Leopoldo Marechal

Adam Buenosayres

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The following organizations are gratefully acknowledged for their support:

• The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, for a Standard Research Grant (2004–08)

• The Laurentian University Research Fund

• The Sur Translation Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship of the Argentine Republic

• The Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

This project could never have been brought to fruition without the constant support, encouragement, and friendship of María de los Ángeles Marechal, who has helped in so many ways: by putting at my disposal the archives of the Fundación Leopoldo Marechal, facilitating access to the Marechal archives housed at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, and by introducing me to many individuals in Buenos Aires who in turn helped orient my research in diverse ways, all of whom I salute here. Special thanks go to filmmaker Gustavo Fontán, whose conversation and documentary films taught me much; to Alberto Piñeiro, director of the Museo Histórico de Buenos Aires Cornelio de Saavedra, whose highly knowledgeable guided tours through his city’s past and present have been unforgettable; to Guillermo Julio Montero, not only for his psychological insight into Leopoldo Marechal but also for his exquisite hospitality; and to Susana Lange, for sharing memories of her illustrious aunt. Thanks are due as well to Magadalena La Porta, especially for her diligent research at the archives of the Sociedad Argentina De Escritores (SADE). The art historian Adriana Lauria, Rosa Maria Castro of the Fundación Forner-Bigatti, and Enrique Llambas of the Centro Virtual de Arte Argentino have been wonderfully helpful in the procurement of old photos — my sincere thanks to all three. I wish to express my appreciation to María Magdalena Marechal, too, for the warmth of her conversation and the sensitivity with which she has brought her father’s work to the stage.

Over the years, many people have influenced in some way or other the realization of this project. Fellow “Latin-Joyceans” César Salgado, Gayle Rogers, Brian Adams, and John Pedro Schwartz have all provided valuable insight and intellectual stimulation, as have fellow Marechal scholars Claudia Hammerschmidt and Ernesto Sierra. Conversations with my Argentine-Canadian colleagues Emilia Deffis, Rita de Grandis, and María del Carmen Sillato suggested new perspectives, added nuance, and were a source of enthusiasm and support; the same goes for fellow Hispanists, and translators, Hugh Hazelton, Stephen Henighan, and Andrea Labinger. Intellectual exchanges with Mario Boido, María Figueredo, Mark Heffernan, Amanda Holmes, Lucien Pelletier, and Michael Yeo have nourished and influenced my general perspective on this project.

My immense gratitude to the editors at McGill-Queen’s University Press — to Kyla Madden for listening with courteous intelligence and opening the door; to Mark Abley for his good humour, sage advice, and Herculean efforts to make this project happen; and to Ryan Van Huijstee for his savoir-faire in the art of editing. I owe a special debt of gratitude to copy editor Jane McWhinney for many inspired stylistic suggestions that improved the text.

To Nicola Jacchia, fellow translator of Adán Buenosayres, who helped me through thorny translation problems: Salute!

The generously shared erudition of Javier de Navascués, as well as his friendship and moral support, has been quite simply invaluable.

INTRODUCTION^1

CONTEXTS: NATION, HEMISPHERE, WORLD

“The publication of this book is an extraordinary event in Argentine literature.” So wrote Julio Cortázar in his 1949 review of Adán Buenosayres (20)2 shortly after the novel was published in 1948. The young Cortázar struggled somewhat to conceptualize just why the novel was so extraordinary, but there can be little doubt that this literary event had an influence on Cortázar’s brilliant Rayuela (1963) [Hopscotch] whose unusual structure and celebration of language surely owe something to Marechal’s Adán. Later, other novelists of the 1960s Boom generation — Ernesto Sábato, Carlos Fuentes, José Lezama Lima, Augusto Roa Bastos — echoed Cortázar’s appreciation; and after them, major post-Boom writers such as Ricardo Piglia and Fernando del Paso. Speaking as an Argentine, Piglia names Roberto Arlt, Jorge Luis Borges, and Leopoldo Marechal as his precursors, the writers who forged the direction of twentieth-century Argentine literature (“Ficción y política” 102). Del Paso, Mexican author of Noticias del Imperio (1986) [News from the Empire] — a sweeping tour de force that marries “Joycean” narrative with the historical novel — does not hesitate to qualify his “Buenosayres querido” [“beloved Buenosayres”] as “one of the greatest Spanish American novels” of the twentieth century (16). Today, one can say not only that the arrival of Adán Buenosayres was a signal event for both Argentine literature and Latin American narrative fiction but also, if we are to credit Franco Moretti, that Marechal’s novel is a significant feature in the topography of world literature.

Paradoxically, however, as del Paso observes in the same breath, Adán Buenosayres is one of Spanish America’s least read novels. Even so vastly well-read an intellectual as Carlos Fuentes learned of Adán’s existence only in the 1960s, after fellow Mexican writer Elena Garro thought she detected its influence on Fuentes’s first novel, La región más transparente (1958) [Where the Air Is Clear]. The astonished Fuentes went to great lengths to track down a second-hand copy of Adán Buenosayres; thoroughly impressed by it, he then likened it to Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), and John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925), as well as to his own work (Carballo 561–2). The anecdote is significant for more than one reason. First, how was it possible that Fuentes, who actually lived for a time in Buenos Aires, had never heard of Marechal’s novel? Second, without any need to speak of influence, it became clear to Fuentes’s contemporaries that Adán Buenosayres was in tune with the new direction of the Spanish American novel of his generation. Third, Adán is a Joycean novel of the metropolis that Fuentes places in an international rather than a national, regional or hemispheric context.

In the twenty-first century, literary theory and practice both confirm this third point. In Volume 2 of his monumental work The Novel, Franco Moretti includes a reading of Adán Buenosayres under the rubric “The New Metropolis” — a series of short interpretations of major novels that is critically framed by Philip Fisher’s “Torn Space: James Joyce’s Ulysses” (in Moretti 665–83). There, Ernesto Franco’s personal essay on Adán Buenosayres holds a place between other readerly takes on novels of the city, set respectively in Shanghai and Lagos.3 Just as those two novels give narrative form to the “torn space” of twentieth-century Asian and African metropolises, Leopoldo Marechal’s Adán grapples with the turbulent space of a great Latin American port city. Buenos Aires, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was deluged by torrential flows of foreign capital (mostly British) and immigration (especially from Italy, Galicia in northern Spain, and Eastern Europe, but also from Syria and Lebanon). By the 1920s “Buenos Aires in motion was laughing; Industry and Commerce were leading her by the hand,” warbles the narrator of Adán, cheekily parodying the boosterism of newsreels, propaganda organ of capitalism. Adam Buenosayres enters the street of his city — “a river of multiplicity” — and finds “peoples from all over the world [who] mixed languages in barbarous dissonance, fought with gestures and fists, and set up beneath the sun the elemental stage of their tragedies and farces, turning all into sound, nostalgias, joys, loves and hates.”

Founded in 1580, Buenos Aires was laid out on a grid pattern, like many Spanish-colonial towns. For the first two centuries of its existence it was a quiet backwater, but by the end of the eighteenth century it had come into its own and in 1810 was the first Spanish American city to break definitively with Spain. In the 1880s it began to grow rapidly. By 1910, when it celebrated the centenary of Argentine independence, it was riding the crest of rapid urban growth and economic development powered by foreign capital investment, foreign immigrant labour, and internal migration. It was then that modern downtown Buenos Aires — its spacious parks, broad avenues, elegant cafés and confiterías, and Parisian-style architecture — took its definitive shape.4 With its newly constructed Obelisk replica arising from the midst of the world’s widest thoroughfare (Avenida 9 de Julio), as well as the tree-lined Avenida de Mayo modelled on the Champs Élysées, it was a city that fancied itself the “Paris of the Pampas.”5 Bounded by the broad estuary of the Río de la Plata on its northeast flank, it was rapidly expanding south and west over the pampa. Villa Crespo, relatively centrally located, has been a typical barrio (municipal district) among the forty-eight comprising the city. As we see in the novel, in the 1920s Villa Crespo was home to many immigrant communities. The First World War had temporarily interrupted the flow, but immigrants poured in throughout the twenties; between 1920 and 1930, the city’s population grew from 1,700,000 to 2,153,200 (Walter 83). In politics, the new Argentines found representation in the Radical Party, and their massive collective presence was expressed and reflected in new modes of cultural production — in amusement parks and mass entertainment centres such as Luna Park (depicted more than once in Cacodelphia), as well as in popular theatre, cinema, and literature.

Immigrants arrived not only from abroad, however. If the inner-city barrio of Villa Crespo is the stage of cacophonous cosmopolitan encounter, the city’s suburban edge — the badlands of Saavedra — is where urban modernity and rural criollo tradition collide. It is where the hinterland’s displaced descendants, internal immigrants uprooted by the industrialization of agriculture and ranching, claw at the edges of metropolis in a new subculture of the arrabal. “I like the landscape in Saavedra, that broken terrain where the city comes to an end,” says Adam’s friend, the philosopher Samuel Tesler. Indeed, Adam and his avant-garde comrades are irresistibly attracted to that “frontier zone where burg and wilderness meet in an agonistic embrace, like two giants locked in single combat.” Zone of knife fights and tango, brutality and forlorn sentimentality, the suburban frontier traces an advancing line of creative violence, the very knife edge of modern actuality; and it is there that most of the novel’s mock adventures take place, including the long final descent into the avant-garde inferno designed by the astrologer Schultz.

In Moretti’s selective encyclopaedia of the novel, then, Marechal’s Adán Buenosayres finds itself well positioned under the Joycean aegis of metropolitan “torn space”; not suprisingly, several critics have looked at the theme of the city and urban space in Adán (Ambrose, Limami, Wilson, Berg).6 But in light of the troubled history of the reception of Adán — a point to which we will return — a more general observation must be made. “Countless are the novels of the world,” notes Moretti apologetically (ix); and yet this particular novel cannot be left out of the account. Decades after Carlos Fuentes’s prescient observation, Moretti’s method of “distant reading” on a planetary scale finds Adán to be a significant fixture of world literature when viewed with the objectivity of the long view. This theoretical point is corroborated in practice by literary experience. In Santiago Gamboa’s novel El síndrome de Ulises (2005) [The Ulysses Syndrome], the Colombian protagonist-narrator meets at the Sorbonne a Morrocan-born student happily obsessed with Adán Buenosayres: Salim, a devout Muslim, is writing a doctoral thesis based on Marechal’s novel and its representation of the individual vis-à-vis the city (Gamboa 24).7 Remarkably, a novel written by an Argentine Catholic nationalist about 1920s Buenos Aires speaks to Salim across barriers not only temporal and geographical but also religious and ideological. Like the wily Ulysses, a great piece of literature can overcome tremendous obstacles and travel to the most unlikely places. And for Gamboa’s (autobiographical) narrator, who until that moment of recognition — through the eyes of a non-Westerner — had seen Adán Buenosayres as a book “condemned to live within its [national] borders” (32), there dawns a new geo-cultural consciousness.

THE JOYCE CONNECTION AND CULTURE WARS

At the heart of this novel is the story of Adam Buenosayres’s unrequited love for a young woman called Solveig, whom the hapless poet reimagines as his latter-day Beatrice. This interior drama is boisterously paved over by a festive narrative about seven mock-heroes whose madcap antics, farcical adventures, and wild conversations about everything in heaven and on earth give the novel its living flesh. All seven evoke avant-garde writers and artists of 1920s Buenos Aires, a “golden age” of Argentine literature. Some are composite figures, while others are caricatures of clearly recognizable individuals: notably, Luis Pereda (Jorge Luis Borges), the astrologer Schultz (artist and polymath Xul Solar), the philosopher Samuel Tesler (poet Jacobo Fijman), and the pipsqueak Bernini (writer Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz), as well as the protoganist Adam, a quasi-autobiographical version of Marechal himself. Thus the novel is on the external level a roman à clef^8 — with the curious anomaly of the character portrayed as Adam’s beloved, Solveig Amundsen. Since her family is clearly a novelistic version of the real-life Lange family, it has been speculated that behind the fictive Solveig stands the writer Norah Lange, dubbed at one time the “Muse of Martín Fierro” (the literary review to which we will return presently). Strikingly, however, the meek, passive, voiceless girl who is Solveig does not even vaguely resemble Lange — a creative, highly articulate, and outgoing intellectual. Solveig stands as a virtually empty figure, functioning as the Beloved whom the poet Adam Buenosayres idealizes and recreates in the mystico-courtly manner of the Petrarchan poets. When she accepts the suit of Lucio Negri, Adam’s rival for her affections, Solveig becomes a sort of antagonist to Adam, an obstacle whose stubbornly concrete existence he must overcome as a writer, especially since Negri epitomizes the bourgeois doxa against which Adam rebels. Thus, caution must be exercised when interpreting Adán as a roman à clef. On the other hand, it can be read as a Künstlerroman whose most obvious model is Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, though these two subgenres can hardly account for the novel in its totality.

Another clear source of inspiration is Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), which traces Leopold Bloom’s itinerary through Dublin for a single day (16 June 1904).9 Marechal’s Adán Buenosayres takes place over three days, April 28–30, in an unspecified year in the 1920s. The novel opens at 10 a.m. on Thursday the twenty-eighth, as Adam wakes up. On Saturday the thirtieth at midnight, he and Schultz begin their descent into the infernal city of Cacodelphia. Meanwhile, we follow Adam and his friends around Buenos Aires; their adventures are recounted in Books One to Five by a Protean third-person narrator who, as in the case of Ulysses, assumes different voices in different contexts. These five “books” could stand alone as a traditionally structured novel. Books Six and Seven, on the other hand, are presented in the “Indispensable Prologue” by the quasi-fictive narrator as “found manuscripts” (an old Cervantine trick). Both these texts are narrated in the first person by Adam himself, and both take as literary models texts by Dante Alighieri. Book Six, “The Blue-Bound Notebook,” is Adam’s spiritual autobiography, an earnest account of his love and its transformation along the lines of Dante’s love for Beatrice in the Vita nuova. It is in Adam’s Notebook, far more than in the clownish misogyny of Samuel Tesler or Franky Amundsen, that the entire rhetoric predicated on gender divisions becomes interesting; a close study of Adam’s Neo-Platonist text from a gender studies perspective would surely produce worthwhile results. Finally, Book Seven — at once social satire and a great meta-literary romp — recounts the journey to Cacodelphia, jocosely parodying Dante’s Inferno.

Borges complained that Joyce’s Ulysses, with its “arduous symmetries and labyrinths,” was “indecipherably chaotic” (“Fragmento sobre Joyce” 61). By contrast, the structure of Adán Buenosayres is quite orderly. Notwithstanding the young Cortázar’s astonishment at the novel’s apparent “incoherence,”10 the plot unfolds in a clear and simple temporal line: from Thursday morning to Friday night (Books One to Five), then Saturday night (Book Seven), and thence to the sunny, springtime morning when Adam’s funeral is quite literally celebrated, in a rite of distinctly paschal overtones, in the novel’s “Indispensable Prologue.” This temporal sequence echoes the narrative paradigm of the Passion of Christ as ritually codified in the Christian liturgical calendar, from Holy Thursday through the Crucifixion to the subsequent Resurrection.

The novelist does, however, impose a couple of structural displacements on this linear paradigm. First of all, the ending (Adam’s funeral) is announced at the textual beginning. Second, there is a hiatus of six months between the descent into hell on a Saturday night in April and Adam’s funeral on a Sunday-like morning in October — spring, the paschal season, comes in October in Argentina. Third, Adam’s notebook, his spiritual autobiography, wedged between Books Five and Seven, textually pries open the linear plot but in a sense contains the rest of the novel. Depending on one’s perspective, “The Blue-Bound Notebook” is either a poetic diversion from the novel or both its centre and circumference.11 There is no narrative “chaos” here: the displacements are easily recognizable, and the reader has no need to resort to a complex scholarly roadmap of the kind Stuart Gilbert drew up for Joyce’s Ulysses. If one wishes to speak of “incoherence,” it will have to be on the level of interpretation: what do these clearly marked cleavages mean? Does Adam end up stranded at the bottom of hell, as the novel’s last page seems to suggest?12 Or does he spiritually climb out of the hole and achieve some sort of “resurrection”? But then, why has he died? Marechal’s narrator provocatively addresses his narratee as lector agreste “rustic reader,” clearly putting readers on notice: it will be up to the them to negotiate the novel’s narrative gaps, come to terms by their own lights with its built-in aporias. As in a Borges story, a structure of crystalline clarity is deliberately rent: readers are led to make their own intellective or imaginative leaps.

Much has been made of Adán’s debt to Joyce, often by Marechal’s irate detractors. He read Portrait very attentively, as evidenced in his personal copy of Alonso Dámaso’s 1926 Spanish translation; later, when in Paris in 1929–30, he read Valery Larbaud’s French translation of Ulysses hot off the press and forthwith began work on the chef d’oeuvre that took eighteen years to come to fruition. According to the author, after writing the first few chapters in Paris in 1930, he dropped it for a long while before taking it up again in 1945, perhaps not uncoincidentally the year that Argentine José Salas Subirat’s first-ever Spanish-language translation of Ulysses was published in Buenos Aires. However, according to his lifelong friend, the poet Francisco Luis Bernárdez (glimpses of whom can be seen in Franky Amundsen in Adán), Marechal was already planning the novel in his imagination as early as 1926 (Bernárdez 2). This claim cannot be concretely documented, but it is plausible. The echoes of Joycean material in Adán derive largely from Portrait, plus the “Telemachus” section that opens Ulysses and focuses on Stephen Dedalus; in terms of content, Marechal’s interest was drawn to the narrative of the Stephen cycle, not to the adventures of Leopold Bloom. This is not, however, to deny Marechal’s evident uptake of Ulyssean narrative technique.13 Indeed, Adán Buenosayres is the first Joycean novel to be written in Spanish-language literature. When in the 1960s Cortázar’s Hopscotch was being hailed as the “Spanish American Ulysses,” it was José Lezama Lima — author of Paradiso (1966), another major novel deemed Ulyssean — who opportunely reminded his interlocutors that the clearest antecedent of Rayuela was Marechal’s Adán, never mind Joyce (Simo 57).14 The Joycean lineage that earned accolades for Cortázar brought mostly scorn upon Marechal, at least when Adán Buenosayres first came out in 1948. In a review that Piglia later termed an “infamous screed” (xvii), Eduardo González Lanuza described it as a pietistic imitation of Ulysses but “abundantly spattered with manure”;15 Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Enrique Anderson-Imbert, two major critics who would subsequently exert great influence in the North American academy, followed suit (Lafforgue xiii). The violence and incoherence of their ad hominem attacks are clear signs that something more than differences in sensibility and literary taste was at stake here.16

The troubled history of Adán Buenosayres’s reception is a direct consequence of what might be called the mid-twentieth-century Argentine culture wars or, following historian Loris Zanatta, the “ideological civil war” cleaving Argentina during the thirties and forties (13). To some degree, this civil war is a reprise or recrudescence of political-ideological divisions dating back to Argentina’s birth as a nation in the nineteenth century, which was followed by a long civil war between federales and unitarios — between traditional, Catholic, Hispanophile Federalists, on one side, and liberal, anti-ecclesiastical, Europhile Unitarians, on the other. The latter eventually won out, and a modern liberal constitution was put in place in 1853. Culturally, modern nineteenth-century Argentina looked to France, England, and the United States; economically, it was friendly to the influx of British capital, while the immigration from impoverished Catholic countries, Italy and Spain, was uneasily tolerated by the liberal-patrician elite. After a triumphal celebration of the nation’s centenary in 1910, however, the liberal model began to show cracks and, with the 1929 economic crash, Argentina lurched into crisis. By the mid-thirties, after brewing since at least the early twenties, Catholic nationalism was becoming a powerful cultural and, eventually, political force. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and the Second World War three years later, further polarized the nation’s writers and intellectuals. By the time Church-supported Juan Domingo Perón became president of the nation in 1946, the divorce was absolute. As a Catholic nationalist and a Peronist functionary, Leopoldo Marechal, along with a few other writers, was at loggerheads with the now-alienated liberal literary establishment, whose leading light was Jorge Luis Borges. Hunkered down, as it were, in the fortress of SADE (Sociedad Argentina de Escritores; Argentine Society of Writers), the liberals, guerrilla-style, maintained a coded war of words against what they hyperbolically called the “Nazi-Fascist-Peronist dictatorship.” In return, Borges was unceremoniously removed in 1946 from his position at the Miguel Cané municipal library and named Inspector of Markets.17 Meanwhile, according to one cultural historian, Marechal had become enemy number one of SADE (Fiorucci 184n). Into this poisoned context was born the novel Adán Buenosayres.

MARTINFIERRISMO

AND

CRIOLLISMO

In the glory years of the literary review Martín Fierro (1924–27), Marechal and Borges had been friends who wrote admiring reviews of each other’s books of poetry. Politically, too, they saw eye to eye; in the run-up to the 1928 presidential elections, they struck the Intellectuals’ Committee for the Re-election of Hipólito Yrigoyen, with Borges as president and Marechal as vice-president (Abós 135–6). In her historical novel Las libres del sur (2004) [Free Women in the South], María Rosa Lojo — better known as a judicious literary and cultural critic — portrays the two young writers as fast friends who shared adventures. By the end of the decade, however, a rift was already perceptible. Marechal, Bernárdez, and Borges planned to revive the martinfierrista spirit in a new review titled Libra, but for reasons that remain murky Borges did not participate (Corral 26). In spite of the involvement of the prestigious Mexican, Alfonso Reyes, then resident in Buenos Aires, the review managed only a single issue, in 1929. The party was over. A military coup inaugurated the “Infamous Decade” of 1930s Argentina. Marechal and Bernárdez underwent personal crises — the spiritual crisis mentioned in the “Indispensable Prologue” of Adán — and joined the Cursos de Cultura Católica, an institute founded in 1922 that served as the stronghold of Catholic nationalism. The in-your-face vanguard journals of the twenties gave way to the more serene literary review Sur (founded in 1931); attempting to stay “above the fray,” Sur managed to provide a pluralistic venue for intellectuals from the Americas and Europe before finally succumbing toward the end of the decade and taking sides in the national ideological divorce (King 75). Victoria Ocampo, writer and wealthy patroness of the magazine, is caricatured quite unkindly in Cacodelphia, whereas ten years earlier, in 1938, Marechal had contributed to Sur a respectful article on “Victoria Ocampo and Feminine Literature.” The insult to Ocampo — in a passage surely written after 1945 — seems like a parting shot at his erstwhile colleagues at Sur, a grenade lobbed from Marechal’s side of the barbed-wire fence.

However, the period evoked in the broad canvas of the novel is generally not the nasty thirties and forties, but rather the culturally effervescent twenties. Buenos Aires was directly plugged into the international network of the artistic and literary avant-garde. Just back from Europe in 1921, Borges and a few others, including Norah Lange, “published” the first issue of the review Prisma as a series of posters tacked to trees and pasted to walls throughout the city. This playful and provocative gesture set the tone for the decade to come. The short-lived Prisma was succeeded by Proa, in which Borges precociously wrote a review of Joyce’s Ulysses in 1924. Patronized by wealthy Argentine author Ricardo Güiraldes, a friend of Joyce’s translator and promoter Valery Larbaud, Proa gained international prestige and notoriety. Though the young avant-gardists rhetorically challenged the previous generation of writers, such as Manuel Gálvez, Ricardo Rojas, and Leopoldo Lugones, they adopted as their presiding genius the elderly Macedonio Fernández, an eccentric philosopher and exquisite humourist. Proa endured for two short spurts (1922–23 and 1924–26). Meanwhile, Martín Fierro (1924–27) came into being. The finest flower of the contemporary avant-garde, it was the review that gave a generation its name — the martinfierristas. Their manifesto (attributed to Oliverio Girondo) began like this:

Faced with the hippopotamic impermeability of the “honourable public”;

Faced with the funereal solemnity of the historian and the professor, which mummifies everything it touches; […]

Faced with the ridiculous necessity to ground our intellectual nationalism, swollen with false values that deflate like piggy-banks at the first poke;

[…]

Martín Fierro feels it essential to define itself and call upon all those capable of perceiving that we are in the presence of a NEW sensibility and a NEW understanding, which, when we find ourselves, reveals unsuspected vistas and new means and forms of expression;

[…]

Martín Fierro knows that “all is new under the sun” if looked at with up-to-date eyes and expressed with a contemporary accent. (Revista Martín Fierro, XVI; my translation)

The basics of martinfierrista ideology and rhetoric can be gleaned from this brief excerpt: the cult of the new and of youth (common to the international avant-garde of the period), a taste for provocative hyperbole, an aggressive attitude that doesn’t take itself in complete earnest, but also a sort of soft cultural nationalism that deserves some commentary. The review is named after a nationally iconic literary figure. José Hernández’s El Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) [Martín Fierro the Gaucho] and La Vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879) [The Return of Martín Fierro] comprise a two-part poem recounting the tragedy of the gaucho, cowboy of the pampas, whose way of life was being eroded by modernization. In El payador (1916) [The Gaucho Minstrel], Leopoldo Lugones consecrated Hernández’s work as the Argentine national epic and the gaucho as a symbol of Argentine national identity. But Lugones’s ideological manoeuvre is complicated, if not outright contradictory, for in the same breath he celebrates both the gaucho’s contribution to Argentine identity and the historical disappearance of this ethnic type tainted by “inferior indigenous blood” (83). Though racially mixed, the gauchos always self-identified culturally as cristianos and criollos rather than indios. The archetypal literary gaucho, Santos Vega, had long been a paradigm of telluric nobility. (To this day, the phrase hacerle a alguien una gauchada in rural Argentina means “to do someone a right fine favour,” as a real gaucho would do.) Martín Fierro becomes a new archetype: the noble gaucho with attitude.

When the manifesto of Martín Fierro impugns the “false values” of “our intellectual nationalism,” what is intended? Is the text alluding to Lugones’s seeming mystification? In what looks less like a serious prise de position than a provocative jab at Lugones, with whom he also polemicized on aesthetic issues, Marechal demanded that we “forget about the gaucho” (Martín Fierro 34, 5 October 1926). Or does the manifesto impugn the tendency of the academic elite to imitate European models too closely? Is it perhaps simply an anarchic rejection of empty rhetoric? “Tradition, Progress, Humanity, Family, Honour are now nonsense,” writes martinfierrista Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz toward the end of the decade in a famous essay titled El hombre que está solo y espera (101) [The Man Who Is Alone and Waits/Hopes]. Or does the manifesto express an inchoate nationalism that deplores economic colonization by British capital with the acquiescence of the Argentine landed oligarchy?18 All these elements — and more — jostled and clashed among the contestatory martinfierristas, who lacked any coherent ideological program as a group and argued with each other as much as they rebelled against their seniors. In Book Two, chapter 2 of Adán, the mock heroes get into a tempestuous argument about Argentine national identity — upon what values it should be grounded — in an episode that will repay the reader’s close attention.

In that same violent discussion, the problem of criollismo gets an airing. With the phrase criollismo urbano de vanguardia, Beatriz Sarlo aptly synthesizes the motley ideological-aesthetic program of martinfierrismo (105). Nothing is surprising about the conjunction of the terms “urban” and “vanguard”; rather, it is criollismo that distinguishes the Buenos Aires avant-garde from its international context. Criollo was in colonial times the term for those of Spanish blood born on American soil, but came to mean simply “native to the Americas.” (The English and French cognates — Creole and créole — tend to be associated with the Afro-Caribbean.) In Argentina the term gradually acquired a more specific identitary thrust, somewhat comparable to the Québécois de souche of French-speaking Canada; the criollos were old-stock Spanish American Argentines, as opposed to indios on the one hand or immigrants on the other. But this ethnic distinction was destabilized by the massive influx of immigrants, both internal and foreign, into late-nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. The cultural movement of criollismo contained elements of class struggle as well. According to Adolfo Prieto, criollismo became a discursive site where competing social groups attempted to defend or establish their legitimacy. For the ruling Argentine elite — and their ideological representatives such as Lugones — the appropriation of rural, gaucho discourse was a way of keeping at bay the unnerving presence of the poor lower-class immigrants thronging to the capital and spilling outward from there. For rural Argentines displaced from country to city, it was an expression of nostalgia and an alternative to rebellion against the impositions and demands of modern (sub)urban life. And for foreign immigrants, adopting criollista cultural expression was a sort of fast track to cultural citizenship in the new country (Prieto, El discurso criollista 18–19). In Adán Buenosayres, for example, we meet Tissone, a son of Italian immigrants, who, although he has never set foot outside the city of Buenos Aires, handily makes his living doing a schtick as a payador or gaucho minstrel.

An urban criollista avant-garde, then, is a strange hybrid. In Europe, the avant-garde that looks to the technological city of the future normally turns its back on local autochthonous tradition. Not so the martinfierristas, even though their attitude toward an increasingly artificial and mediatized criollismo was ambiguous and conflicted. Marechal stages this conflict at the wake of Juan Robles, mud-stomper and “good old boy,” in Book Three, chapter 2, an episode that particularly delighted Cortázar (22b). As Prieto puts it, Marechal’s send-up of popular suburban criollismo brilliantly brings a long-lived cultural movement to a close (El discurso criollista 22). But parody always enacts a sort of homage as well, and the colourful gallery of cultural types and stereotypes populating this and many other episodes of Adán Buenosayres add up to a celebration of Argentine popular culture and its expressive forms. Why else would the epigraph to the novel’s first chapter be constituted of verses from a sentimental tango?

GENEALOGIES (RELIGIOUS, IDEOLOGICAL, LITERARY)

The young writer Cortázar was both disconcerted and excited by what he enigmatically called the diversa desmesura of Marechal’s novel (original Spanish version 23), its hypertrophic excess on various levels — perhaps its monstrous hybridity — which rationally he perceived as an inadequate matching of structural form to content but which intuitively the writer in him grasped as this novel’s aesthetic achievement, its “energetic push toward what is truly ours [in Argentine literature]” (24). As Ángel Rama put it, in Adán the forms of high culture meet those of popular culture in a parodic oscillation, with the net effect that the former are destabilized along with their philosophical underpinnings (216–17). By “high culture” one must understand the allusions not only to classical Greece and Rome, but also to the Bible — Northrop Frye’s “great code” — and to Catholic theology. Marechal himself insists that the “keys” to his novel are to be found in two parallel lines of thought stretching from Aristotle to Saint Thomas and from Plato to Augustine (Andrés 32); he interprets Adán Buenosayres as a Christian allegory, the soul’s odyssey through the world and its eventual homecoming in God (Marechal, “Las claves”). A Catholic-theological reading of the novel is certainly possible — Navascués’s narratological study and the introduction to Barcia’s scholarly edition are fine examples — but much of the novel’s material seems to overflow this ideological framework, to the point of rudely shaking or even damaging the frame itself. Argentine critic Horacio González once mused about the novel’s “comical,” “ironic,” or even “broken” Christianity.19 Even if one enlarges the Christian-epic reading to an ecumenical “metaphysical” interpretation, as Graciela Coulson does in order to account for the many allusions to non-Christian traditions, the essential problem only gets displaced, not resolved. Suffice it to say here that different readers, according to their cultural formation, will have different takes on Adán Buenosayres. As with all great works of literature, it is a novel that no single critical reading can exhaust.

Adam Buenosayres and his close friend and confidant, Samuel Tesler, are both “traditionalists” who move in a discursive world informed by such radical traditionalist authors as René Guénon, whose voluminous output includes the apocalyptic Le règne de la quantité et les signes des temps (1945) and who attempts to conflate the metaphysical systems of the world’s great religions in a single block that stands superior to the error of modern thought. The two “metaphysicals,”20 Adam and Samuel, make common cause against the positivist scientism of Lucio Negri. (The third “metaphysical” is the astrologer Schultz, who like Xul Solar could be described with the paradoxical term “avant-garde traditionalist.”) And yet, Adam will eventually rebuke Samuel for his Jewishness, invoking the hoary myths invented by medieval anti-Semitism. As in most traditional Catholic societies, a degree of anti-Semitism — a frightening term for us since the Second World War — was still quite normal in 1920s Argentine society. The Jews (mostly from Russia and Eastern Europe), along with the Italians, Galician Spanish, “Turks” (refugees of varying ethnicity from the crumbling Ottoman Empire), and so on, were cast as stereotypes in the popular imaginary; Marechal’s novel humorously sets those popular stereotypes on display. The Jews, the odd anti-Semitic incident notwithstanding, were in the mind of the Catholic criollo majority just one distinct minority among others. Nevertheless, the rise of Argentine Catholic nationalism, under the influence of a new outbreak of a very old virus emanating from Europe, was accompanied in some circles by a more virulent expression of anti-Semitism. Although the centuries-old prejudice was deeply racialized, the more thoughtful Catholic-nationalist intellectuals attempted to confine it to a religious question: the Jews’ failure to recognize Christ was a theological error from which they needed to be disabused. Manuel Gálvez, for example, professed his love for the Jews. This love, which he considered to behoove any good Catholic, did not, however, prevent his endorsing negative Jewish stereotypes (Schwartz 131–2). Gálvez — as well as Adam Buenosayres and perhaps even Marechal himself^21 — could well be examples of what Máximo José Kahn in 1948 called “philo-Semitic anti-Jewishness,” referring to those who are philo-Semitic “by civilization” and anti-Jewish “by instinct” (Kahn 48).22 And yet, parsing this paradox further in his incisive but (deliberately?) enigmatic article, he opines that atheism is worse than philo-Semitic anti-Jewishness (57), even if the unbeliever seems to be on your side. Here he seems to refer to those liberals who waved the banner of anti-anti-Semitism as part of their anti-Peronist campaign, their negative philo-Semitism militantly expressing, within the perfectly polarized ideological field of the time, their hatred of Peronism and its supporters, which initially included the Catholic church.23 Adam and Samuel have their differences, but they are united against modern non-religious scientism. Both men locate themselves squarely in what Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell has called the tradition of the “anti-Enlightenment,” the many-faceted revolt against the Franco-Kantian Enlightenment that constitutes a second, parallel modernity (8).

Reading the frank anti-Semitism on display in a few passages of Adán Buenosayres is a complicated business, not only because of the paradox of anti-Jewish philo-Semitism but also because of the novel’s polyphony. The shifting and parodic narrative voice makes it hazardous to ascertain precisely the pragmatic ethos of any given passage. What is certain, however, is that Adam Buenosayres dies and Samuel Tesler lives on to play a part in Marechal’s third novel, Megafón, o la guerra (1970), the only one of his fictional characters to do so.24

From a strictly stylistic perspective, one finds another index of diversa desmesura in the juxtaposition of the earnest, spiritualist, neo-Dantian prose of Adam Buenosayres’s “Blue-Bound Notebook” with the novel’s Rabelaisian tremendismo, to use Marechal’s own term for his conscious emulation of Maître François. The humorous contrast of high and low, the spiritual and the coprological, stems as well from Miguel de Cervantes’s legacy, worth recalling here for the benefit of English-speaking readers.25 Besides the Cervantine device of the “found manuscript” mentioned above, Marechal, as Cervantes does in Don Quixote, interpolates into the text lengthy stories that serve as functional instances of mise-en-abyme; the stories told in Cacodelphia by The Man with Intellectual Eyes and by Don Ecuménico are salient examples. Another meta-literary technique bequeathed by Cervantes is to provide commentary, either directly or by allusion or by parody, on diverse texts of various genres, literary and otherwise. The Argentine component of Adán’s meta-literary discourse is what particularly struck Piglia: “A novelist constructs his own genealogy and narrates it; literary tradition is a family saga. In Adán, origins, relationships, endogamic successions are all fictionalized. Marechal treats the struggle among various Argentine poetics with the ironic tone of a (Homeric) payada [literary duel in the gauchesque tradition]” (xvi).

In the notes accompanying this edition of the novel, the reader will find explicated many — not likely all! — such allusions to Argentine literature. For example, José Mármol’s foundational novel Amalia (1851) — a Manichean melodrama pitting noble unitarios against the evil federales of the Rosas regime — is prominently referenced at the outset of Adán Buenosayres. Equally significant, perhaps, is that another foundational text of Argentine literature — Esteban Echeverría’s short story “El matadero” (circa 1939) [The Slaughterhouse] — is seemingly effaced from Marechal’s literary genealogy. Echeverría memorably made the slaughterhouse a symbol of the bestial ferocity of the Rosas regime and its supporters (the Church and the lower classes). But Marechal, on the first page of Book One, evokes the slaughterhouse merely as a feature of the urban landscape and a symptom of “the world’s voracity.” If his image of the slaughterhouse carries any political valence at all, it refers not to the context of Argentine national politics, but rather to the geo-economic/political order: chilled beef — the term appears in English more than once in Adán — was being shipped from the refrigerators of the slaughterhouse in Buenos Aires to “voracious” Europe.

ADÁN BUENOSAYRES

AND THE VISUAL ARTS

When he speaks of the fictionalization of competing poetics in Adán, Piglia is likely referring to the fantastical adventures of Book Three (chapter 1), when a succession of national-literary characters and sociocultural stereotypes visit the seven drunken adventurers and provoke heated discussion among them. These episodes, and other flights of fancy in the novel — the street brawl as a Battle of Armageddon (Book One, chapter 2), Adam’s imaginary rampage as a mad giant in the streets of Villa Crespo (Book Two, chapter 2), and any number of scenes from Cacodelphia — could also be considered from the aesthetic perspective of the visual arts and their impact on Marechal’s novelistics. Marechal was always interested in the plastic arts, and it is no accident that the astrologer Schultz — based on polymath and avant-garde painter Xul Solar — is so important a character in the novel, both as Adam’s guide and mentor, and as the architect of Cacodelphia. Xul’s biographer, Álvaro Abós, does not hesitate to resort to Marechal’s novel to round out his account of the unclassifiable painter; just as Adam constantly converses with Schultz, avers Abós, so Marechal’s novel is an extended dialogue with Xul Solar (Xul 183). More interesting still than the two characters’ conversations about aesthetics is the performative dialogue between novelist and visual artist. Xul Solar’s sui generis watercolours have impressed Beatriz Sarlo for certain qualities that can likewise be discerned in Marechal’s novelistics. Sarlo speaks of the “semiotic obsessiveness” in Xul’s art, as well as the deliberate absence of perspective that recalls both primitive painting and cartoon strips (Una modernidad periférica 14). Sign and image commingle, and the distinction between graphic and iconic representation is blurred and at times completely effaced, as in Xul’s Grafía (1935) [Graphemes] or Prigrafía (1938) [Pre-graphemes?].26 The perspectival flatness of Xul’s paintings gives them the appearance of creative texts rather than mimetic representations. Caricatural forms, products of a deliberate abstraction, collide in a two-dimensional space and easily recombine in outlandish hybrids such as Mestizos de avión y gente (1936) [Hybrids of Airplanes and Persons]. In Marechal/Schultz’s Cacodelphia, we find similar hybrids: homokites or kite-men, homoglobes or balloon-men, homoplumes or human feathers, bomb-men, and tabloid-men who, crushed by rotary presses, turn into newspapers and then back into humans. In the tabloid-men, body becomes text becomes body.

The art of caricature, in both Xul and Marechal, is an aesthetic choice that offers the immense plasticity and freedom enjoyed by cartoon strips and film animation. Perhaps not uncoincidentally, Buenos Aires in the 1910s and ’20s was home to the great animationist Quirino Cristiani (1896–1984), who made the world’s first feature-length animated film, El apóstol (1917) [The Apostle], an amusing spoof of President Hipólito Yrigoyen. His Peludópolis (1931) was another premiere — the first “talky” in animated film. Its symbolic character Juan Pueblo [John of the People] may be the source of Marechal’s Juan Demos, a similarly symbolic figure who, seated on a pedestal inside the Cacodelphian parliament, offers pithy comments on the parliamentarians’ deliberations. Between those two landmark films, Cristiani prolifically created animated films for popular consumption (Bendazzi 49–52). Marechal’s novel, it would seem, not only enters into dialogue with the high avant-garde art of a Xul Solar, but also exploits the aesthetic possibilities, along with those of tango and popular theatre, of the popular visual arts.

The picture theory explicit and implicit in Adán Buenosayres, grounded in Dante and Thomas Aquinas and yet keenly cognizant of the new visual media emerging in his time — in particular, cartoons and animated film — has yet to be comprehensively addressed in Marechalian criticism. For our present purposes, we need only observe that, if Xul Solar is the semiotically obsessed creator of pictures, Adam Buenosayres presents the converse case: the image-obsessed wordsmith whose obsession causes him guilt. Just as Dante’s image theory, as Hans Belting has put it, got “entangled in an unresolvable conflict” with the theological doctrine of the soul (An Anthropology of Images 133), so the piously logocentric Adam stumbles over contradictions in the aesthetic theory he expounds at Ciro Rossini’s restaurant (Book Four, chapter 1). Whereas the astrologer Schultz and his real-life model Xul Solar are fearless (or quite mad) in their semiotic-imagistic experimentation, Adam has profound doubts about the ontological status of the image and its verbal analogue, the poetic image. Though Adam’s theological language may strike late-modern readers as anachronistic, his angst over the nature of images, and their power, makes him our contemporary. We still await the picture theorist of the calibre of a W.J.T. Mitchell or a Hans Belting, who will translate Marechal’s theological metaphors into a twenty-first-century theoretical discourse.

It is again no accident that filmmakers such as Fernando “Pino” Solanas and Eliseo Subiela are inspired by Marechal’s novel(s).27 The greatest cineaste to champion Adán Buenosayres has been the venerable Manuel Antín, whose project to take the novel to the big screen was repeatedly frustrated by Argentina’s turbulent history (Sández 36, 100). Spurred on by his friend Julio Cortázar (some of whose texts he filmed), Antín with the help of Juan Carlos Gené wrote a screenplay, which as recently as 2009 he still possessed.28 And yet, one cannot help wondering how Antín could have realized so quixotic a project as filming the diversa desmesura of Adán Buenosayres in the medium of live-action film. The medium of film animation could provide one solution to the technical difficulties involved. Twenty-first-century advances in computer animation offer another solution — the sort of filmic language developed, for example, by Esteban Sapir in La antena (2007) [The Aerial]. Steeped in the avant-garde film tradition of both Europe and Argentina, Sapir’s crossing of grapheme, word, and image, as well as his morphology of human-machine hybrids, seems a direct homage to Xul Solar and Marechal’s Schultz. The continuously falling snow-like substance in La antena — is it finely shredded paper? semiotic dust? — recalls the rain of grimy newsprint in the first circle of Schultz’s Cacodelphia; and Sapir’s hombres-globo (human balloons) are surely the formal descendants of the homoglobos designed by Schultz/Marechal or Xul Solar’s human airplanes. Perhaps Antín’s dream of filming Adán Buenosayres was an idea before its time.

THIS ANNOTATED TRANSLATION

This translation of Adán Buenosayres is based on the fourteenth (and final) edition of the original publisher, Editorial Sudamericana, and Pedro Luis Barcia’s annotated edition (Clásicos Castalia, 1994). Although I have consulted other editions, the minor textual variations (mostly orthographic) are too slight to be of significance for the English-language translator. Patrice Toulat’s French translation (Grasett/UNESCO, 1995) has been amply consulted as well, especially by Sheila Ethier, who read the first draft of my English translation against Toulat’s version and gave valuable feedback. Nicola Jacchia’s 2010 Italian translation arrived too late to provide a substantive point of comparison, but I have been grateful for our stimulating and helpful e-mail exchanges about translation problems.29

In principle, this translation adheres as closely as possible to the elusive ideal of textual fidelity. Recourse to annotation allows for the possibility of rendering the novel’s rich colloquiality more directly. Though often rendered in approximate equivalents toward the beginning of the translated novel, many of the original lunfardo or Argentine-slang terms, are progressively incorporated in the translated text, with explanations provided in the notes and the glossary; the intent is that readers should gain more direct access to the palpable flavour of a unique urban culture, which in turn facilitates a more precise reading of it. It is worth noting that two of the many dictionaries I consulted — the Academia Argentina de Letras edition of the Diccionario del habla de los argentinos and José Gobello’s Nuevo diccionario lunfardo — both frequently cite Marechal’s Adán Buenosayres to illustrate particular Argentine usages; this is yet another indication of the novel’s cultural importance.

The long sentences and elaborate language of Marechal’s neo-Baroque prose present a problem for English syntax. I have broken up run-on sentences when doing so seemed to profit readability, but never at the expense of any layer or nuance of meaning. Marechal’s prose is often self-parodic: he piles up clause after clause in pretentiously elaborate constructions with comic intent, the opulence of the expressive means humorously contrasting with the relative banality of the content. In such cases, I have adjusted the syntax as little as possible, in order to conserve the humour. In cases where language is ludically celebrated in nonsense prose or utterly gratuitous puns, I have at times needed to sacrifice textual fidelity; such instances are signalled in endnotes.

Further, in order to retain as much original flavour as possible, I have, with two exceptions, not translated the characters’ names. The first is the most vexatious; the eponymous “Adán Buenosayres” — in Spanish a euphonious six-syllable verse of poetry — has been rendered as “Adam Buenosayres.” Unfortunately, the substitution disrupts the rhythm of the name/title, and the music of this lovely verso llano suffers. However, the name Adán is not readily recognizable to most anglophones, and would not therefore convey all the biblical and symbolic freight we hear in “Adam.” Poetry has thus had to take second place to meaning. The other exception is the name of the astrologer Schultz, changed from Marechal’s “Schultze,” the latter being a far less common form of the German surname. But the real-life model for the astrologer is the self-named Xul Solar, a monniker that condenses his birth name “Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari.” It seems likely that Marechal preferred “Schultze” because the German “Schulz,” lacking the final voiced “e”, is virtually unpronounceable within the phonological system of Spanish. In English, by contrast, it is more natural to say Schultz and to spell it with a “t” (as Marechal has done).

Much lyric material is quoted in the novel, including verses from tangos, folk songs, children’s poetry, doggerel, and Marechal’s own poetry. So as not to disrupt the flow, I have placed my translations of this material in the main text and the original versions in the endnotes. Readers of Ulysses will notice that I use the same protocols for dialogue as Joyce does; that is, a dash to mark the point where a given character’s speech begins. This partially replicates the Spanish punctuation observed in Marechal’s text (in Spanish, a second dash normally marks the point where the speech act ends). In fact, as Lafforgue notes, Marechal in his manuscript notebooks often neglected to add the closing dash (“Estudio filológico preliminar” xxiii — xxiv), perhaps unconsciously under the influence of his reading of Ulysses. On the other hand, as Barcia observes (103), Marechal never used the Joycean stream-of-consciousness technique. Indeed, he seems to hesitate when punctuating complex narratorial layering; in Book Two, chapter 1, for example, he vacillates between the dash and quotation marks when handling Adam’s interior monologues, sometimes presenting them as soliloquies (see Lafforgue and Colla’s critical edition). Nevertheless, once in print, the punctuation remains quite stable in all succeeding editions. In this translation, with the exception noted above, I reproduce Marechal’s punctuation of dialogue and interior monologue.

Marechal often cites classical phrases in Latin. Unless the phrase is very short and its meaning obvious, I usually provide translations in the notes. When we read, for example, that Adam says something to himself ad intra, it is obvious that he is speaking inwardly. Adam’s penchant for using Latin phrases, an anti-modernist gesture, is as odd in Spanish as it is in English. The narrator uses phrases from both classical and medieval Church Latin, often with cheeky jocularity.

The annotation, intended for both scholars and non-specialist anglophone readers, owes much to Pedro Luis Barcia’s 1994 edition, as well as to the recent critical edition of Javier de Navascués, who was kind enough to exchange manuscript notes with me. References to Barcia’s notes are indicated by page number (e.g., Barcia 100n); likewise to Navascués’s critical edition (e.g., Navascués, AB 227n). Textual material quoted in the notes, if the original is in Spanish prose, is rendered in my English translation, unless otherwise indicated. All errors and omissions, of course, are entirely my responsibility.

~ ~ ~

Leopoldo Marechal in 1929. (Courtesy of María de los Ángeles Marechal)

Sketch of Marechal from mid- to late 1920s. (Artist unknown, often attributed mistakenly to Xul Solar)

Sketch of Marechal by Aquiles Badi (Paris, 1930). (Courtesy of María de los Ángeles Marechal)

Argentine artists of the “Grupo de París” around Aristide Maillol’s Monument à Cézanne in the Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, 1930. Standing, left to right: Juan del Prete, Alberto Morera, Horacio Butler, Raquel Forner, Leopoldo Marechal. Sitting, left to right: Maurice Mazo, Alfredo Bigatti, Athanase Apartis. (Courtesy of the Fundación Forner-Bigatti)

Artists of the “Grupo de París” in Sanary-sur-Mer on the French Riviera, 1930. Left to right: Alberto Morera, Alfredo Bigatti, Aquiles Badi, Leopoldo Marechal, Raquel Forner, Horacio Butler. (Courtesy of the Fundación Forner-Bigatti through the Centro Virtual de Arte Argentino)

Marechal’s working sketch of Schultz’s “Neocriollo,” the astrologer’s visionary model of Argentina’s future inhabitants. (Courtesy of María de los Ángeles Marechal)

Sketch by Marechal for the magazine Valoraciones (August 1926). His poem “Jazz Band” appeared in Martín Fierro 27–28 (10 May 1926). (Courtesy of María de los Ángeles Marechal)

Leopoldo Marechal, Susana Rinaldi (tango singer and actress), and composer Astor Piazzolla. Photo first published in the magazine Extra in 1968. (Courtesy of photographer Gianni Mestichelli)

The original cover of Adán Buenosayres, published by Sudamericana in 1948.

ADAM BUENOSAYRES

To my comrades of Martín Fierro,1 alive and dead, each of whom could well have been a hero in this fair and enthusiastic story.

Indispensable Prologue

On a certain October morning in 192—, at not quite noon, six of us entered the Western Cemetery,2 bearing a coffin of modest design (four fragile little planks), so light that it seemed to carry within not the spent flesh of a dead man but rather the subtle stuff of a concluded poem.3 The astrologer Schultz and I held the two handles at the coffin’s head, Franky Amundsen and Del Solar had taken those at the foot. Luis Pereda went ahead, stocky and unsteady as a blind boar. Bringing up the rear came Samuel Tesler, pawing with ostentatious devotion a great rosary of black beads. Springtime laughed above the tombstones, sang in the throats of birds, waxed ardent in the sprouting vegetation, proclaimed amid crosses and epitaphs its jubilant incredulity toward death. And there were no tears in our eyes, nor sorrow in our hearts, for in that simple coffin (four fragile little planks) we seemed to bear not the heavy flesh of a dead man but the light material of a poem concluded. We arrived at the newly dug grave; the coffin was lowered to the bottom. From the hands of friends, the first lumps of earth drummed upon the bier, then the gravediggers’ brutal shovels took over. Samuel Tesler, proud and impudent, knelt down on the abundant earth to pray a moment, while at the head of the grave the men proceeded to erect a metal cross bearing, on its black tinplate heart, the inscription:

ADAM BUENOSAYRES

R.I.P.

Then we all made our way back to the City of the Tobiano Mare.4

In the days that followed, I read two manuscripts that Adam Buenosayres had entrusted to me at his death: The Blue-Bound Notebook and Journey to the Dark City of Cacodelphia. Both works struck me as so extraordinary that I resolved to have them published, confident that they would find a place of honour in Argentine literature. But I later realized those strange pages would not be fully understood by the public without some account of who their author and protagonist was, so I took it upon myself to sketch out a likeness of Adam Buenosayres. At first I had in mind a simple portrait, but then it occurred to me to show my friend in the flow of his life. The more I recalled his extraordinary character, the epic figures cut by his companions, and above all the memorable exploits I had witnessed back in those days, the more the novelistic possibilities expanded before my mind’s eye. I decided on a plan of five books, in which I would present my Adam Buenosayres from the moment of his metaphysical awakening at number 303 Monte Egmont Street until midnight of the following day, when angels and demons fought over his soul in Villa Crespo, in front of the Church of San Bernardo, before the still figure of Christ with the Broken Hand.5 Then I would transcribe The Blue-Bound Notebook and Journey to the Dark City of Cacodelphia as the sixth and seventh books of my tale.

The first pages were written in Paris in the winter of 1930. A deep spiritual crisis later made me drop everything, including literary activity. Fortunately, and just in time, I understood that I was not called to the difficult path of the Perfect Ones.6 And so, to humble the proud ambitions I once held, I turned again to the old pages of my Adam Buenosayres, albeit listlessly, penitentially. But since penance sometimes bears unexpected fruit, my faint interest gathered a new momentum that carried me through to the end, despite the setbacks and misfortunes that impeded its progress.

I publish it now, still torn between my hopes and fears. Before this prologue ends, I must warn my reader that the novelistic devices of the work, strange as they may seem, are all employed to the end of rendering Adam Buenosayres with rigorous accuracy, and not out of vain desire for literary originality. Moreover, the reader will readily ascertain that, in both the poetic and comic registers, I have remained faithful to the tone of Adam Buenosayres’s Notebook as well as his Journey. One final observation: some of my readers may identify certain characters or even recognize themselves. If so, I will not hypocritically claim that this is due to mere coincidence but will accept the consequences: well do I know that, no matter where they are placed in Schultz’s Inferno and no matter what their antics in my five books, the characters in this tale all rise to “heroic stature”; and if some of them appear ridiculous, they do so with grace and without dishonour, by virtue of that “angelic wit” (as Adam Buenosayres called it) that can make satire, too, a form of charity, if performed with the smile that the angels don, perhaps, in the face of human folly.

L.M.

BOOK ONE

Chapter 1. The little white kerchief

I offered you,

embroidered with my hair.1

Temperate and blithe are the autumn days in the witty and graceful city of Buenos Aires, and splendid was the morning on that twenty-eighth of April. Ten o’clock had just struck. Wide awake and gesticulating beneath the morning sun, the Great Capital of the South was a gaggle of men and women who fought shrieking for control over the day and the earth. Rustic reader, were you graced with birdlike powers and had you from your soaring flight cast your sparrow’s gaze o’er the burgh, I know that your loyal porteño breast would have swollen, obedient to the mechanics of pride, before the vision laid out below. Booming black ships, moored in the harbour of Santa María de los Buenos Aires,2 were tossing up onto her piers the industrial harvest of two hemispheres, the colours and sounds of four races, the iodine and salt of seven seas. Other tall and solemn vessels, their holds chock-a-block with the plant, animal, and mineral wealth of our hinterland, were setting sail in the eight watery directions amid the keening farewells of naval sirens. If from there you’d followed the Riachuelo^3 upstream to the refrigeration plants, you’d have seen the young bulls and fat heifers jostling out of crammed holding-pens and bellowing in the sun as they waited for the blow between the horns, the deft knife of the slaughterman that would offer a sacrificial hecatomb to the world’s voracity. Orchestral trains entered the city, or departed for the woods of the north, the vineyards of the west, the Virgilian central plains, and the bucolic pastures of the south. From industrial Avellaneda to Belgrano,4 the metropolis was girded with a belt of belching smokestacks that scrawled wrathful sentences by Rivadavia or Sarmiento^5 across the manly sky. Murmurs of weights and measures, the clink of cash registers, voices and gestures clashing like weapons, heels in flight: all these seemed the very pulse of the throbbing city. Here the bankers of Reconquista Street drove the mad wheel of Fortune; there the engineers as grave as Geometry contemplated new bridges and roads for the world. Buenos Aires in motion was laughing; Industry and Commerce were leading her by the hand.

But whoa there, reader! Hold your horses, rein in your lyricism, come down from the lofty heights into which my sublime style has launched you. Descend with me to the neighbourhood of Villa Crespo, in front of number 303 Monte Egmont Street. There’s Irma, vigorously sweeping the sidewalk and wailing the first lines of “El Pañuelito.” She stops short and leans on her broom, dishevelled and hot, an eighteen-year-old witch. Her sharp ears tune in the sounds of the city in a single chord: the Italian construction workers’ song, the hammering from the garage named La Joven Cataluña,6 the caterwauling of fat women arguing with the vegetable grocer Alí, the grandiloquence of Jewish blanket vendors, the clamour of boys tearing around after a ragball.7 Then, confirmed in her exalted morning mood, she takes up her song once more:

It was for you,

but you’ve forgotten it.

Soaked in tears,

I have it with me.8

Adam Buenosayres awoke as though returning. Irma’s song hooked him out of deep sleep, pulling him up through fragmented scenes and evanescent ghosts. But after a moment the thread of the music broke off, and Adam fell back down into the depths, surrendering to the delicious dissolution of death. Local deities of Villa Crespo, my tough and happy fellow citizens! Old harpies writhing like gargoyles for no reason at all; tough guys crooning tangos or whistling rancheras; demon kids flying the team colours of River Plate or the Boca Juniors;9 bellicose coachmen twisting on their padded seats as they hummed a tune northward, hurled a curse southward, shouted catcalls to the east and threats to the west! But above all, you, my neighbourhood girls, duets of tapping heels and laughter, suburban muses with or without the rasping voice of Carriego the poet!10 Surely if the girls had climbed the stairs to number 303 and looked in on Adam Buenosayres’s room, our hero’s presence would have moved them to generous silence. Especially had they known that, with his back turned against the new day, defector from the violent city, fugitive from the light, he forgot himself in sleep and in forgetfulness cured his pains — for our protagonist is already fatally wounded, and his agony will be the subtle thread running through the episodes of my novel. Unfortunately, Monte Egmont Street knew nothing of this. And Irma, who wouldn’t have scrupled to rouse Ulysses himself as long as she could sing, launched into the second verse with verve:

A bird sang a sad song,

my sweet darling,

when you left me.11

His head tossing and turning on the pillow, Adam Buenosayres’s figure traced a vast gesture of denial. Against his will he was surfacing again, uprooting himself from the phantasmagorical universe that surrounded and hemmed him in. Smoky faces, silent voices, and vague hand gestures faded away below. One face, his grandfather Sebastián’s, was still calling out to him, but it dissolved like the others, in zones of stupor, in delicious depths. Adam hit the rock-bottom certainty of this world and said aloud:

— Too bad!

He half opened his eyes; through the lashes he sensed the darkness thinning, an inchoate clarity, a hint of light filtering through the dense curtain. Before Adam’s eyes, in the illegible chaos filling the room, colours started gathering and pushing each other aside, and lines began to attract or repel one another. Each object sought its sign^12 and materialized after a quick, silent war. As on its first day, the world sprang forth from love and hate (Hail, old Empedocles!13), and the world was a rose, a pomegranate, a pipe, a book. Caught between the call of sleep still tugging at his flesh and the claims of the world already stuttering its first names, Adam looked askance at the three pomegranates on the clay plate, the wilted rose in the wineglass, and the half-dozen pipes lying on his work table. I’m the pomegranate! I’m the pipe! I’m the rose! they seemed to shout, proudly declaiming their differences. And therein lay their guilt (Hail, old Anaximander!14): they had broken with what primordially was undifferentiated; they had deserted the blissful Unity.

Adam felt a bitter taste on his tongue — not just the fleshy one, but on the mother tongue of his soul as well — as he watched the parodic genesis unfold in his room. Like a god in the mood for cataclysms, Adam shut his eyes again, and the universe of his room returned to nothingness. “Blast it all, anyway!” he grumbled, imagining the dissolution of the rose, the annihilation of the pomegranate, the atomic explosion of the pipe. Perhaps on merely closing his eyes, the city outside as well had vanished. And the mountains would have faded away, the oceans evaporated, the stars fallen like figs from a tree shaken by its maker… “Hell’s bells!” said Adam to himself. Alarmed, he opened his eyes, and the world put itself back together with the meticulous exactitude of a jigsaw puzzle. He would have to give up his midnight readings of the Book of Revelation! Its terrible images of destruction kept him wide awake, then dogged him in dreams, and left him the next morning with an obscure sense of foreboding. Now more than ever, he needed to keep a weather eye on what was happening in his soul, ever since the drums of the penitential night had beaten for him. It wouldn’t do to succumb to a childish dread of geneses and catastrophes. The truth was that when his eyes were closed (and Adam shut them once again), the rose, for example, was not obliterated at all. On the contrary, the flower lived on within his mind, which was now thinking it; and it lived a lasting existence, free of the corruption tainting the rose outside. For the rose being thought was not this or that rose, but all roses that had ever been and could be in this world: the flower bound by its abstract number, the rose emancipated from autumn and death. Thus if he, Adam Buenosayres, were eternal, so too the rose in his mind, even if all the roses out there were abruptly to perish and never bloom again. “Blessèd is the rose!” Adam said to himself. To live, as the rose, eternally in another, and for the eternity of the Other!

Adam Buenosayres opened his eyes for good. When things insisted on their irrevocable sign, he dejectedly saluted: “Good morning, planet Earth!” He wasn’t yet ready to break the stillness of his supine body; it would have been a concession to the new day, which he resisted with all the weight of his dead will. But from Monte Egmont Street the new day reminded him again of its dominion: “Goal! Goal!” howled ten children’s voices in victory. “Foul! Foul!” roared ten others in protest. The clash of quick battle was heard, then peace being negotiated among insults and laughter, then kids tearing around again as they resumed their game. Afterward, when the uproar of the dust-up had settled down to the level of the ambient street noise, Adam picked out the acrid voice of his landlady, Doña Francisca, cackling reproaches, growling offers, belching disdain as she beleaguered the grocer Alí. “Two hundred pounds of belligerent fat,” thought Adam, recalling her mountainous udders. He imagined the ecstatic figure of Alí standing by his vegetable cart and listening without hearing, absorbed instead by some memory of patient oriental markets.

A repeat of yesterday, Adam was thinking. And tomorrow it will be the same scene all over again. It chilled him to think of this flightless reality that endlessly returned, day in day out, inevitable and monotonous as the ticking of a clock. He turned over in bed, and melancholy springs moaned deep in its guts. “The day is like a trained bird,” reflected Adam. “It comes into the world every twelve hours, at the same spot on the globe, and bores us with its eternal song and dance. Or it’s like a pedantic schoolmaster with his sun hat and his primer of stale knowledge — This is the rose, this is the pomegranate.” With a start, he remembered that he too was a teacher. Thirty-two pairs of listless eyes would soon be peering at him from behind their desks. “Shall I go to school?” he asked in his soul. He recalled the damp building, the principal’s saturnine face, and decadent countenances of the pedagogues, and Adam resolved in his soul: “I won’t go to school!” This is the rose, he then mused. No! The rose was Solveig Amundsen,15 no matter what the day said. The memory returned of that last afternoon in the big, rambling house in Saavedra. That empty hopeless feeling and the sting of humiliation were mellowing into something like nostalgia for a cherished impossibility. In Solveig Amundsen’s garden, already wilting with autumn, Lucio Negri (the quack doctor!) had stood before the earnest young girls and fervently preached “mental hygiene,” deeming it all the more desirable in “the Amundsen madhouse,” as the place was quite reasonably dubbed. No doubt about it, Lucio Negri had taken advantage of the chance absence of the four brightest lights of the tertulia — the astrologer Schultz, Franky Amundsen, Samuel Tesler, and the pipsqueak Bernini — who hadn’t showed up that day. Lucio had chosen his moment deliberately, of course. Solveig was present among the girls, and Adam was sitting beside her in his role as poet without apparent prospects. At Adam’s rejoinder, that charlatan of a doctor reproached the poet by quoting Adam’s own verses:

Love more joyous

than a child’s funeral.16

The girls had laughed at his metaphor, then stared in distress and incredulity at Adam, and laughed again in chorus — their pigeon breasts stuffed with laughter! But Solveig Amundsen shouldn’t have laughed with the other girls. Maybe she wouldn’t have, if she’d known that her laughter would detonate the collapse of a poetic construction and the ruin of an ideal Solveig. “I’ll have to take her my Blue-Bound Notebook,” said Adam to himself without much hope. As for Lucio Negri, how could he understand why a child’s funeral is joyful? Adam beckoned a memory from childhood — back there, in Maipú^17 — evoking the little house on the hill, at night, and the dead child propped up in his little chair beneath smoking candles, the flash of sequins on his tunic, the little gold-foil wings his mother had sewn to his shoulders. The parody of an angel, true! But the angel’s eyes looked out no more. Two cotton swabs in his nostrils contained the incipient stench of rotting flesh. Green flies crawled across his powdered cheeks. Outdoors, however, guitars and accordions were making merry. Sugared mate and gin were doing the rounds. Lead-footed dancers stumbled, and furtive couples wandered off among thistles into the night (Adam understood later!), perhaps moved by the obscure urge to prolong the painful yearning of the generations with their hot blood. The drunken guitarist sang:

Little angel, you fly away

with a drop of wine,

Adam, in his innocence, wanted to know the reason for all this jubilation. Someone answered that the child in the chair wasn’t dead. He was now living a blessèd existence in God.

Little angel, you go away

with a flower in your hand^18

That had to be why a child’s funeral was a festive occasion. It meant going away to live eternally in another, thanks to the eternal virtue of the Other. Solveig Amundsen probably didn’t know this. All the same she shouldn’t have laughed at Adam that afternoon, because she too, unawares, was living within him an existence emancipated from the four seasons. “I’ll take her my Blue-Bound Notebook,” Adam resolved in his mind.

He slowly stretched, and the bed-springs again moaned their de profundis.19 Out on Monte Egmont Street, the voices were getting louder, the hubbub of men and women who, like Lucio Negri, understood only the literal sense of things and gave themselves over entirely to the illusion of a reality as changeable as its hours and as ephemeral as its shouts, like horseflies intoxicated by the day’s nectar, grimy with sweat and pollen, buzzing with relish beneath a sun that would go down as surely as they would. “Bah!” thought Adam ill-humouredly. “Lucio Negri will be powerless to prevent the day from eventually losing its worn-out alphabet or the world from tottering as did Don Aquiles, the silly old schoolmaster of Maipú, when looking for his misplaced spectacles among the schoolboys’ bags. Nor — alas! — will he forestall the moon turning to blood, or the sky being rolled up like a scroll.” The tremendous words of the Apocalypse thundered in his ears from the night before: Sicut liber involutus.20 Adam had stopped reading at that image and held his breath to listen to the hard, ominous silence of the night. There, in the heart of stillness, he seemed to hear the click of great springs breaking loose, a crunch of forms being instantly annihilated, an insurrection of atoms repelling one another. Terror-struck, Adam had fallen to his knees and for the first time felt his clumsy prayer reach the heights that had been denied him so many times before. Surely that sacred dread was a prelude to the living science that his soul, weary of dead letters, had been longing for. A sacred dread. But how easily it melted away now into the noise and colour of the new day!

Propping himself up, Adam Buenosayres reached out to the bevy of pipes calling out to him from the table. He chose Eleonore,21 with its cherry stem and porcelain bowl, and carefully filled it with tobacco from Uruguay that for a moment would become his soul. Skilfully lighting up, he breathed in the soul of Eleonore, then exhaled and watched it curl in the air, a dragon of smoke. He resumed the sweet horizontal posture of sleep and death, and savoured the delight of smoking inside his closed cubic space, in that penumbra where forms unfleshed themselves to the point of resembling numbers. For some time now he had been suffering one of two kinds of anxiety when he woke up: either he had the unspeakable impression of opening his eyes onto a strange world whose forms, even that of his own body, struck him as so absurd that he was promptly plunged into a state of fear and apprehension of ancient metamorphoses; or else he stumbled into this world as though into a bazaar full of hopelessly pawed-over objects. But there had been a time when days would begin with his mother’s song:

Four white doves,

four blue ones,

four little red ones,

death gives to me.22

A little boy rubbing his blue eyes, pulling on clothes pell-mell as he rushed out to the morning that opened like a book filled with ravishing images! Later, Don Aquiles had read aloud in class the first stammerings of Adam’s ecstasies and pronounced judgment: “Adam Buenosayres will be a poet.” The other children clapped astonished eyes on Adam; he turned pale, his essence laid bare, the exact form of his anxieties exposed by that pedant from Maipú who, moreover, believed in the immutable regularity of the cosmos and who, every morning, watch in hand, used to invigilate the sun’s rising, lest it deviate from the hour specified in the almanac and incur his reproof. Don Aquiles limped methodically, and the schoolchildren, choking with laughter, would sing to the rhythm of his hobbled gait:

Coo-coo, coo-coo,

sang the frog,

coo-coo, coo-coo,

beneath the water.23

Suddenly the old man stops beside Adam’s desk and looks at him: what a gaze, filtered now through memory, through bluish spectacles, his octopus eye lurking in navy blue waters!

Adam Buenosayres fondly reviewed in mente those figures from his childhood. But old images and new conflicts alike were being thrust aside by his day’s arduous launch, especially now that Eleonore, the pipe smoked before breakfast, was steering him into tobacco’s subtle, exceedingly noble, altogether poetic inebriation. “Glory to the Great Manitou,” he recited in his soul, “for he has given humans the delight of Oppavoc!”24 Better still, under the influence of the sacred leaf, his paralyzed will seemed to be reviving: he looked again at the objects in his room and this time found the pomegranate and rose worthy of an interest bordering on praise (splendor formae!); then he trained his ears on the din in the street, but inclined now to a benevolent attitude. At that moment, a terrific commotion inside the house hijacked his attention. Irma! Monte Egmont Street left behind, she was climbing the stairs amid a clatter of pails and brooms; she sang to the withered canary, praised the prudent cat, laughed at the bald scrub-brush, cursed the bobtailed duster. Next he made out the clomp of her shoes in the study and the creak of the furniture she was ruthlessly punishing. No doubt about it, Irma was one big unabashed shout. But an eighteen-year-old shout… and Adam had told her that her eyes were like two mornings together, or maybe he’d kissed her. It had been springtime, and perhaps the strong smell of the paraísos^25 had stirred their blood — hers, as she spread the sheets over his bed, all of her curving like a live bow; his, when he left off reading to look at what she wished him to see, even though he felt she didn’t want him to look, not suspecting that she wanted him not to suspect that she wanted him to see, O Eve! And Adam had followed the line of her bare arms which, as she raised them, revealed two dark thatches of fleece, or he saw the flash of thighs, dark olive like the skin of apples. A thick fog suffused him suddenly, erasing all memory and understanding until he was left prey to an aggression that willed him, trembling, toward Irma. And when Adam’s eyes asked “yes?” she answered “yes” with hers. Then it was as though he lost this world (forgetting it and himself) only to find it again afterward (remembering it and himself), but a world now without lustre, sullied by coarse melancholy, as though his shipwrecked soul were blind to the intelligible grace that illumines things. Without a glance or a word, they parted company at last. Adam heard her laughing on the staircase, then prattling below as if nothing had happened. He was left to savour his shame, his useless remorse, angry at himself for having fallen again into Nature’s famous trap (Hail, old Schopenhauer!).26 Of course! Nature played with the dishonour of the poor freak who, originally meant for paradisal beatitude, had scandalously fallen to earth and, like an insect at night, been singed by any glimpse or simulacrum of his first happiness.

The truly sane option would be to ignore the calls from the outside, like Rose of Lima!27 In suspense and terror, Adam had read the story about her battle against the world, about how that rose had imposed a progressive self-destruction upon her mortal coil. One midnight, upon closing the gloomy book and resorting to the never idle loom of his imagination, Adam had evoked the image of Rose in her torture chamber. She had erected a cross in her room where she crucified herself in imitation of her adored Lover, the pain of her cracked sinews and wracked bones affirming the heaviness of flesh which, slight though hers was, had not yet overcome the law of its misery. On her bowed head, through hair that had once been so beautiful, the spikes of her metal crown raked new blood from old scabs. Her gaze fell inert upon the strewn rubble and broken glass that served as her bed, the one she had chosen for her conjugal bliss. Thus did Rose keep her vigil in the deep night of America. Perhaps sounds from the big house filtered into her room — her father’s laboured breathing, her mother’s muttered reproaches, even in dreams, against her daughter’s heavenly folly, or the sighs of her sisters as they dreamed, no doubt, about love affairs. But she paid them no heed, absorbed as she was in her task of annihilation: she was destroying the self within her, so that she might reconstruct that self in the Other. Such was the work of her needle, an embroidery in blood…

The violent clatter of falling objects in the study wrenched him from his abstractions. Adam heard Irma let fly the stoutest, most energetic obscenity of them all. But a human howl from the next room cut her short:

— Infernal womaaan!

He recognized the voice of Samuel Tesler and heard the philosopher’s fist hit the wall three times to demand Adam’s testimony and solidarity against Irma’s excesses. “The Bachante has awakened Koriskos,”28 observed Adam. “Koriskos is right, the Bachante’s at fault.” So he answered with the required three fist-blows. Instantly the philosopher’s cursing voice folded into itself, a decaying wind that sputtered out among soft sleepy grumblings. Still attentive yet to the other’s murmurs, Adam Buenosayres heroically left his berth and went to open the window wide, letting a torrent of light into the room. Then, faithful to the venerable custom of lyric poets, he returned to bed and gave himself over to breathing the strong autumn air. The aroma of paradise no longer wafted up from the trees on Monte Egmont Street, as on that barbaric spring day with Irma (Adam had said her eyes were just like two mornings together, maybe he’d even kissed her). Now instead came the breath of autumn, heavy with seed, the pungence of dead leaves. Better, though, was the scent of white roses, for they would speak to him always of Solveig. That afternoon he had watched her bend down in the shade of the greenhouse among the roses — they were practically drunk on the smell — and she too was a snow-white rose, a rose of damp velvet; her voice, so moist and clear in timbre, seemed akin to water, the water in the well back in Maipú, when a stone fell in and drew forth secret music. Alone in the flower nursery, they were brought closer together than ever, up against their great opportunity and their inevitable risk. Adam, as he stood by her side, suddenly felt the birth of a grief that would never leave him, as though that moment of supreme closeness opened between them an irremediable distance, as with two stars whose ultimate degree of proximity coincides with the first of their separations. The grotto-like light did not at all undermine the integrity of forms, but rather exalted them prodigiously. The form of Solveig Amundsen became painfully vivid, imbued with a plenitude that made him tremble with anxiety, as though so much grace sustained by such a weak frame suddenly revealed the risk of its fragility. Once again the admonitory drums of night had begun to beat, and before his hallucinated gaze Solveig withered and fell among the pale roses that were as mortal as she.

Adam lowered his eyelids: how sore those poor eyes! If one abused the night, demanded everything from its dominion, then it burned like black oil ravaging eyelids that tried in vain to close. The morning after, daylight was like alcohol on the inflamed lids. “Could it be that he was a night spirit, kin to ominous birds, insects with phosphorescent rear-ends, and witches that rode meek broomsticks?” No, because his soul, diurnal, was daughter to her father, the sun of intelligibility. “If this was so, then why did he live by night?” He haunted the night because, in his era, the torch of daytime incited a war without laurels; it raped silence, it scourged holy stillness. Daytime was external like skin, active like the hand, sweaty as armpits, loud-mouthed and prolific in falsehood. Male by sex, daytime was a young, hairy-chested hero. He shied away from the light of day because it pushed him toward the temptation of material fortune, induced the anxiety to possess useless objects, as well as other unhealthy desires: to be a politician, boxer, singer, or gunman. “And the night?” Colourless, odourless, insipid as water, nighttime nevertheless got him as high as good wine. Silence-loving, the night nonetheless kindled the dawn of difficult voices and deep calls which the day with its trombones drowns out. Antipode of light, night made the tiny stars visible. Destroyer of prisons, she favoured escape. Field of truce, she facilitated union and reconciliation. Female who healed, refreshed and stimulated, she lay with man and conceived a son called sleep, the gracious image of death.

And yet, the night could weigh heavily when finally one wanted to sleep and could not. His big, childish eyes wide open at midnight back in Maipú, when insomnia initiated him — oh, so young! — into the mysteries of his nocturnal vocation! And that “journey to silence” through the “jungle of sounds” he’d invented to fall asleep, that trip he used to take in the fitful nights of his childhood! His traveller’s ear hit its first obstacle in the dogs’ barking at the moon as it rose or set. Further along he heard sheep shuffling in their pens, or some cow lowing its insomnia, or a restless horse scratching itself against the palisade. Further still, he came upon the swampy music of creepy-crawlers, their tiny glass guitars or water-crystal violins tinkling over the marsh. At a greater distance he heard a train perforate the night. Then something strange, like a conversation among distant roosters (Lugones’s “telepathic” cocks^29), or the sound of the earth turning on its axis. At last, pure silence, healing silence would fill his ears, become song, then lullaby; for silence is the beginning and end of all music, just as white is the beginning and end of all colour. Such had been his childhood! And there it stayed, in the ringing woods of Maipú: howling werewolves would chase it among the night sounds — O adventure!

And once upon a time… Adam was in his little bed, his ear pressed to the very heart of the night, when suddenly he told himself that the earth would explode willy-nilly before you could count to ten. “One, two, three, four,” he counted, hands clenched; “five, six, seven” and he held his breath; “eight, nine… Nothing! For now!”

Or he would imagine his mother had died: he’s dressed in his Sunday best, crying beside the black wooden coffin — alas! — black wood, with bronze handles. His weeping isn’t loud and showy, oh no; his are the silent tears of a brave little soldier. There’s a strong smell of funeral candles, burning wax, and charred wicks, while he — poor child! — bids his mother farewell, peering into the coffin at her for the last time, before the solderers arrive — oh! — those men who seal up lead boxes with steel soldering-irons. Around him, wrapped in light-coloured clothing, the grownup women of his neighbourhood are hovering, and ancient women with great black shawls caress his cheek with hands smelling of old rags or mice or venerable yellowed papers. In the patio, men stand around talking about death, while others seated in the parlour speak of life, as all the while the mate gourd passes from hand to hand, its bombilla gurgling… ah, how the bombilla used to gurgle in those happy times! His classmates from third grade are gaping at him, dying to know what a kid is like whose mom just died. Among them, his seatmate María Esther Silvetti; and maybe he’d give her a peck on the forehead since they’re already boyfriend and girlfriend, have exchanged notes declaring themselves so. But how far from his mind is all that now! Adam looks only at his mother’s face, bathed in a cold sweat that others are drying with soft cloths, and at her hands, which had caressed, darned, combed, knotted his tie — poor, sad, tireless hands. And his sobbing always grows more disconsolate over those hands, and Adam is at the centre of all those compassionate voices… Suddenly, returning to reality, he would hear, from over there in her bed, his mother’s slow, harmonious breathing, and would realize his drama was only imaginary. And yet his tears really did flow when a hundred harsh voices accused him in the darkness: “Monster!” “There’s the kid who gets a kick out of imagining his own mother’s death!” “He imagines his mother’s death so that everybody will feel sorry for him and admire him!”

— No, it’s not true, he whimpered in response to the voices. To fend off the vision of death still haunting him, he would recite his lesson in National History: “A bullet had killed San Martín’s horse, and just as a Spanish soldier was about to run him through with his bayonet…”30 But it was no use, the death scene would return in terrifying detail — the candelabras, the flowers, the hushed murmurs. “Aaah!” His anguished shout would wake up his mother then. “It’s Adam, he’s had a bad dream,” she would say. “I’d better wake him up.”

Half amused, half in earnest, Adam evoked that childhood as though it were not his but an absent brother’s, or something he’d read many years ago in the book Corazón,31 beside the rain-lashed windowpane, as his grandmother Ursula sang:

Good Friday, Good Friday,

day of great Passion,

when they crucified him,

the Divine Redeemer.32

Nevertheless, how well he recognized himself in the soul of that afflicted child! It was certainly more pleasant to remember his grandfather Sebastián, buried not long before in the cemetery at Maipú. How to reconstruct the face of Grampa Sebastián? He clamped his eyelids tight and thought about him intensely. Right away, his features loomed out of the interior blackness: his curved nose, his rain-soaked beard, his eyes round and shiny like the heads of screws. Everyone in Maipú knew that Grampa had got to Buenos Aires by sailboat, just like Juan de Garay,33 and that he’d been a smuggler in Rozas’s times.34 Adam said so in class. The other kids didn’t believe him, but Don Aquiles took the opportunity to teach them that Rozas had been “a cruel despot” and that smuggling was a very ugly thing, punishable by law. What would Grampa have been like back in those days? Did he wear a chiripá, leather boots, and a silver knife in his belt, like the ones you see in National History engravings? Adam closed his eyes, as he used to do in the Maipú nights, and once again recalled him sitting out under the trellis that bore the family grapevine full of greedy sparrows, holding the porcelain jug tucked between his thighs (he liked dark wine), and laughing in praise of the morning. Then he’d tell endless tales, children and adults alike hanging on every word of his colourful language and feisty proverbs.

Of all his stories, the one about blood was best! Grampa Sebastián had been taken prisoner by the Mazorca. His men were wounded, his smuggler’s whaleboat burned. Two Mazorca agents (perhaps escaped from the novel Amalia^35) take him to the residence of the Illustrious Restorer. The henchman on his right (God save us all!) has a patriotic scar clear across his face. The one on his left is smiling, but his smile looks a lot like his buddy’s scar. Grampa, however — and he doesn’t want to brag, mind you — Grampa is as calm as if he were running a shipment of Paraguayan yerba. It’s siesta time; not so much as a cat can be seen in the streets of Buenos Aires. Finally, they go into an entrance hall, cool and dark as a cave, and come out onto a patio where a mulatta dressed in red, hunched over her mortar, mashes corn (they were probably having mazamorra that night!). All of a sudden, right then and there, Grampa runs into Don Juan Manuel himself. He’s sitting on his folding cot, drinking mate without sugar and staring at his slippers, embroidered perhaps by Manuelita. One of the thugs, the scarface, whispers something in his ear, but the Illustrious Restorer, engrossed in thought, seems not to hear him. Finally he tears his eyes away from his slippers and looks at Grampa Sebastián’s boots, through which protrude earthy toes with nails of quartz. “So you’re the rascally Basque who brings in merchandise from Paraguay?” Don Juan Manuel says at last. “In the service of God and the Holy Federation,” answers Grampa. His words fall in a strange silence; the black woman is no longer mashing corn but gawking in amazement at the scene. “Let’s see. How many savage Unitarians have you taken over to the other side?” “I don’t smuggle men, Illustrious Restorer.” “Humph!” exclaims Rozas. “I suppose you want me to believe that you’re a good Federalist.” “I am a good Federalist!” replies Grampa, and he isn’t lying. Don Juan Manuel’s eyes are now following a fly that buzzes and swivels among the clusters on the grapevine. The black woman’s eyes are a pair of saucers, and the scarface studies the nape of Grampa’s neck as though choosing the best spot on which to play a tune with his knife.36 “And your insignia? Come on now, where’s your good Federalist insignia?” asks Rozas mockingly.37 Grampa Sebastián starts laughing; his hilarity shakes his beard like a gust of wind. Quite matter-of-factly, he unbuttons his shirt to reveal his bare chest and the wounds he got in the fray. Blood is running beneath his gold-studded gaucho belt, down his thighs, and dripping onto his leather boots. There’s his insignia! The illustrious Don Juan Manuel is struck dumb, for sunlit blood at times can be as beautiful as the purest rose. He turns to his men: “Let him go.” Then adds: “I like this Basque!”

O adventures of yesteryear! thought Adam. Horses, rain, wind! Horses with sonorous bladders and pure vegetable breath, thundering across the wide open spaces of Maipú, on a day devoted to the fabulous enterprises of childhood! What to do now? What to do with these useless hands? Maybe the eight strapping Basques who’d borne Grandfather Sebastián to the Maipú cemetery had buried adventure along with him. It had been a summer morning, and the eight Basques, arriving in front of Ugalde’s general store, had set down the coffin to have a sangría of wine, water, and sugar. Adam had stayed outside, and his child’s eyes wandered from the black box parked in the dust to a flock of sparrows darting about nearby on the parched earth. Where had Grampa gone? To the ranch of “Don Cristo,” as they said on that old gaucho record they used to listen to on the phonograph at home? That’s probably how it was: Grampa Sebastián had gone to that ranch in the sky, where they’d given him permission to unsaddle his dapple-grey horse and let it run loose among the stars.38

Adam Buenosayres put down the pipe Eleonore, now cold in his fingers, and contemplated his hands, two dead grey things that ended in five dead grey points. On that same day, which strode ahead like a vulgar orange-hawker, how many possible destinies were offered him by land and sea! But what to do with his five-pointed hands? A shifty player, a weaver of smoke^39 — that’s what he’d been and still was! It would be better to go all the way, right down to his last card, as Grampa Sebastián had done, in the great dream each man weaves in the external world and which is called “a destiny” — whether the dream was good or bad, sublime or ridiculous, at least it would be an authentic gesture, an honourable posture before the Absolute. But he, immobile as a god who sits cross-legged and makes himself a self-reflecting mirror, had always been prone to the poetic madness of assuming imaginatively his possible destinies and living them out ad intra, a hundred phantasmagorical Adams having struggled, suffered, triumphed, and died. Did he want to be a political leader, a movie star, a plutocrat, or a saint? He had only to close his eyes, and a virtual Adam tasted power, covered himself with laurels, amassed the gold of fortune, or was interred with the palm-branch of the martyr.

Disturbed by the recollection of his mental destinies (some of those fictions would certainly make him squirm with shame and ridicule, were he to review them now by the clear light of day!), Adam contemplated once more his dead, grey hands. For some time now, he thought, his existence had been limited to a tiresome recapitulation of the already lived, as if his soul, seeing its present as a desert and its future denied, was now labouring in that pivotal stage of life that they say precedes its demise or metamorphosis. He felt the urgent need to question himself deeply, in order to know at least what was at stake in his presumed death or transformation. He would have loved to consult with the illustrious Boethius!40 Or even Poe’s crusty old crow, if only he would appear at his bedside!

For lack of one and the other, Adam resolved to dialogue with himself. First question: who was he, this absurd entity, this nebulous smoker, this object enclosed within a cube of bricks and mortar, in a house on Monte Egmont Street, in the city of Buenos Aires, at eight o’clock on the morning of April the twenty-eighth of whatever year? Answer: he was, of course, human, the enigmatic reasoning animal, that tricky mélange of a mortal body and an undying soul, the dual freak whose bizarre antics made the angels weep and the demons laugh, the unlikely creature whom its own Creator regretted. What reasons did Adam Buenosayres suggest to justify the invention of the human monster? The Creator needed to manifest all possible creatures; the ontological order of His possibilities required a link between the angel and the beast; hence, the human hybrid, something less than an angel, something more than a brute. What did Adam do after putting forward such a wise hypothesis? As usual, he admired himself at length, graciously acknowledged ad intra the wild applause of an invisible public, and then turned his attention to the question of his corporeal nature. What observations did he make concerning his body? He observed that his animal component conformed to the noble structure of the vertebrates and he recalled, not without vanity, that he occupied in this order the enviable rank of the mammal family; he went on to classify himself among the two-handed mammals, a zoological dignity that justified Adam’s legitimate pride. What other satisfaction did he derive from his study of his carnal nature? He told himself that his body, stretched out between two not very clean sheets, was the ancient and venerable Microcosm, condensation and centre of the entire visible world, summary of the three realms and possessor of three souls: the elemental soul of minerals, the vegetative soul of plants, and the sensible soul of animals. Devourer and assimilator of all the lesser corporeal natures (the great Omnivore!), his body was bound to the Macrocosm by analogy. Thus his heart corresponded to the Sun, his brain to the Moon, his liver to Jupiter, his spleen to Saturn, his kidneys to Mars, his testicles to Venus, and his penis to Mercury. How did he react when he considered these vast projections of his body? With melancholy, for he saw himself subject to two limiting conditions, space and time, which from the start condemned him to the error and fatigue of local movement, to becoming, to death. This reminded him of his childhood dread of time and space. How had the terror called Time invaded him? Back in Maipú, he had conceived Time as a stream that flowed over his house, an invisible stream whose waters brought the newborn and carried away the dead, turned the wheels inside clocks, peeled away walls, and gnawed away at the faces one loved. And Space? This terror had struck when the pedant Don Aquiles taught them in class that it would take a locomotive millions of years to get to the star Sirius; but also at night out on the plain, when he gazed up at the dense constellations of the southern sky until vertigo overtook him and he clung to his motionless horse, just to feel next to his fearful flesh something alive, close, friendly. How had he managed to get over these two terrors? He had overcome them in his soul, which was neither spatial nor temporal; by virtue of his soul, which could rescue the rose from the pain of time and space by abstracting its intelligible form from its sensitive flesh and giving it the hazard-free life of abstract numbers; thanks to his soul, which had apprehended Don Aquiles’s astronomical system, internalized it and set it in motion within like a toy planetarium; by the grace of his soul, which, being a microcosm too, not only devours and assimilates the whole intelligible world but also gives sanctuary to the spirit of spent things. What other aspects of his soul did Adam review? Its immortality, its divine origin, its fallen nature. In what personal intuitions had he recognized the immortality of his soul? In the soul’s absolute certainty of its permanence, which it discloses to its fratre corpo, causing the latter to entertain pernicious illusions; and in the soul’s incredulity, alienation, and repugnance vis-à-vis death as total annihilation, a feeling common to all human beings. By what signs had he come to understand the divine origin of his soul? By its irresistible tendency toward unity, even though it lived in the world of multiplicity; by its notion of a necessary happiness, possible only in an absolute, motionless, invisible, and eternal Other, even though the soul lived in a realm relative, changing, visible, and mortal; by its vocation for the virtues Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, divine attributes to which the soul gravitates as if to its natural atmosphere or its homeland. How had he recognized his fallen nature? Negatively, when he noticed the way his intelligence strayed, his lapses of memory, his failures of will; positively, when he exercised these three powers and observed glimmers and vague stirrings that felt like vestiges of a lost original nobility.

Did Adam concoct, as was his wont, some poetic analogy to express such a vexed duality? He had no need, Plato’s inimitable simile sprang to mind: his soul was like a wingèd chariot pulled by two different horses. One of them, sky-coloured, its mane bristling with stars, its delicate hooves airborne, tended to draw always upward, toward the heavenly meadows where it was born. The other, earth-coloured, slack-lipped, balky, its crupper twisted, paunchy, long-eared, knock-kneed, down at the mouth, and stumble-gaited, always pulled downward, itching to get stuck in muck up to the crotch. Poor Adam, the driver, held the reins of both horses and strove to keep them on track. When the accursed colt prevailed and dragged down the soul’s entire équipage, the divine equine seemed to be asleep in its traces. But when the celestial steed took over, its limbs plied a marvellous light, its nostrils flared to the scent of divine alfalfa fields, and the coach flew, hoisting aloft the dead weight of the earthly horse. The sublime charger kept going higher until it sensed the air thinning, its sinews slackened, and it fell asleep drunk on loftiness. That’s when the terrestrial animal woke up and, finding its teammate asleep, let itself fall down hard, given over to a voracious hunger for impure matter. When, satiated, this beast nodded off, the noble bronco awoke and was master of the coach once more. Thus, between one horse and the other, between heaven and earth, now pulling on this rein and now on that one, Adam’s soul rose up or tumbled down. At the end of each trip Adam the coachman wiped acrid sweat from his brow.

What did Adam do after thus analysing his body and soul? He re-examined himself as a compositum, and on realizing that he hadn’t been born of his own will, he resorted to genealogy to understand his advent to this sad world. What did he determine genealogically, then? Two different lines had joined and unwittingly incurred the infinite responsibility of bringing him onto this plane of existence. Paternal branch: his father was born by the banks of the Río de la Plata, himself the son of grandfather Charles and grandmother María, both natives of the clear-browed city of Lutecia. Maternal branch: his mother too was born beside the Río de la Plata, daughter of Grandfather Sebastián and Grandmother Ursula, who both hailed from Cantabria, hard by the barren sea. How did Adam explain the curious fact that two such different branches had left their native Europe to come together on the banks of the River-named-after-a-metal?41 The visible causes: Republican ideas in grandfather Charles, banished by the French king Louis-Philippe; wanderlust in Grandfather Sebastián, incorrigible sailor. The intelligible causes, according to the astrologer Schultz, were the neocriollo angels, those inciters to emigration, invisible tempters who roamed the world, recruited volunteers in every nation, and with their siren song led them into concave vessels. These same messengers flew before the ships, one wing steadying their vulnerable keels, the other holding wind and storm clouds at bay, thus ensuring the recruits’ safe arrival that they might fulfill their exalted destiny in the Land-which-from-a-pure-metal-takes-its-name. Didn’t Adam feel shame at the thought that angels sporting blue and white cockades might witness his scandalous inertia? He wasn’t ashamed at all: he proceeded to locate himself in space and recognized that his position was terribly fraught with motion, since he was at number 303 Monte Egmont Street in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, Spanish America, southern hemisphere, planet earth, solar system, Macrocosm, and therefore was subject to incessant movement, to the vertiginous spiralling dance resulting from the triple movement of the earth, in its rotation on its axis, its orbit around the sun, and its flight through space along with the entire planetary system toward the constellation of Hercules at the speed of 1,170 kilometres a minute. So, what did he do, now that he felt himself to be a cosmic traveller and stellar dancer?

Adam Buenosayres began to look sympathetically at the objects that were keeping him company on the trip. Inclining his torso toward the floor, he saw beneath the bed the following still life: a porcelain chamberpot, with little flowers painted against an onion-green background; on the pot’s left, his threadbare bathroom slippers; on its right, his old shoes, yoked unidirectionally in sleep, submitting to the dictatorial form of the Adamic foot, grimy with gross materials, comical because they highlighted in their laughable extremities man’s animal nature, lyrical in their reference to the human traveller and the beauty of his earthly translations, dramatic inasmuch as they revealed the peril and penury involved in human movement. Righting his torso, Adam passed in review the pomegranate and the rose, the fraternal pipes, the books on their shelves. His gaze then paused on the print of the Cristo de Lezo being crucified between sun and moon, a family heirloom brought from Pamplona by his grandmother Ursula that had fallen to him as the eldest grandson. His eyes at last came to rest on a photograph of The Throne of Venus, fixed by four thumbtacks to the wall. The goddess was arising from the sea, two great women steadied her by the underarms, her wet hair fell in a wash over her shoulders, and her breasts lifted haughtily or shook themselves like two wet seagulls. To kiss those breasts must have been like kissing a weeping face. How much she looked like Solveig in her portrait as an adolescent, which he’d seen in the big drawing room in Saavedra! She was only fourteen years old, her skirt short, her hair in ringlets. Maybe she came home from school with cardboard polyhedrons, the tetrahedron red as fire, the octahedron blue as air, the icosahedron clear as water, and the cube black as earth. Or perhaps she recited in class, in front of the coloured map: “The Republic of Argentina borders on the north with Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil.” If only he’d known her before, from her first breath! Adam told himself he had a right to such poetic usury, because no one had seen her the way he had, naked in her reality, exalted in her mystery. To be sure, he would take her his Blue-Bound Notebook…

The door opened. Irma flew in like a gust of wind, performing a balancing act with the breakfast tray. She threw it onto the table, looked for Adam’s eyes. Seeing herself ignored, she scolded saucily: “What a long face!” She slammed the door as she left. Her laughter tinkled outside. And Adam had said her eyes were like two mornings together.

Chapter 2

Hesitant, his soul hanging from a thread and his heart thumping like a drum, Adam tapped his knuckles against the door of the other’s room. With bated breath, he listened a long while for some sign of life. But a hard silence reigned within that cave, as though room number five were not a hollow cube but a solid mass. Clenching his fist, Adam knocked again, then put his ear to the door; again the only response was a silence that seemed to revel in its very perfection.

“Koriskos answers not,” Adam said inwardly. “Koriskos sleeps.”

Determined that an enterprise so well begun should not fail, the visitor placed his hand on the doorknob and exclaimed:

— Open, Sesame!

The door swung open without a sound, and the visitor slipped into the cave.

— Close, Sesame!

The door closed ponderously behind him.

It is not unlikely that at this point the reader, facing an adventure so ominously begun, may be overcome by anxiety and abandon my novel in search of gentler climes. But if the blood of San Martín or Cabral^1 still flows in his veins, and if the armour of his forebears hasn’t yet succumbed to the rust of centuries or the greed of dusty antique dealers, the reader will slough off his weakness and ask me: So, what was inside room number five? My answer: total obscurity, palpitating shadow, living darkness; as if the last night, hunted down by the day and its dogs, had taken refuge, trembling with fright, inside room number five.

(Samuel Tesler, philosopher, was born in Odessa^2 beside the Pontus Euxinos, a happy and highly portentous circumstance that in his opinion destined him ineluctably to classical studies. Although he more than once insinuated that the supernatural was involved in his advent to this world, Samuel Tesler was not, like Pallas Athena, born from the majestic skull of Zeus, or even, like flinty Mars, thanks to an unusual percussion in the maternal vulva, but rather in the straightforward, natural way of ordinary folk. True, his enormous infantile head — the formation of which had so leached his mother of calcium that she lost most of her teeth — had resisted for long hours against crossing the sorrowful threshold into the world. In the end, it yielded to the heroic forceps, whose deployment left a bloody mark on each of his temples, two pitiful roses that his mother used to kiss and anoint with her tears. As for the manner of his breastfeeding, Samuel Tesler never denied having managed, albeit with great difficulty, to wring some juice from his mother’s desiccated dugs, and yet whenever he broached this subject, he always intimated the collaboration of some she-wolf or nymph at whose kindly breast he suckled alongside Jupiter. Historians, in spite of their abundant reticence on many matters, all coincide in affirming that Samuel Tesler did not undertake in his cradle any exceptional labour, having neither strangled the serpent of Hercules, nor squared the circle, nor even solved a third-degree equation with nine variables. On the other hand, it is well established that, possessed of a truly extraordinary diuretic capacity, he applied himself to wetting countless diapers, which his grandmother Judith hung to dry by the big stove in the kitchen. Even though his father was only a humble mender of violins and his mother a meek spinner of hemp, Samuel Tesler claimed to descend in a direct line from the patriarch Abraham and King Solomon; and whenever anyone cast doubt on the priestly character of his lineage, he pointed to his furrowed brow and swore up and down he could feel there the two horns of the initiates. He was barely five years old when he emigrated with his tribe and their gods to the lands of the River Plate, where he grew in ugliness and wisdom, scouted out landscapes, studied customs, got a feel for the people and, thanks to his amazing mimetic talents, came to consider himself a native of our pampas, even going so far as to wonder, when looking at himself in the mirror, if he wasn’t the spitting image of Santos Vega.3)

The door closed behind him; Adam Buenosayres ventured a step into the blackness. He’d have gone further if he hadn’t at that moment recalled the wisdom of famous travellers in the night — Montecristo, Rocambole, and other paladins of our childhood — who always allowed their senses to adapt to the darkness. Heeding this useful lesson, Adam Buenosayres did not rashly continue forward, but stood stock-still and sent his five senses on ahead. The first to be assaulted was his olfactory sense: the thick stench of an environment corrupted by its relations with animal life, either through the exchange of gases between animal and atmosphere, or the fermentation of rancid sweat, or the biodegradation of urine imperfectly controlled during expulsion or too long stagnant in those receptacles that human dignity, always jealous of its prerogatives, has seen fit to call “chamber pots.” A moment later his keen sense of hearing picked up the rhythm of deep and laborious breathing in the depths of the lair; its alternate movement, in musical notation, went like this: inhalation in crescendo and sharp snore, exhalation in diminuendo and bass snore.

Anyone else might have trembled upon hearing the dragon breathe, but not Adam Buenosayres. Listening to the bellows wheezing in the dark, he reflected on the innocent vulnerability of sleeping persons and felt tenderness at his foe’s defencelessness. He might even have fallen down the slippery slope of tears but for a sudden break in the concert of respirational music. The dragon, still invisible, had abruptly turned over in bed and unleashed a gigantic explosion of flatulence.

“Koriskos salutes me,” thought Adam, “with salvos from the artillery!”

Now used to the dark, his eyes discerned the layout of room number five. In front of him, a rectangular window was protected by a heavy curtain against the assault of light. To his right, the baleful face of a mirror. On his left, what looked like written characters traced in white chalk against a background of absolute black. He began to register shreds of an unknown perfect whiteness, then the spectrum of greys, and later the corpulence of furniture lurking in the corners of the room like domestic beasts. Sure, now, of the terrain he was invading, the visitor headed for the window and yanked open the curtain, opening the floodgates to the light. Turning his eyes back to the cave’s interior, he saw Samuel Tesler on his bed in a laterally recumbent position and intelligently oriented toward the earth’s magnetic pole. Samuel’s eyelids flapped against the sudden sunlight, strong as acid, and an enormous sigh seemed to deflate his entire body. He frowned. He smacked his lips as if tasting a drop of vinegar. Then, with a heave of his mountainous hip beneath the dismal covers, he rolled over and continued snoring, backside to the day.

(Although none of the philosopher’s written doctrine confirms this, the oral tradition preserved by his disciples maintains that Samuel Tesler lived in the world as if in a deplorable hotel where — he sadly alleged — he was taking a total-rest cure in an attempt to recover from the fatigue of having been born. When queried as to the origin of this evidently intractable fatigue, the philosopher put it down to the cumulative effect of his numerous reincarnations, beginning with the partition of the original Hermaphrodite. He solemnly declared he’d been a fakir in Calcutta, a eunuch in Babylon, a dog-shearer in Tyre, a flautist in Carthage, a priest of Isis in Memphis, a whore in Corinth, a moneylender in Rome, and an alchemist in medieval Paris. He was once asked, in a Villa Crespo café called Las Rosas, if a job wouldn’t assuage the tedium of so many different transmigrations. Samuel Tesler answered that work was not an “essential” virtue of human nature; the almighty Elohim had created man only for otium poeticum,4 he maintained, and work was an “accidental” impairment to our nature brought about by the wilful “separated rib”; and seeing as how he, Samuel Tesler, was a man who kept his conduct grounded in the essential, he was not about to lower himself to a chance accident that reminded him of that unpleasant episode in Paradise. Another time, it is told, on the terrace of Ciro Rossini’s restaurant, a bedspread salesman engaged Samuel Tesler in the tired old debate of the Cricket versus the Ant. The philosopher, not without first expressing his disdain for both invertebrate animals and bedspread salesmen, heroically defended the Cricket, to whose health he drank three glasses of Sicilian wine. And since the salesman insisted on knowing what he thought to be the ideal economy, Samuel Tesler replied that it was the economy of the bird, the only terrestrial animal that can convert ten grains of bird-seed into three hours of music and a milligram of manure.)

Adam Buenosayres couldn’t bring himself to wake up the sleeping man. Instead, he looked at the clutter surrounding him. On the table lay a large book, wide open like a mouth. In front of the austere mirror, four chairs faced one another in a bizarre arrangement, as though a conclave of ghosts had been sitting in them the night before. A notebook lying open on the floor exhibited the dragon’s vigorous handwriting. Over here, a couple of discarded socks still held the form of the human foot; over there, a faded rag blindfolded the lone eye of the bedside lamp. And books were everywhere, in piles on the floor, stacked up against walls. Monographs strewn as if by a lion’s paw. Tomes whose rent bindings bled knowledge. Folio-sized volumes groaning like beasts of burden. A blackboard set up by the window seemed to redeem the decorum of the lair; on its surface Adam Buenosayres could now read the characters that had looked mysterious in the dark:

APRIL 27

1 p.m. — A brilliant idea about catharsis in ancient tragedy. The aestheticizers at Ciro’s will shit bricks.

2:20 p.m. — The laundry woman brings me a paltry bill ($1.75). I perform a dialectical miracle and revive her wilted hopes that she’ll collect. She’s Galician Spanish,5 a race given to lyricism: she’s dreaming if she thinks she’ll get the better of me!

3 p.m. — Sexual discomfort and fleeting sublimation of the quo usque tandem^6 (preventive reading of Plato).

3:30 p.m. — Is Plato’s Demiurge a poor Italian construction worker or the hypostasis of the Divinity manifesting itself as the efficient cause of Creation?

4 p.m. — Melancholy for unknown reasons, maybe hunger (must keep a couple of chocolate bars on hand).

4:45 p.m. — If I take the yod out of the word Avir, it becomes Aor. (How the greasy beards in the Synagogue would tremble if they knew!)7

There was nothing more on the blackboard, so Adam Buenosayres turned his eyes to the master of so much wisdom and studied him with renewed interest. It must be said that Samuel Tesler slept without visible signs of pride, but without undue modesty either. His face was expressionless, like that of an extinguished streetlamp or a dead man, its entire expanse shiny with an oily sweat produced, no doubt, by the exertion of sleep. Two clear lines were sketched across a forehead as broad as a hemisphere. One was sinuous, denoting a sea voyage. The other was the straight line of benign malice. The arcs of his eyebrows pointed menacingly at his enormous nose (custom-built, according to Samuel, for breathing the divine pneuma); the proboscis, as if intimidated, looked like wanting to take leave of its face, perhaps for a landscape more accommodating of its sierra-like grandeur. From his half-open mouth, snorting and musical, the dragon’s breath coursed like an invisible torrent between twin rows of gold-filled teeth.

“Koriskos snores,” said Adam to himself. “But he must perforce awaken. He is summoned by the day, by reality, by the blackboard.”

Putting hesitation behind him, he shook Samuel by the shoulders:

— Wake up!

Samuel Tesler blinked with the dazed air of a fish hauled up from great depths.

— Eh? he sputtered between sighs. What?

— Get up, illustrious professor of sleep!

Samuel Tesler struggled to sit up, still not quite awake, and clamped foggy eyes on his interpellator. Upon recognizing Adam, he fell back against the gutted cushions.

— Quit messing around, he begged. I’m dog tired!

Without insisting further, Adam Buenosayres waited for Samuel to come around. And he didn’t have to wait long, for the dragon, yawning noisily, gave himself a good stretch until his bones achieved a euphonious crack.

— What time is it? he finally asked in resignation.

— Twelve o’clock on the nose, Effendi, replied a ceremonious Adam.

— It can’t be!

— Eye of Baal, that’s the exact time!

— Hmm! What day is it?

— Thursday, Sahib.

As Adam Buenosayres, laughing, flung open the two window panes, the philosopher sat up again, flattered by the Oriental honorifics, music to his ears, no doubt. The bedcovers receded like the waters of the sea, at once revealing the dragon’s incredible torso, which in turn was swaddled by an even more unbelievable Chinese kimono, and released a whiff of rank jungle beast.

(“Twice only does the just man bathe: at birth and at death.” Thus, the rigorous doctrine professed by Samuel Tesler on the subject of hygiene. Concerning his own case, he claimed to live in perfect peace with his conscience, for he did not in the least doubt that his pious progenitors had complied with the first ritual bath, nor that his kith and kin would perform the second one, lest they annoy Elohim. As for prenuptial washing, the philosopher made no objection, even though in his opinion the just man ought to be content, in vexatious matters of this sort, with the abstract odour of decency. It once happened that a few of Samuel’s adepts visited his cubicle and saw there a green-, yellow-, and blue-striped bathrobe. Shocked and alarmed, they suspected apostasy. But the philosopher set their minds at ease, telling them that just as the ascetics of old used to contemplate a skull to disabuse themselves of worldly illusions, so he put before his eyes that useless garment as a reminder of the dishonour incurred when ablutions are performed in adulation of the human body. He felt a religious dread for water and kept himself at a reverential distance, for he considered it divine, the third offspring of impalpable Ether. Hence, its use for menial purposes he found painfully profanatory. Asked if it was permissible to drink water, Samuel Tesler held that only the gods could rightfully imbibe that venerable liquid, and that man, lowly insect of the earth, ought to limit himself to wine, beer, mead, and other humble products of human industry.)

As I was saying, Samuel Tesler righted his huge torso, crossed his arms, fixed his calm gaze on Adam, and apparently savoured the silence that sprang up between him and his visitor.

— Okay, he said finally. Why are you here bothering me in the wee hours of the morning?

Samuel’s serene face, his placid gesture, his mild voice, were not enough to put Adam at ease. He knew only too well the Protean virtues of that face, its wondrous capacity for metamorphosis, and how terribly quickly the dragon could rearrange his facial muscles to compose one face, then destroy it in a single breath to compose another, according to the changing circumstances of the battle. Knowing this, Adam Buenosayres decided to play along and humour him.

— The wee hours of the morning? he replied, feigning astonishment. The San Bernardo clock is striking noon!

— And what do your damned clocks have to do with me? Samuel protested sweetly.

Adam hesitated a moment. How to suggest to the dragon the subtle motive for his visit, without pronouncing the “name under reserve” or exposing his secret to the curiosity of another?

— The day is claiming you! he said at last in a solemn tone. The new day, too, wants to be on your blackboard!

— The day is claiming me? asked Samuel with dreadful innocence.

His dead eyes suddenly brightened: the straight line of benign malice deepened on his forehead, and a dangerous smile curved his lips. (“Watch out!” thought Adam.)

— Thursday, mused the philosopher. Of course, of course! It has to be Thursday. If anyone should be called Thursday, it’s the man who woke me up with no consideration whatsoever.8

“Look out, look out!” said Adam to himself again. Samuel’s playing so much on the word Thursday had him on tenterhooks. Could he have guessed? He couldn’t have, he was still half asleep! Nevertheless, without letting his concern show, Adam put himself on alert. But now he watched as Samuel’s features were radically transformed. The fire in his eyes went out; the malicious line faded on his brow; his lips were expressionless. Now the philosopher showed him a different face, the sad and noble bust of the martyr.

— Yes, yes, he sighed. It’s God’s will that you can’t get any sleep in this bloody house.

Sprawled over the pillows, remorseful, easy of word, severe in mimicry, he continued:

— Do you think it’s right that just because I owe the Fat Lady a lousy three months’ rent, I shouldn’t be allowed to sleep in peace, as did all my ancestors from Pythagoras down to our friend Macedonio Fernández?9

The eyes of the dragon — his docile, melancholy eyes — pleaded for a response. Adam was still uneasy, but determined to stick with him through all his transmutations, even if they outnumbered those of Ovid and Apuleius put together. So he answered:

— Bah! I don’t think it’s because you’re behind with the rent. Beneath the abundant boobs of Doña Francisca there beats a heart of gold, believe me. It’s her housewife morality that’s offended by your unholy habits.

Samuel Tesler listened to his visitor’s argument in disdainful silence, his mouth bitter, but his eyes meek and sad.

— Let’s take a closer look at Doña Francisca, persisted Adam in a grave tone. Let’s come down to earth, Eye of Baal! Doña Francisca had a husband — may he rest in peace — who used to get up every morning at five and go to bed every night punctually at ten. Doña Francisca’s spouse’s bowels — and the whole neighbourhood knew this — never failed to move at precisely six-thirty; you could set your watch by it.

— And could such a jewel of a man have died? an incredulous Samuel interrupted.

— He died prematurely, answered Adam sadly. Whom the gods love die young.10

The look the philosopher gave his visitor was half approving, half anxious. In fact, he was regarding him as he would a disciple who was getting a little too big for his britches. Which only encouraged Adam, who continued:

— By her mathematical mate, Doña Francisca conceived two sons, Castor and Pollux, who maintain their father’s noble line. Both keep toothbrushes in the bathroom; Castor has a blue one, Pollux a dark red one. Faithful to the principles of modern hygiene, the two champions purge themselves “religiously” at the change of every season. It’s a known fact that the Company raised Castor’s salary less than two months ago, but it’s equally true that Pollux will be promoted up to Management as soon as his boss kicks the bucket. Unfortunately (and here Adam shook his head in dismay) the intellectual harmony between these two upright young men is not as perfect as their aggrieved mother might wish. They’re both cinephiles, but Castor’s favourite star is Bessie Love, while Pollux prefers Gloria Swanson. Fanatical soccer fans, Castor stands by the famous blue jersey of the Racing team; Pollux roots for the invincible San Lorenzo. Free of the scourge of illiteracy, Castor reads Crítica and Pollux La Razón.”11

His benevolence exhausted, Samuel Tesler was showing signs of a vast discontent.

— But don’t get the idea, Adam advised him, that they’re a pair of innocent duffers. No! They also pay tribute to the night, to frenzy, to dissipation. Every Saturday night Castor and Pollux observe the following program. From nine till half-past midnight, movies at the Rivoli. At one in the morning, homage to Venus at the goddess’s temple on Frías Street. At two in the morning, chocolate y churros at the café Las Rosas. At two-thirty, back to the maternal hearth and home for restorative sleep.

His arduous portrayal of these characters finished, the visitor looked to Samuel for the praise he felt he’d earned. But the philosopher gave no sign of indulgence.

— Nice morality! he scoffed, his brow jutting forward in menace. A bunch of bourgeois slobs insulated in fat and conventionality!

And with all the dignity that his underclothes would allow, he added:

— I know the type! They seize the day by force and stuff it chock-a-block with their schemes and scams, their shouts and their farts. And then they’re surprised if the philosopher, excluded from the day, takes shelter in the sweet beneficence of the night!

He levelled a threatening finger at his visitor:

— Answer me this, since you’ve seen at least the cover of the odd book of metaphysics. What is the bird of the philosophers?

— The owl, Effendi, answered Adam.

— That’s right, the owl. The nocturnal bird par excellence.

And placing his right hand on his breast, he solemnly declared:

— Well, then, I am the owl.

Surprised but polite, Adam Buenosayres held out his hand to the owl who, with minimal fanfare, had just presented himself as such. But the owl was busy with the remainder of a half-smoked cigarette that now drooped from his lower lip, trying to light it and putting his nose in serious jeopardy in the process.

— And what is the most grossly diurnal bird? he asked once he’d achieved combustion. The bird that is fat and graceless like no other?

Adam didn’t answer.

— The hen! exclaimed the philosopher. The perfect symbol for Buenos Aires!

His eyes frolicked in a cruel dance. A deceitful smile crossed his belligerent features. Thus jovial and monstrous, Samuel exhibited a third face, no less formidable than the other two.

— The City of the Owl Against the City of the Hen, he recited cryptically.

— What’s that? Adam wanted to know.

— It’s the title of my work. I pluck the hen and toss it into the boiling pot of my analysis. I add the young cob of melancholic corn and a lively sprig of sarcasm…

— Altogether, a real criollo hash, said Adam scornfully. That’s our literature, all right!

— You mean yours, you bunch of mulattos!12 corrected the philosopher, visibly piqued. In mine, you’ll see a cackling people who busily scratch and peck at the earth, night and day, never remembering sad Psyche, never turning their eyes heavenward, deaf to the music of the spheres.

By the time he’d finished this declamation, the malignant line had reappeared on his forehead.

— To conclude my thesis, I propose that a dun-grey chicken replace the dove of the Holy Spirit on the Buenos Aires coat-of-arms.13 And to top it off, I suggest that Doña Francisca and her Pythagorean crapper of a husband be declared historical monuments, and that they be provided with their own water closet so that visitors won’t piss on them. As author of such a useful work, I ask for only one thing in return: that Irma be immediately banished from Buenos Aires, packed off to her native Catamarca,14 shipping prepaid.

Seated at the foot of the bed and laughing abundantly, Adam Buenosayres warmly applauded the philosopher’s thesis. But Samuel appeared insensible to his guest’s fervour. On the contrary, whether because he hadn’t yet forgiven him for the tirade about Castor and Pollux or because he was having trouble digesting that “criollo hash” so irreverently served up by his visitor, Samuel kept dolefully quiet.

— Poor Irma, exclaimed Adam. To cast out such a defenceless creature!

The philosopher’s jaw tightened, his mouth pursed in a bitter sneer:

— Defenceless? With her damned tangos and her buckets she’s capable of waking up every last reader of Teutonic philosophy, asleep since the days of old Mannie Kant.

As if moved by an ancient rancour, he added:

— That creature must have the devil in her. One of these days I’m going to wring her neck.

— Poor Irma! insisted Adam. What does she know about philosophers? To her, Kant is probably a Jewish pharmacist on Triunvirato Street.

Samuel Tesler was looking at him now with waggish curiosity.

— She’s a flower of nature, Adam concluded. Let us breathe her sylvan fragrance.

A tremendous guffaw shook the philosopher’s rugged bust; the straight line of malice joined the sinuous, sea-voyage line, etching a strange glyph. (“Look out!” Adam cried out in his soul.)

— It seems to me, said Samuel, that you’ve gone a little further than breathing her, O Poetaster!15

Adam made no reply. (It was true, he’d said her eyes were like two mornings together.) But the philosopher, sensing an uncomfortable memory in his guest’s silence, didn’t let up:

— What I just don’t get, is how you can be fooling around with Irma while at the same time claiming to be in love with Solveig Amundsen.

(“Heads up, here it is!”)

He looked at Adam askance:

— So you give Irma your body and Solveig your soul? It’s a case of proportional distribution quite typical among the scoundrels who tote a lute around in this vale of Irmas.

The “name under reserve” had been pronounced, and Adam Buenosayres understood the battle was imminent. How painful that the name had passed the impure lips of the dragon! The name he himself hadn’t dared utter, not even in his Blue-Bound Notebook. But what to do? Tackle the dragon and tear from his mouth the sweet name he’d profaned? He thought about it a moment, then decided that if he attacked, he wouldn’t find out what the dragon could and must reveal to him.

— That’s ridiculous! he protested at last. A mere girl! Anyway, I haven’t been to the Amundsens’ for many a Thursday now.16

On the offensive, he added:

— Speaking of the Amundsens, I hear you’ve been skulking around that house full of girls at all hours. They say you haven’t missed a single tea in Saavedra, and that for some time now — I can scarcely credit it! — you’ve had a manic attack of personal hygiene.

Samuel Tesler smiled, disdainful and bored, but something vital stirred beneath his armour.

— Yes, he confessed, I like the landscape in Saavedra, that broken terrain where the city comes to an end.

He obviously wanted to change the subject, for he added right away:

— And speaking of Saavedra, I haven’t seen any of those fat-assed angels that your friend Schultz says hatch new neighbourhoods.

With those words, the philosopher swung his legs over the edge of the bed, anxiously looked for his slippers, and stood up, thus offering a new perspective of his mutable nature: his gigantic torso was now perched atop two dwarfish legs, short, thick, and bandy. At the same time, his Chinese kimono was displayed in all its splendour.

At long last, the moment has arrived to describe this remarkable robe, with all its inscriptions, allegories, and figures. For if Hesiod sang of laborious Hercules’s escutcheon, and Homer of the deserting shield of Achilles, how could I not describe the never-yet-seen, never-evenimagined kimono of Samuel Tesler? If someone were to object that an escutcheon is not a dressing gown, I would reply that a dressing gown can nevertheless be an escutcheon, as in the case of Samuel Tesler — that unsung paladin who for lack of a steed rode a double bed and whose sole act of chivalry was a dream-state he sustained in dogged self-defence against the world and its rigours.

The kimono, egg-yellow in colour, presented two faces: front and back, ventral and dorsal, diurnal and nocturnal. On the right flank of the ventral face were depicted rampant neocriollo dragons furiously biting their own tails. On the left flank, a field of ripe wheat seemed to billow beneath the dragons’ panting breath. In the wheatfield, a farmer with a kind face sat cross-legged, smoking. His Chinese-style mustachios hung in two long shoots down to his feet. The right-hand strand was tied around the big toe of his left foot, and the left-hand strand around the big toe of his right foot. On the farmer’s forehead was emblazoned the following heraldic device: “Man’s first care is to save his own skin.”17 The pectoral area of the kimono showed a citizen blissfully placing his vote in a gleaming rosewood ballot-box, while a grey angel whispered in his ear. The voter’s breast boasted the legend: Superhomo sum! In the abdominal region of the kimono, the figure of Dame Republic was embroidered with threads of a thousand colours; she wore a Phrygian bonnet and blue peplum; her breasts were bounteous, her cheeks rosy, and she poured gifts from a great cornucopia over a delirious multitude. At the level of her mons pubis could be seen the four Cardinal Virtues lying dead in as many funeral coaches on their way to the Chacarita Cemetery; the funeral procession was formed by the seven Capital Sins, who wore monocles and smoked triumphal cigars, banker-style. Also on the front of the kimono appeared the preamble of the Argentine Constitution written in uncial characters from the sixth century; the twelve signs of the Zodiac, represented by the country’s flora and fauna; a table for multiplication and another for subtraction, both identical; the ninety-eight amorous positions from the Kama Sutra, very vividly rendered, along with an advertisement for Doctor X, a specialist in venereal disease; a horse-racing schedule, a cookbook, and an eloquent prospectus for “MotoGut,” a popular laxative.

When Samuel Tesler turned around, the dorsal or nocturnal face of the kimono was exhibited. It was graced with the design of a tree, its branches extending outward in the four cardinal directions, then turning back so that their extremities joined in the leafy treetop. Two serpents wound themselves around the trunk of the tree. One serpent spiralled downward, its head reaching the roots, while the other ascended and hid its head in the treetop, where twelve resplendent suns hung like fruit. Four rivers gushed forth from from a spring at the foot of the tree, flowing north, south, east, and west; Narcissus leaned over this spring, contemplating the water and slowly turning into a flower.

But as I was saying, Samuel Tesler had just stood up. He put out his cigarette in an ashtray, crushing it with his thumbnail, then went to the blackboard and carefully wiped it clean of the notes for the twenty-seventh. Finally he went to the window. His eyes looked out over the city as it laughed naked under the sun’s harpoon. As though in the grip of an idée fixe, he raised an eloquent arm, taking in zinc rooftops, brick terraces, distant bell-towers, and the tall stacks smoking in the wind:

— There you have Buenos Aires! The bitch that devours her pups in order to grow.

Shouts and laughter from outside cut his speech short.

— Who’s shouting out there? asked the philosopher with knitted brow.

Adam pointed to a building under construction, opposite them:

— The Italian construction workers.

— And what’s the Italic beast laughing about?

— Your kimono.

And so they were. Up there on their scaffolding in the sky, the workmen had left off munching their lunch of raw onions and were excitedly gesticulating in celebration of the kimono and its bizarre designs. Samuel Tesler, enigmatic, stared at them and made the following Masonic sign: placing his left forearm inside the elbow joint of his right arm and jolting it upright, he then emphatically shook the vertical appendage two or three times and anxiously waited for a reaction. The Italians immediately responded in kind, and the philosopher, satisfied, burst out laughing: they had understood one another. Then, addressing his guest, the construction workers, the city and the world, Samuel Tesler spoke thus:

— There lies Buenos Aires, the city whose symbol is the chicken, not so much for its ineffable grease as for the elevation of its spiritual flight, comparable only to that of the ample bird. I wonder now, and I put the question to you, my happy fellow citizens: What can a philosopher do in the city of the early-rising hen?

Samuel Tesler paused a moment, and the construction workers applauded, though their adulation came ominously supplemented by a chorus of raspberries. Samuel Tesler nevertheless gestured his profound gratitude. Then, raising his hand to his face as if to adjust an actor’s mask, he continued in a tone of darkest melancholy:

— It is twelve noon, and at this solemn hour two million greedy stomachs are receiving the chewed foodstuffs sent them by their fortunate owners. Food which, as you know, will be transformed into blood and faecal material. The latter will in turn pass through an ingenious plumbing system and go on to enrich the waters of the “eponymous river,” as Ricardo Rojas^18 would say; while the blood, conveniently oxygenated in the lungs, will run through the generous arteries of my fellow citizens. And two million brains will think that life is just amazingly hunky-dory. And so, what will the philosopher do in the city of the hen?

Samuel Tesler paused again, and the workers filled the silence with another ovation. But the philosopher no longer deigned to notice them. He cupped his right ear with his hand and, breath held, mimed that he was listening long and hard.

— The clock has struck twelve! he exclaimed at last. Ah, what strange music comes to my ears this noonday! It’s the maxillary music of four million jaws joining and separating in accord with the harmonious laws of mastication. An hour from now, four million arms will return to their labour. They’ll raise the facade of the city higher and ever higher, and sink the roots of the city ever deeper. They’ll strengthen the city’s kidneys, adorn her face, place shoes on her feet. They’ll stuff her pockets using the clawed hand of commerce and the calloused hand of industry. They’ll build outward — out from the skin, out from the eyes, outwardly paying lip service — all that can be touched, tasted, heard, and smelled. Then night will fall, and two million exhausted bodies will fall to earth. Two million horizontal bodies, beneath the sleepless gaze of God, will sleep noisily, rending the conjugal sheets with their farts. And who will watch over the city of the hen? A handful of select minds who, wakeful alongside their sleeping brothers, are meditating on the City of the Owl, the city within that cannot be seen or smelled or touched.19

Samuel Tesler fell silent, his facial muscles suddenly relaxing. Through his cracked mask, however, could be glimpsed a shadow of real pity.

— How you exaggerate! said Adam, chortling.

— It’s the pure, unalloyed truth, Samuel assured him. I don’t know about your encounters with the city of the hen, but mine are absolutely hilarious.

The philosopher began to mimic the voice, the look, the gestures, and even the clothes of various individuals as he named them:

— For example, here I am, studying Hegel, and my father comes in: ABRAHAM TESLER: (Moses-like beard, furtive eyes, nose like the leap of a lion, nickel spectacles. He wears his ancient heavy frock-coat from Odessa and matching coachman’s top-hat.) My son, you vaste your time and my money on philosophies! Vy philosophies and not commerce, my dear Samoyel? You put up little stand for selling hats in Triunvirato Street. Three months later you rent a nice place with windows for display. Two years later you buy own house; five years later…

SAMUEL TESLER: (Forehead bulging with genius, dignity in his eyes, greatness in his bearing. Interrupts his father with an Olympian gesture.) That’s enough, old man! My mind is made up. (Exit Abraham Tesler, rending the lapel of his frock-coat with one sweep of his hand.)

— Other times, continued Samuel, I’m eating supper at home, and my mother…

REBECCA TESLER: (Meek, lachrymose eyes, a blond wig that’s seen better days, work-roughened hands. She bends over the sewing machine under a small electric lamp.) Samoyel, your mother vork night and day so that you should study in Faculty of Medicine. These eyes hurt me because I look so much at sewing vork. But I see great doctor in my Samoyel and your mother’s eyes don’t hurt no more. Study, Samoyel! Doctor of Medicine, great career! Later you marry rich girl, big dowry for clinic and X-rays. Then big automobile, many clients in waiting-room…

SAMUEL TESLER: (Head sinking into his soup bowl.) No, Mother! Never!20

A fit of laughter shook the philosopher right down to his feet:

— Do you get the picture? It’s two different worlds, putting the boots to each other!

His laughter, following upon the sorrow of the characters just parodied by Samuel, was so dehumanized and outrageous that the visitor would have been aghast had he not intuited all the mortification implicit in Samuel’s raillery. So Adam Buenosayres said nothing, though his silence resonated with sadness. (“Remember! Remember your first verses, hidden in the desk drawer, like a delicious sin. And your father, the blacksmith, came upon them: he leafed through them in silence, put them back in your schoolboy’s folder, and said nothing as you trembled before him. And one day, Don Aquiles read your composition and pronounced: ‘Adam Buenosayres will be a poet,’ and all eyes turned to look at you, spellbound, the way they looked at pictures in the Natural History textbook. And as an adolescent you kept your secret, feeling shame before the men who weep or laugh under the sun, and timidity before the daughters of men who beneath the sun laugh or weep.”)

But Samuel, fearing that an importunate meditation might rob him of the ideal spectator he had in his visitor, resumed his discourse:

— As you can see, my situation is awkward in the city of the hen. That’s one problem. But there’s another problem: it’s a city full of temptations.

— Hey, hey! cried Adam, his interest piqued.

— Sometimes, declared Samuel, I’m sorely tempted to give up on the bleary-eyed donkey of philosophy and boot its ass over to Pipo the Wop’s corral.

— No!

Samuel Tesler adopted an air of mysterious reserve.

— For some time now I’ve been visited by an angel of reinforced concrete.21

— Really?

The philosopher planted himself in front of his visitor. He balanced himself on one leg while raising the other behind him, piously joined his hands, and constructed a mechanical smile, his eyes mimicking ecstasy. Having struck the posture of the angel, he spoke thus:

THE CEMENT ANGEL: (Voice at once silly and unctuous.) Samuel, worthy man! You are the last scion of a once pastoral race that sang the rosy-cheeked Eclogue. Why do you insist on living in the sinful city? (Admonitory.) Do you not fear the scourges of tuberculosis and offensive newspapers? (Didactic.) Remember that Argentina has some three million square kilometres, ready to receive the seed of bread and the sweat of human labour. (Imperious.) Get thee to the prairie, O illustrious little loafer! Make the plough march before thee; let the oxen of aromatic manure march before the plough; let the earth, before the oxen, open her fertile vagina! (Between suggestive and chaste.) Let there be a woman by your side, let her conceive fourteen look-alike children who will gulp down bitter mate and intone the National Anthem without mispronouncing a single word. (Lyrical.) Out there on the pampa of sturdy loins and beneath a sun not yet grown old and grey, the smell of your feet will be your song! (Dubious.) But even if you hold to atavistic propensities and disdain Ceres in favour of money-spinning Mercury, run to the plain anyway! Has it not been compared to a billiard table? Well then, on it thou shalt lay down the three balls.22

Breaking the angel pose, Samuel let out a single guffaw so irresistible that his visitor gave in to the temptation to join him in exercising that privilege of human dignity.

— Not a word of lie! insisted Samuel Tesler. The angel and I punch each other out every night.

— Looks to me like your angel is a demon with a dangerously matrimonial bent, observed Adam Buenosayres, still laughing. Now I understand your little excursions to Saavedra! Which one of the girls is the angel’s candidate? (“Watch out!”)

— Don’t worry, it isn’t Solveig Amundsen! replied the suddenly melancholy philosopher.

He fell into an ecstatic silence, as though the cool shade of a woman had abruptly fallen over his kimono’d figure.

(Samuel Tesler, philosopher, lectured his disciples in the Agora many times on the inanity of woman, who, being a mere fragment of the Adamic rib cage, could barely hide her naked metaphysical lack. Precisely this destitute nudity — he affirmed with abundant quotations both modern and classical — explained why women were eternally obsessed with getting dressed up at any cost and did not hesitate to strip carnivorous animals of their sleek furs, birds of their sublime plumage, reptiles of their scales, trees of their fibres and bark, worms of their glistening spit, and the earth of its precious metals and gems. Samuel Tesler, philosopher, did not censure this exploitation of the three kingdoms, meant to repair an absolutely irreparable nakedness, even though a certain cosmic pity, which never brought a tear to his eye, occasionally moved him to lament the sad lot of the lowlier creatures. He would point out in passing that Jehovah had tried in vain to cover a nudity which, though decked out with the entire visible Creation, remained for all that even more naked than before. But what the philosopher would not allow — and on this point he was intransigent to the point of anger — was that woman, after adorning herself with all the graces of the natural world, should do the same with the graces of the intellect, thanks to the despicable servility of poets in love or poetic lovers, whose truly laughable erotic fantasy was capable of embellishing their false idols with the attributes of goddesses, naiads, sylphs, and nereids. To combat this temptation to subordinate the subtle order to the gross order of existence, he taught his disciples an infallible trick he’d resorted to himself, consisting in the reverse operation. For example, imagining the divine Cleopatra picking her nose and making little snotballs, or Helen of Troy sitting on the john. Such prudence won for Samuel Tesler the recognition of his contemporaries, who had the following epitaph engraved on his tomb: “Traveller who goeth to Cytherea: here lies a man who never confused the Terrestrial Venus with the Celestial Venus.”)

A prickly silence lay between the two interlocutors. Adam said nothing, but was thinking that Samuel was about to confide in him and that his confidence would oblige Adam to respond in kind, an eventuality Adam was trying to forestall for the sake of the “name under reserve” and the secret contained in the Blue-Bound Notebook. Samuel’s muteness was slightly alarming: true, the muscles of his face had relaxed, as though fatigued from maintaining the actor’s mask, but now they were rearranging themselves to suggest yet another expression, this one grave and morose.

— Don’t worry, it isn’t Solveig Amundsen! he repeated at last. I’m going to tell all; I want to give you a lesson in frankness.

— Me? asked Adam apprehensively.

— Yes, you! said Samuel with energy. Do you think nobody notices you posing like Hamlet with a head cold every time the brat looks at you? Haven’t I seen you break out in an Othellian sweat whenever anyone mentions the brat’s name?

— You’re crazy! Adam Buenosayres managed a laugh. (“Look out, look out!”)

— And today, Thursday, why have you ruined a philosopher’s sleep? added Samuel. To fish for information about Saavedra and find out what I’ve seen or heard in that grotto of delights!

Sharp as awls were the eyes that impaled the visitor, and Adam’s eyes wobbled under the weight of so much truth. The philosopher, sensitive to the other’s embarrassment, desisted from severity and switched to mercy:

— No, brother! It’s time porteños overcame their stupid reserve. The thirty-two foreign philosophers who dishonoured us with their visits, who took Buenos Aires’s pulse and inserted a thermometer into her anal orifice, finally came up with the diagnosis that our city is sad.23 Reasons? They didn’t give any. They were too busy stuffing themselves with our famous chilled beef. The gringos didn’t realize that Buenos Aires is an archipelago of men, all islands unto themselves.

Samuel laughed malevolently:

— What I can’t understand is how our great Macedonio, living in Buenos Aires, could come to this astounding metaphysical conclusion: “The world is an I-less soul-idarity.”24 God forgive him his neologisms. Under the same circumstances, I draw a very different conclusion.

— What conclusion? the visitor wanted to know.

— This one — round, musical, and meaningful: “The world’s a fartful I-ness.”

He stopped a moment, apparently to meditate on the profundity of his maxim, then scrutinized his visitor as if to gauge how amazed he was by so much brilliance. And Adam Buenosayres’s wonderment must not have been scant, for Samuel Tesler returned to his theme:

— Now then, he announced, between generous and bitter. I, a European, am going to take the initiative. I’ll speak to you with brutal frankness.25

— It must be a hair-raising story, Adam laughed. How did your romance start?

— Ah! growled Samuel. That’s what I ask myself, metaphysical animal that I am.

He fell into a studied silence, behind which could be discerned a feverish preparation for his next histrionic move. Then, leaving the window, he picked up the chamber pot from his bedside table and stood there urinating into it, with a dignity Diogenes Laërtius would have attributed to his namesake, the one in the barrel. A harmonious lament issued from the urinal: a deep crescendo was followed by a sharp decrescendo, petering out in the final musical drops. The philosopher put the recipient back in its place, sat down on the unmade bed, and asked his visitor point-blank:

— How would you define love, if I asked you to?

— Oh no you don’t! protested Adam. Don’t come to me asking for definitions!

— I’m not asking you for the kind of nitwitted definition you’d get out of Reader’s Digest. I’m looking for something transcendental, a definition in three bound volumes.

— You’ve got some nerve if you’re expecting anything of the kind from me!

Samuel Tesler lowered his head to signal his dismay.

— O world, o world! he sighed. What has happened to sacred Philography?26

— What if you give me your definition? proposed the visitor in a conciliatory spirit.

Samuel Tesler raised a professorial index finger:

— I won’t begin with a definition, but rather a methodology. Summarizing Plato’s ideas — although only on the plane of the earthly Venus, the real lollapalooza — I’ll say that love has two phases: the bedazzlement of the subject (me) upon seeing the beautiful form (Haydée Amundsen), followed by the anxious urge of the subject (me) to take possession of the beautiful form (Haydée Amundsen) in order to procreate in her beauty. Am I right?

— Too right! grumbled Adam. That second phase smacks of metaphysical obscenity.

— Anyway, Samuel reminded him, it’s clear that I, being well versed in the subject, had the right to be initiated according to the classical norms. Right or wrong?

— Right.

— Well then, declared the disconcerted philosopher, the thing happened to me backward!

— What do you mean, backward? demanded the visitor, likewise in consternation.

— I mean there was no initial bedazzlement, in spite of the methodology. I’m telling you, at first Haydée was nothing more to me than a topographical feature of Saavedra; she left me completely indifferent. In a word, I didn’t notice any symptoms betraying the penetration of one of the Imp’s arrows into the third space of my rib cage.

— Then what?

— Then, in the course of my metaphysical inquiry into primordial matter, I started observing all her gestures, poses, and grimaces. As you can see, it was merely out of scientific interest.

— Poor innocent schmuck! exclaimed Adam on the verge of laughter.

The kimono’d philosopher glared at him.

— Are you going to let me talk? he said acrimoniously.

The visitor recovered the serious composure befitting so thorny a subject, and Samuel Tesler proceeded:

— Later I had the amazing realization that, whenever I saw her, Haydée always looked decidedly stupendous, as if she took on the fullness of her grace when she came before my eyes.

— It had to happen! Adam murmured fatalistically.

— Until one day I discovered a highly suggestive phenomenon. Every time the creature appeared to me in a happy mood, I felt terribly low. And vice versa: if I saw she was sad, I was idiotically and inexplicably thrilled.

— And you still didn’t realize? Adam asked.

Samuel Tesler smiled with pity.

— Clearly, I’m not too quick on the uptake. Once the magnitude of the phenomenon had sunk in, I took stock of my heart. I opened books, consulted authors, and got to the root of my problem. And finally in my head there was a noonday light: I was up to my balls in love!

— It was about time! laughed Adam. So then what?

— Well, the first phase of the methodology having been altered, it was only right that I proceed to the second phase: to wit, the possession of the beautiful form.

— Cynic!

— Everything was inviting me to that pleasant exercise in practical Philography: the cement angel, my condition of a bored Faust, the aromatic nights in Saavedra…

— And you haven’t yet declared yourself?

— Not yet, responded the philosopher. It seems impossible. There are days when I arrive at her house feeling like a real Trovatore, with a mouthful of phrases that would melt a heart of stone: the declaration is imminent, I can feel it coming, and my face is taking on shades of Tristan and Isolde. And then, nothing. Because that’s the day the creature’s in a good mood, nowhere near the idyllic trance I need her to be in. On the other hand, if I get to her place feeling totally vulgar, the poor woman suffers a fit of romanticism that could turn a guy’s stomach.

A dense cloud had spread across Samuel Tesler’s face as he divulged the details of his impossible entanglement. With downcast eyes, drawn mouth, and rampant nose, the philosopher looked as pathetic as a unicorn in love.

— So what do you plan to do? asked Adam, perplexed.

— I don’t know, answered the unicorn. Sometimes I try to say to hell with her, but it’s useless! By day her image possesses me, wreaks havoc in my thoughts, and drives me to the most shameful actions.

Here the unicorn lowered his voice, as though weighed down by a secret ignominy.

— Imagine this: I’ve gone so far as to write her a sonnet.

— I can’t believe it! cried Adam scandalized.

— I’m telling you: a sonnet. Me! Do you realize how ridiculous this is? I’m not going to read it to you, of course.

— I guess not. That really would be going too far!

— That’s not all, insisted Samuel. At night, I’m the one who possesses her image…

He suddenly fell silent, his jaws clenched, nostrils flaring, eyes foggy, mouth dry — a demonic mask^27 reflecting the glint of flames from ancient cities condemned to perish by fire. But it was all erased in an instant, and Samuel Tesler’s eyelids lowered like two dead leaves.

— Does anybody suspect what’s going on? Adam asked.

— Anybody? groaned Samuel. Just the whole neighbourhood! The kids in Saavedra use their slingshots on me, housewives point at me, dogs follow me around nipping at my heels. And as if all that weren’t enough, the cop on the corner has decided to shadow me. I sense him right behind me at night when I take a walk along their block or stop in front the Amundsen house.

— He probably takes you for a chicken thief, laughed Adam. It’s dangerous to wander the byways of Saavedra with an undeclared love in your gullet. If I were you, I’d show up at the house as an official suitor and get it over with.

— Yes, sometimes I decide I should do it. But my well-oiled imagination gets me looking at the future consequences of such a drastic step.

— Such as?

— First of all, the scandal among my tribe — lapels being rent, weepy Hebrew elegies being intoned. Then I, Samuel Tesler, deserter of my people and my gods, see myself inside a tuxedo rented from the Casa Martínez, climbing out of a limo in front of a church that isn’t mine; I’m surrounded by a mob of dolts saying nasty things about me, and by street urchins shrieking for pennies. The bride’s mother is blubbering like a beached whale, and her relatives stare at me with stony eyes, while clutching a little steel coffer with the guarantee of the girl’s maidenhood inside, duly signed by two public notaries. Depressing, don’t you think?

— Brutal! protested Adam. When you look at it that way, poetry doesn’t stand a chance.

But Samuel Tesler wasn’t flinching.

— No, that’s not what the city expects of us. Buenos Aires is dying of vulgarity because it lacks a romantic tradition. It needs enriching with legends! I am right or am I wrong?

— It all depends.

— Wait’ll you see! exclaimed the philosopher, warming up now. I’ve got dozens of projects in my head!

— For instance?

— Among others, I’m toying with the idea of promoting lovelorn suicide. Not the bourgeois, pedestrian type, of course; I’m talking about the original, sublime suicide. Take your case, for example. If you want to help me out, you could hang yourself from an ombú^28 in Saavedra, not before nailing to the tree trunk an epistle in rhyming verse (it’s gotta be a masterpiece), wherein you explain to the police the reasons for your fatal decision.

— No thanks, Adam excused himself modestly. For now, that’s not really my thing.

— Come on! What would it cost you?

— It’s just that I don’t like ombú trees. They say their shade is unwholesome.

— Slander! I’ve slept many a time in the shade of an ombú.

— Okay, an ombú then, Adam conceded. But when you get right down to it, your infatuation with Haydée Amundsen makes you just as good a candidate for the scaffold and the epistle.

— But I don’t know how to rhyme, alleged the philosopher, visibly saddened.

From this point forth, the Visited and the Visitor, having laid their arms aside, knew the taste of peace, the ease of a language without sharp edges, and the nobility of hands reaching out to one another. The dialogue deepened as Visited and Visitor penetrated further into the domain of good sense. Gently obliged to make a confession, the Visitor exposed the scant reality of his love. With a passing reference to a mysterious Blue-Bound Notebook, he confessed that his love had only the fragile essence of an ideal construct, although this was based on a flesh-and-blood woman. Upon hearing this, and after exacting from him certain bits of information with the utmost tact, the Visited asked the Visitor if he wasn’t making incursions into the realm of Celestial Aphrodite. And since the Visitor wasn’t sure about that, the Visited proceeded to convince him of his happy hypothesis by means of an eloquent display of examples he claimed to have drawn from ancient literatures, both Oriental and Occidental, wherein discourse on divine love was so frequently couched in the language of human love that it bordered on gibberish. Convinced by such solid documentation, the Visitor admitted he was fashioning a heavenly woman on the basis of an earthly woman. The Visited, attentive to the metaphysical work of the Visitor, asked if the terrestrial woman was still indispensable to his labours of sublimation. And since the Visitor answered yes, the Visited opened wide the floodgates of his discretion to announce that he bore a message from a beauty whom the angels of paradise called Solveig Amundsen, and that this same belle dame had displayed a truly otherworldly benevolence by bidding him communicate to the Visitor that his presence was greatly missed in the gardens of Saavedra. To convey the pleasure that inundated the Visitor upon hearing this gratifying news is a task beyond the style of mortal man. In spite of the caution induced by his immeasurable hopelessness, the Visitor asked the Visited if the message from the lady fair was an expression of her immense courtesy or perhaps of a deeper feeling that the Visited might have noticed. When the Visited answered that in his opinion the second hypothesis was more plausible, the Visitor felt he was blessed among the Blessed. Whereupon Visited and Visitor agreed to meet in Saavedra that very afternoon.

Samuel Tesler, philosopher, did not die of indigestion caused by smoked herring; this calumnious rumour was circulated throughout Villa Crespo by a rival sect. Equally apocryphal is the legend that has him die, like Pythagoras, in a bean field. This story was invented by Samuel’s heterodox disciple Kerbikian, an Armenian dishwasher at the Café Izmir on Gurruchaga Street, of whom it is said that, being gifted with a singularly obtuse intelligence, he never understood the first thing about the philosopher’s teaching. What really happened — and it might even be true — is that Samuel Tesler, ripe now for grand revelations thanks to his judicious practice of the heroic virtues, simply climbed down from this world as one gets off a Lacroze streetcar.29 Surrounded on his deathbed by the innermost circle of his disciples, he implored them not to weep for him, nor to cover their brows with ashes, nor, in their anguish, to rend their clothes (being mindful of the exorbitant price of English woollens^30); he exhorted them rather to forget the ephemeral gifts of natura naturata and to seek instead the invisible, yet intelligible, traces of natura naturans.31 Already in his death throes, Samuel Tesler first gave vent to a burst of laughter, then to a fit of sobbing. When asked about the reason for his hilarity, he replied that before him he beheld the true image of Death in a surpassingly beautiful virgin who was calling him now to a sleep induced by the opium poppies wreathing his brow; so it made him laugh, he said, to recall the skeleton armed with scythe and other lugubrious props attributed to Death by the brooding imagination of versifiers. As for his weeping, it was provoked by the sad thought that centuries would pass before Buenos Aires might be blessed again with a thinker of his calibre. At the moment his soul flew free, they say, a strong odour of benzoin, myrrh, and cinnamon wafted from his body and spread throughout the entire neighbourhood. So strong it was, that the good people of Villa Crespo wondered if Abdullah the Turk’s perfume shop wasn’t getting looted over on Warnes Street.

Historico-critical attempts to pigeonhole Samuel Tesler as a Cynic, an Epicurean, or a Stoic philosopher have been laughable, for the metaphysician of Villa Crespo was an Eclectic of the finest kind, and those who cannot understand this will wrack their brains until Judgment Day. Samuel Tesler had two reasons for detesting Diogenes, the one in the barrel. First, he claimed, Diogenes was the paradigm of vanity; he had only to step before a mirror to find “the man” he so eagerly sought. Secondly, Samuel found the business of the barrel grossly absurd, for he maintained that a philosopher could neither be the content of a barrel nor a barrel the vessel of a philosopher, since both philosopher and barrel were the natural vessels of the sacred liquor that Noah invented after the Flood, no doubt to recover from so great an excess of water. Samuel Tesler was no less judicious about the weeping Heraclitus and the laughing Democritus. In his view, Heraclitus was a sentimental calf and Democritus a gleeful magpie. The two of them were equally dehumanized, since neither had discovered that the true law of the human condition is the useful and prudent alternation of laughter and weeping. To laugh dramatically at one’s fellows and weep for them comically, these are two equal aspects of compassion. This aphorism was taught by Samuel Tesler, philosopher. Similar sentences testify to his eclecticism in diverse matters. They used to ask him about the surest method for achieving sofrosyne;32 cognizant of the duality of human nature, he replied: Go number two in body and in soul every day. Once he chanced to be among a circle of rubberneckers watching a Calabrian fruit-seller methodically thrashing his concubine, and the philosopher inquired into whether it was meet to punish a woman. His conclusion: In general, no; in particular, yes. To those too fond of frolicking with Venus, he said: Thou shalt sleep with women, but dream of goddesses. His optimism about the human species is manifest in a maxim worthy of Terence: I love children because they are not yet men, and the elderly because they no longer are so. Unfortunately, save for a few fragments collected by Asinus Paleologos^33 in his Latin edition, nothing remains of his treatises. Rumour has it that his landlady (a certain Doña Francisca, a hairy-chested woman sometimes compared to Socrates’s wife, Xanthippe) sold off his books to collect a paltry debt and even hawked his manuscripts as used paper at three cents a kilo — a literary catastrophe, according to some admirers, equalled only by the tragic fire that destroyed the library of Alexandria.

BOOK TWO

Chapter 1

Her broomstick tapping rhythmically, Old Lady Chacharola made her way down Hidalgo Street toward Monte Egmont, slowly, all right, but erect and straight as a spindle. Her mouth cruelly clenched, eyes stony, brow stormy, the whole of her exuded bile and vinegar as she shuffled along the sunlit sidewalk in her faded, floppy shoes. In her Sicilian heart, as in a chemist’s retort, hatred simmered on the slow fire of memory, the memory of a daughter whose name she never uttered if not to curse it countless times — as countless as the drops of milk she’d fed her, she thought, then struck her wizened breasts, self-castigation for the sin of suckling a serpent. It wasn’t so much her daughter’s life in the milongas, her insults and wickedness and gossiping. No, what she could never forgive — here she kissed her thumb-crossed-over-index-finger, shrivelled crucifix — was that she’d run off with that young punk of a bandoneón player. On top of it all, they’d made off with four linen sheets she’d brought over from Italy, her chunky wedding ring, plus the fifteen pesos she’d kept in a wool stocking in the trunk. At the memory of the sheets, Old Lady Chacharola stopped and ground her teeth, a sour belch rising to her mouth. Then she moved on, a walking vessel of rage, acrimony mounted on two aimless legs.

The sparring match with Samuel Tesler behind him, Adam Buenosayres bounded down the stairs three at a time to Monte Egmont Street. Hard to describe the exultation propelling him: a hundred different thoughts buzzed in his mind, now interlocking in fatal oppositions, now harmonizing in jubilant syntheses, according to the various interpretions he placed upon the message that Solveig Amundsen had so imprudently confided to the philosopher, who in turn had so slyly kept it under his hat. Despite doubts and his fear of disappointment, a vision of Solveig persisted, undeniably real. In it she was calling him from afar, unfurling a new horizon of hope, exciting the mad loom of his imagination: “Within the hour, he’d be at her house, his hand on the bronze knocker, and Solveig Amundsen would rush to the door (not so much in response to the strike of metal, as borne on the wings of a vague presentiment), wearing the clear robes of adolescence Adam had seen at the first revelation in Saavedra. They would stand face to face like two universes that had drifted apart and come back together. Without a doubt, they would gaze at each other in a long silence more eloquent than any language — he, in pain (without letting it show too much!), apparently in utter sadness and reserve; she, trembling like a leaf, whether in ripe contrition or perhaps in newly awakened fervour, he would not be able to say. In his wan face, his broken body, his forsaken soul, she would read all the pain of a love denied access to any bridge, and the floodgates of her tears would open irresistibly, making her shudder from head to toe. Then, in a voice breaking with tenderness, he would say…” But just what the hell would he say? Adam Buenosayres tried to quash his absurd daydream, even though his pain and rancour were genuine. “Maybe he should emulate Grampa Sebastián’s heroic simplicity, throw himself at Solveig’s feet, offer her the Blue-Bound Notebook with a bloodied hand that had long been stanching a mortal wound…”

“Ridiculous!” he reproached himself, then carefully erased all traces of the scene from his imagination.

The three funeral coachmen set their empty glasses in a line along the bar at La Nuova Stella de Posilipo before the dead eyes of Don Nicola, who mechanically wiped the tin countertop with his grubby apron.

— Yep, growled the Skinny Coachman as he licked his wet mustache. Folks’s gettin’ hard as flint, not even death softens ’em up. Heartless bastards! It’s gettin’ so this job ain’t worth a fart in a windstorm.

The Ancient Coachman took off his beat-up slouch-hat and studied it morosely.

— Used to be, he averred, death meant somethin’, and people in funeral parties shelled out real sweet. I seen days where I made eight bucks in tips in just two burials! But people nowadays…

— Buncha heartless bastards! thundered the Skinny Coachman. They can’t hardly wait for the last clod of earth to fall in the grave, the gravediggers haven’t got the cross up yet, and they’re off like a shot. Can’t get away fast enough, back to business like pigs to the trough! Cripes!

The Fat Coachman rubbed the buttons of his frock coat with a shiny sleeve and laughed, revealing two spotty rows of greenish teeth.

— Listen to this! he said. I’m comin’ back today from the Chacarita Cemetery with this real uppity big-shot. I take him all the way to his house, and lemme tell ya, it’s away to hell and gone. So we finally get there and I hop down real quick, take my hat off nice as you please, and open the door for him. Well, if the bastard doesn’t climb down and toss me a lousy dime!

— Can’t get far with the women on that, muttered the Ancient Coachman without a speck of cheer.

An opaque drunken silence set in.

— Sad business, the Skinny Coachman growled again.

— Real sad, agreed the Ancient Coachman. Another round?

— Another round, Boss. This one’s on me! the Skinny Coachman called to Don Nicola, whose eyes lit up.

On Monte Egmont Street, Adam Buenosayres took a couple of hesitant steps like a prisoner in flight. Still not moving, his prisoner’s eyes avidly searched the open space, then closed abruptly, dazzled by the autumn sun that delineated forms, made colours laugh, and swept everything up into its tremendous joy. Turning his face up to the sphere of light, Adam felt it all melt away: old cares, new hopes, metaphysical terrors, failures to understand, memory’s voices — in a word, all the intimate details constituting the inalienable, painful, everlasting face of his soul were washed away by the happy warmth beaming down upon him. And this, too, was to live in Another, through the life of the other and the death of oneself! The more he abandoned himself to the glory of the sun, the more his chest swelled with incoming breath, whose precise correlate was the subtler inspiration of his soul. He reached the peak of the respiratory curve, felt his eyes grow moist, and knew his ecstasy was over. But from the summit he brought back a trophy: an irresistible urge to sing, to give praise. And this was the entire mechanism of poetry!

— Right eye of Heaven, Hallelujah!

As soon as he began to walk again, two new worries assaulted his mind. The first had to do with his renewed condition as a traveller, for he had broken with immobility and was diving back into the crazy uncertainty of human motion. Wrenching himself away from his contemplation of that unifying centre called Solveig Amundsen, he was re-entering the hazardous river of multiplicity. True, Monte Egmont Street looked perfectly peaceful, at least in the sector he was traversing, as bedazzled as a man brought back to life. However, he knew that upon crossing Warnes Street he’d enter a universe of agitated creatures. In that other sector of Monte Egmont, peoples from all over the world mixed languages in barbarous dissonance, fought with gestures and fists, and set up beneath the sun the elemental stage of their tragedies and farces, turning all into sound, nostalgias, joys, loves, and hates.

— One hell of a street, or a street from hell! The melting pot of races. Argentine epic?1

He balked just thinking about those who, tempting or hostile, would hook him with their gaze or voice, or even their silence. Nevertheless, now outside the abstract world of his room, he began to feel, as usual, a strong appetite for the concrete and solid, the expectancy of an angel ripe for the fall.

— To look again at forms in their thick carnality, their luscious colours, their weighty volume! To get back down in the dust and roll in it, like the sparrows and horses in Maipú. Feel like Antaeus,2 feet on the ground, Mother Earth. What about the heaven-bound horse? He’s not on this shift.

The second worry had to do with his erotic nature. He had resolved to take his Blue-Bound Notebook to Solveig, and this decision was now making him anxious. When she read it, would Solveig Amundsen recognize herself in the ideal painting he had wrought with such subtle materials? Bah! This wasn’t his main concern. The important thing was that Solveig, through these pages, would get to know an Adam Buenosayres who until now had remained prodigiously unknown to her. “When she learned of his strange love, maybe she would go to him on amorous feet, as matter flows in search of its form. They would be in the garden, in the conservatory, among the roses, autumnal, dying. But it wouldn’t matter because…”

— Yikes! That’s enough.

Sliding down the same old slope of his imagination, Adam hit a final doubt concerning himself both as lover and artist. After so much distance, after having transubstantiated the girl with his poetry, would he recognize the ideal Solveig of his notebook when he saw the flesh-and-blood Solveig? It frightened him to think about the two creatures in confrontation.

— Chacharola, Chacharola!

A chorus of harsh voices brutally cut short his speculations. Adam took his bearings: Hidalgo Street.

— Chacharola! cried a boy’s voice, hard and rough as gravel. What about the four linen sheets you brought over from Italy?

The chorus echoed in spiteful chorus:

— What about the four linen sheets from Italy?

Instantly the old woman croaked hoarsely:

— Brigante!

— Chacharola! What about the gold ring? crowed another childish voice that had never known innocence.

— What about the gold ring? repeated the chorus.

Adam quickened his pace.

— Bandito! cawed the voice of the old woman from over on Hidalgo Street.

— Chacharola! Remember the fifteen pesos in the old sock?

At the corner of Monte Egmont and Hidalgo, a troop of boys charged past Adam Buenosayres, spinning him like a top, then scattered off down the street amid whoops and shrieks. At the same moment Chacharola’s broomstick came sailing into view, describing an arc in the air. Arms a-tremble, she hurled a final insult at her cowardly enemies:

— La putta de la tua mamma!

The broomstick fell at Adam’s feet. Picking it up, he walked over to Old Lady Chacharola, and returned it to her still-clenched hand. Slowly, the old woman rearranged her wrinkles into a spectral smile. She pointed after the fleeing boys with an index finger whose nail was a sorry sight.

— A bunch of sons of whores! she pronounced in impeccable Castilian Spanish.

Then, pointing with the same digit to the nearby steeple of San Bernardo, she moaned piously:

— Today, Saint Vitalis. Bello!

— Yes, replied Adam. The mass of Saint Vitalis.3

The old crone donned a mask of ire and pierced him with two fanatical eyes.

— A martyr! she cried polemically.

— A great saint! Adam placated her immediately.

— Povero Saint Vitalis! she sobbed without a tear in her eye. Bello! Bello!

She went off down Monte Egmont toward Olaya Street, her head swinging back and forth in brooding denial.

Polyphemus lowered his cyclopean right hand (beneath its skin coursed a network of thick streams of blood). While his right hand lovingly stroked the strings of his sleeping guitar, his left hand dug into his coat pocket and jingled some hidden coins. The sound gladdened his ears, those of his body and those of his soul. His raised his majestic head and, describing with it an arc from east to west, he sought out the eye of the sun burning above him, until he felt on his skin the star’s warm gaze. Polyphemus was lucky and strong: he could look at the sun with wide-open eyes. Being blind, of course, he couldn’t see the forms and colours of the world, but in compensation his ears were open to all the music of the earth. Just now he was listening to the dulcet tones (hmm!) of the jazz band that rehearsed every day in the backroom of La Hormiga de Oro. Polyphemus didn’t mind their music, but just then he wished they’d stop so he could hear the pigeons cooing in the steeple of San Bernardo, the neighbourhood seamstresses chattering, the sparrows’ cheerful racket — the wide world of sound his ears knew how to tune in. Okay, that was just art for art’s sake. His real job was to lie in wait for passers-by, closely monitor each one’s stride, and guess whether it belonged to a man or woman, someone young or old, if the gait revealed a heart charitable or stingy, if the person was in a good or bad mood or somewhere in between. Then all he had to do was let his wonderful voice unfurl (in a register suited to each particular case) and pick up the coin that inevitably fell onto his tin plate. Polyphemus’s pride consisted in three distinct perfections: his infallible skill in ambushing souls, the heart-wrenching versatility of his voice, and above all the visual figure he struck. He could see himself clearly in his imagination — the Spanish guitar he didn’t know how to play, but which gave tone and substance to his schtick, his old moss-coloured coat, flowing beard, and eyes of a blind prophet. Finally, there was his arm, which he knew how to raise menacingly and point toward the statue of Christ with the Broken Hand. What a wonderful actor Polyphemus was! Tra-la-la! Business was great, and nobody in Villa Crespo suspected that inside the mossy old coat lurked the owner of three rental properties, with a bid pending on a fourth, all of them won through the steady practice of his art. Tra-la-la! Polyphemus felt laughter stirring in his gullet, but stifled it instantly, not only for the sake of appearances, but also because of a sudden twinge of conscience. What if he, Polyphemus, really was a miserable bandit, an out-and-out scam artist? He thought about it for a moment, his reddened eyelids fluttering. No, no way! Divine Providence, who provides even for the birds in the field, had blessed him with these gifts to help him in his misfortune. Polyphemus clung to this idea, its irrefutable logic: yes, that’s how it was. Calm now, he went back to enjoying the sun, the pure air, the jazz that wouldn’t let up at La Hormiga de Oro, savouring the sweet juice that oozed from his very ripe self-justifications. His euphoria was interrupted by the sound of footsteps approaching from his right.

“Male,” he deduced right away. “Not too old. Stingy? Got things on his mind.”

Then, with his solemn right hand aimed at the Christ with the Broken Hand, he declaimed:

— Aaalms for the blind! Aaalms for a man who sees not the light of day!

The man was right in front of him. Polyphemus waited, giving his throat a rest. The coin didn’t drop. The footsteps were moving on.

— Strange, grumbled Polyphemus. Is this a punishment?

Don José Victorio Lombardi, of the firm Lombardi Brothers’ Sawmill, hadn’t seen the cyclops with the guitar (an oversight in itself offensive to an artist), and if he heard Polyphemus’s voice, it came to him as mere background noise. Truth be told, Don José Victorio Lombardi wasn’t lacking in aesthetic appreciation (witness his stentorian “Bravos!” at the Colón Theatre,4 in praise of the tenor who could sustain a trill for a full twenty-eight seconds, clocked on a stopwatch). No, Polyphemus didn’t know it, but the attention of that paragon among sawyers was totally absorbed by a serious theological problem perilously intensifying with every step that took him closer to the San Bernardo Church. Had he been gifted with sight, Polyphemus would have been able to admire the hemisphere of Lombardi’s full belly (full of something better than tear-soaked bread!), a gold chain tracing an equator across its complacent girth. But what’s more, he would have observed Lombardi’s steps getting shorter, and his perplexed eyes darting to the Christ with the Broken Hand. So, then! When he passed before the church, would Lombardi take off his hat or would he not? That is the question!5 Polyphemus, were he somehow apprised of Lombardi’s dilemma, would have been quite wrong to attribute Lombardi’s vacillation to unbelief, rebelliousness, or any other theological emotion. True, Lombardi had drifted far from the marvellous faith that had nourished him in childhood, but he could never quite get over the fear that someone Up There might be watching and judging. But this craven need to doff his hat was countered by the fear of ridicule: the hostile glances and mocking laughter that a gesture so unusual in this neighbourhood might provoke from the men and women on the street. Would he take his hat off or not? Lombardi slowed down, Lombardi stopped. But just then, the One-Armed Worker and the Blind Stoker surged up from memory to stare at him accusingly. For sure, that severed arm and those dead eyes were going to be weighed in some hidden balance. Lombardi came to a decision, Lombardi resumed walking. As he passed in front of the San Bernardo Church, he tipped his elegant wide-brimmed hat in a greeting to the Christ with the Broken Hand. But, oh dear, at that very instant he thought he heard a chorus of laughter coming from the seamstresses’ shop. Holding his hat between index finger and thumb, Lombardi pretended he was scratching the back of head with his middle and ring fingers, as if this had been his intention all along. Then, visibly relieved, he hurried off. Don José Victorio Lombardi, that paragon of sawyers, had managed to satisfy both God and the Devil.

Adam Buenosayres glanced at Old Lady Chacharola one last time before crossing Hidalgo Street, feeling a warm glow inside. His intervention in the witch’s battle was his first contact with humanity that day. Not surprisingly, the easy strings of his soul were already quivering with tenderness at the mere thought of several altruistic projects that would surely exert a magical influence on the street. What exemplary acts, what Franciscan gestures would he bring to bear against the thoughtless cruelty of Monte Egmont Street?

“Kiss the rheumy eyelids of old women. Wash the postman’s sore feet. Wipe away the horses’ sweat. Sweep the patios of widows. Cure the blindness of Polyphemus. Talk with the pigeons of San Bernardo. Anoint the beards of the Jews who sell sunflower seeds in front of the Café Izmir. Or assemble all the hoodlums on the street and read them my Blue-Bound Notebook, out loud, from beginning to end.”

Looking critically at this latest wave of spiritual schmaltz, Adam understood it was linked to his anticipation of transcendental events in Saavedra. Yes, in this hour of earthly happiness, he felt the need to share his pleasure and take into his heart the immense sheaf of the world’s creatures. “Unless Solveig Amundsen, by the sheer grace of her name…”

— Watch out for the funeral!

Adam was about to cross Warnes Street, but had to step back smartly. Hurrah! The cortège was advancing amid the flutter of sombre plumed helmets and the solemn clatter of iron-shod hooves. Six black horses, glistening all over with sweat, foaming at the muzzle, their proud necks arched forward as they pulled the funeral coach, were guided by white reins in the hands of two rigid charioteers gazing westward. Hurrah! Behind them came the carriage, loaded down with flowers, palm branches, crowns, and purple ribbons. Then the family members in landaus with shrouded lamps, and another twenty vehicles in single file, their lacquered surfaces shimmering. Hurrah, hurrah! Long live the dead man!

Standing at the corner of Monte Egmont and Warnes, Adam read two shiny gold letters embossed on the curtains of the carriage: R.F.

— Ramón Fernández, Rosa Fuentes, Raúl Fantucci, Rita Fieramosca, René Forain, Roberto Froebel, or Remigio Farman. Or whoever the devil it is! Should I take off my hat?

He looked around and saw the men on the street doffing theirs in deference.

— They’re all doing it. Why? An instinctive hatred of death, but a reverential hatred. Maybe they imagine the Grim Reaper is perched up there beside the coachmen, invisible, jealously spying on them, keeping tabs on their gestures of obeisance. “Let Death not notice our resentment! Let Death forget us a while longer!” That’s why they raise their hats. Anyway, it’s only a body minus its soul, a tool with no craftsman, a ship with no pilot. To hell with matter without form! I’m not taking off my hat.

But something was amiss in his proud reasoning, and Adam caught it right away.

— Still, an immortal soul lived in that already decomposing body. A soul exercised its terrible freedom in that body, performed a thousand gestures, worthy or abominable, prudent or crazy, ridiculous or sublime. One day R.F., whoever he was, will have to look for his deserted body in La Chacarita Cemetery, hear the angel’s trumpet, and feel the last leaf of time fall upon his shoulders. Quia tempus non erit amplius.6 Okay, I’ll take off my hat!

Adam saluted the now distant R.F. and waited for all the vehicles to file by. He looked up: the sky was bright, but in his mind’s eye he saw it crumple up and fall in shreds like an old backdrop for a theatrical show.

– “And the sky shall be rolled up like a scroll.” The tremendous words of the Apocalypse, read at midnight. A sacred terror that beats its drums in the distance, in crescendo, in crescendo, until it breaks the eardrums of the soul. A fish on a hook: me. A fish that’s taken the invisible hook and thrashes around at midnight. And that old call, amid the cruel laughter of demons lurking in dark corners: “Adam! Adam Buenosayres!”

Strident voices startled him suddenly.

— Truco! sang out the Ancient Coachman.

— Retruco! shouted the Fat Coachman.

— I’ll go four!

— I’m in!

In front of La Nuova Stella de Posilipo were parked two funeral coaches, rather the worse for wear. The sorry old nags that drew them had their muzzles plunged into canvas feedbags and crunched away on their corn. Inside the cantina, under the enigmatic gaze of Don Nicola, the three funeral coachmen threw down their cards and once again raised their glasses, amid the harrassment of blind-drunk flies.

“Feckless charioteers of Death!” grumbled Adam to himself. “Threadbare top hats, death-green livery, buttons made of a metal without glory. A bunch of Charons with patches on the ass of their pants! They grouse when they count their tips and gargle with cherry liqueur to get the carbolic taste of death out of their mouths. And what about the phantasmagorical Don Nicola? A specimen of dubious ontology: animal, vegetable, or mineral? His famous plonk, one-hundred-percent pure grape juice! Ah, finally, the last car has gone by.”

At La Hormiga de Oro, Ruth took her hands out of a large earthenware tub full of dirty water, where two plates and a serving dish were still waiting to be washed. The kitchen was an appalling chaos of utensils: here a ribald pot showed its blackened arse, there a dipper and a skimmer lay fiercely crossed like two swords. On the grill sat a skillet whose layered remains mutely chronicled the fries of yore. The stench of fish fried in rancid oil saturated everything. A greedy swarm of flies buzzed in the garbage can and around the greasy splotches on the oilcloth covering the table. A bearded leek, three bright chili peppers, and a few earthy potatoes, all in a rush basket, lent some dignity to the barbarous scene with the rigour of their classical forms and colours. But Ruth (it must be said in all fairness) was not resting at anchor in all that terrestrial vulgarity. Her mind navigated in a very different world, as she wiped her hands (hands meant for caressing the ethereal torsos of sylphs!) and lowered her brow under the weight of heaven knows what profound cogitations. Suddenly, tossing back her mane of bronze hair, Ruth stood up tall (O slender stalk of narcissus!), placed her right foot forward, stretched out her bare arm toward the cookware, and declaimed:

Melpomene, the tragic muse, approaches!7

She stopped with a frown of displeasure. Not like that! But how? It was supposed to be the moment of terror when the poet discovers the tragic muse, and she goes and says it in that vulgar, marketplace tone, with no expression, like she was asking the butcher for a thirty-cent soup bone! Resuming her pose, she cleared her throat, then moaned lugubriously:

Melpomene, the tragic muse, approaches!

No, no, no! A calf getting its throat cut! If she didn’t watch out, she was going to look ridiculous. Let’s try once more, not so aggressive this time. Stretching out her admirable arm, Ruth spoke:

Melpomene, the tragic muse, approaches!

That’s it! Just right! The same voice, the same élan as Singerman.8 Encore, encore! Dazzled by imaginary glory, Ruth saw herself on the proscenium, bathed in multicoloured lights that brought out the gold and silver highlights in her dress. The applause was thunderous, and she inclined a head freighted with laurels. She straightened up, clasped her hands in front of her, and walked slowly backward, bowing deeply before the row of pots and pans. Just then, the shadow of a bitter old crone darkened the kitchen door.

— How nice! she scolded. The kitchen’s a pigsty, and the lady’s doing a little song and dance!

Ruth’s arms dropped in a gesture of annoyance.

— But Mom! she objected. I’ve only got a couple of dumb plates left to go!

The shadow disappeared, muttering, and Ruth cast a despondent look around her. Misunderstood! All alone! Two little tears (two drops of morning dew!) sparkled in Ruth’s eyelashes. As she bravely plunged her poor hands into the dirty washwater, she looked around in dejection at the frying pan, the dipper, the hostile plates, the blackened pot, the whole jumble of vulgar kitchen utensils that had to be washed twice a day without fail. How sad! Why couldn’t people just eat carnation petals and Coty perfume, or pink pills and blue lozenges. Poor, lonely, misunderstood Ruth! Yes, a drudge. But they better not try to push her around! Just watch it! Because she too had a right to the good life, and one of these days she was gonna throw caution to the winds, and boy oh boy! Then they’d see what she was capable of! Pained, she looked down at her hands in the tub — coarse as sandpaper; the skin cream was useless; would honey-almond lotion work? Just then the jazz started wailing again in the backroom of La Hormiga de Oro. In spite of her woes, Ruth let slip a deep chuckle:

“Barbarians!” she exclaimed to herself. “They’re so out of tune!”

Adam Buenosayres had crossed the boulevard of death and was now entering the dangerous zone of the street. He cast his gaze along the first stretch: not a soul on the sidewalk! The bells of San Bernardo began to ring slowly, once, twice. Still early, lots of time. His eyes snuck through open windows and spied on the naked and rhythmic hearts of the houses: shadowy interiors, where tranquil women laughed; sunlit patios, vibrant with girls and games. Then his eyes went up to the sky as pure as a violet. The clang of bronze had released a scatter of pigeons, and now the belltower was gathering them back like fragments of a shattered peace being restored to wholeness. He looked along the sidewalk lined with paradise trees; they no longer reminded him of Irma’s arboraceous body, because their golden leaves were coming loose, gliding through the air, raining down silently like little bits of death.

“Dry leaf, golden leaf. The alchemy of trees: chrysopæia.9 R.F. trotting down Warnes Street is a dry leaf. Leaf of gold? Who knows! Tricky business, the chrysopæia of a man. Leaves fall downward; human beings fall westward, at least in Buenos Aires. That’s why R.F. is heading west: he’s setting like the sun. Should I make a note of the image? Nah, it’s dopey.”

The lugubrious ideas inspired by R.F. were doing their best to transmute into the stuff of art, but Adam growled his dissatisfaction.

“Hail, Autumn, father of cornball poetry! Show me a dry leaf, and I’ll automatically spit out a cliché for you. The sickness or privilege of seeing everything as a figure or a translation, ever since my childhood, back in Maipú. Trees, for me, were green flames full of sizzling birds. Time was an invisible stream, and its water plied the wheels inside the clocks in the house. ‘And love more joyous than a child’s funeral.’ A bit thick, I’ll admit. But even so, Solveig shouldn’t have laughed with the other girls, and she wouldn’t have if that imbecile Lucio… Whoops, it’s Fat Gaia!”

She stood at the corner of Muñecas Street by the big wrought-iron gate, a small child in her arms. Planted on two solid hams ending in feet sheathed in shoes the size of ships, her belly big and round, breasts torrential, body hair luxuriant: the whole of her was spherical but as stable as a cube. Beside her, an old man sat motionless on a straw chair, clutching a clay pipe, slowly drying out like a fig in the sunshine. When Adam came face to face with them, he looked away, then heard Gaia belch prodigiously. Without stopping, he looked into the woman’s eyes, but detected no vulgarity or offensive intent. Her eyes seemed not even to look; they were dilated, watery, absent.

“She’s absorbed in the mysteries of her internal laboratory — a brew of quicklime and sugars, fermentation of chaotic substances, distillation of juices. Gas erupts from her at both ends, it’s natural. Rivers of milk and honey flowing toward her terrible nipples. Gaia! Heavy with seed, weighed down with fruit, yet still working on new structures, weaving flesh and assembling skeletons!”

The child was sleeping, the old man disintegrating.

“Darkness is our before and our after. The child is near his ‘before’; maybe he’s dreaming of how things once were and he’ll cry over his loss as soon as he wakes up. The old man is close to his ‘after’; perhaps he already glimpses the dim colours of the frontier. I like old people, and this isn’t sentimental diarrhea, as that Hun Samuel Tesler would say. I like old people the way I like withered flowers, over-ripe fruit, autumn and twilight, things on their way out and on the eve of metamorphosis. But…”

Adam pulled up short, startled: “The blind man!”

The voice of alarm came from within.

“Have an eye for the blind man!” he repeated, then resumed walking with extreme caution.

He was coming close to the turf of a certain bandit known as Polyphemus of the Sharp Ears, whose fearsome job in life was to lighten the purse of passers-by using a technique as simple and ancient as humanity — the sentimental knife-thrust. According to local mythology, Polyphemus, the sacker of souls, suffered total blindness as a result of certain excesses indulged in by his forefathers. Be that as it may, Heaven help the hapless wayfarer who, scorning Polyphemus’s lightless eyes, dreams that he can escape his vigil! For although Polyphemus had indeed been denied all the beauty and grace of the visible world, his ears ruled over the eight directions of the audible universe. The wind itself, though it were shod in the gossamer slippers of the breeze, could not pass next to the cyclops unheard. Adam Buenosayres wouldn’t even have attempted this impossible feat, had he not found the blind man’s tricks and excessive theatricality repugnant to the point of indignation. It should have been easy to shrug off his spell with its cheap props, guitar and all. And yet Adam couldn’t shake the feeling that, as soon as the giant’s voice hailed him, a coin of his would ineluctably end up in the pocket of Polyphemus. The thing was to steer clear of the voice and the visceral commotion it caused him. Through what strategy? By avoiding his irresistible cry. But how? By slipping past the ogre unnoticed. With the help of what resources? Adam trusted in his rubber-soled shoes.

His plan complete, Adam stealthily advanced towards Polyphemus. No use! The cyclops was already onto him.

“It’s a man,” he reckoned. “Young fellow. But, what the… He’s walking on tip-toe! Huh? He wouldn’t be trying to give old Polyphemus the slip, would he? He’d have to be a magician!”

Adam could already see the blind man’s still, composed silhouette, his little tin plate in one hand and the stringless guitar in the other. Twenty steps away, he could make out the grey beard, tobacco-stained around the mouth; he glimpsed the mouth itself, sealed like a cavern liable to throw out a thunderbolt at any moment. Ten steps away now, and he could hear the giant’s deep, placid breathing — could he be asleep? He redoubled his caution and, just as he was sliding by Polyphemus like a shadow, the tremendous voice boomed in his ears:

— Aaaaaalms for the bliiiiiind!

Adam stood petrified on the spot.

— Give aaaaaalms to the poor man who sees not the liiiiight! insisted Polyphemus, savouring every vowel as though making sweet music.

There was no way out; Adam admitted defeat and threw a coin onto the tin plate.

— God will rewaaard you! thundered Polyphemus, raising the plate and the guitar over his head.

— Monster! muttered Adam between his teeth.

But Polyphemus was getting carried away, malignant as a triumphant demon:

— God will repaaay you!

Adam Buenosayres, standing beside the cyclops, raised his eyes toward the Christ with the Broken Hand and told himself Polyphemus was right. Above the portico, Christ with the Broken Hand surveyed the street from on high; a rainbow-throated pigeon was perched on his head, snoozing, as if this were its natural resting place. What had he been holding in that hand, broken off perhaps by a stone flung at him?

“A heart, or a loaf of bread. Day in, day out, he offers it to the people on the street. But they don’t look up; they look straight ahead or down at the ground, like oxen. And I?”

Crestfallen, Adam momentarily felt the old, recurring anxiety.

“A squirming fish, caught on an invisible hook. The fishing rod must be in that severed hand.”

He saluted the cement Christ and continued up-street, up-world, critically eyeing the hat in his hand.

“Totally out of date, this hat — a literary curiosity! Kids used to shout ‘umbrella head’ when I was leaving school. Now they’re used to it. But here on the street… a public scandal. The nymphs in the zaguán, especially. Hang on!”

He pulled the reviled hat back on and automatically felt his pockets for his pouch and pipe. “Feel like a smoke. But not the pipe, not now, in front of the nymphs. Hat and pipe? That would be taunting the evil spirit of the street. I’ll buy cigarettes in La Hormiga de Oro. Yes, but I might run into Ruth… So what? An oasis in the desert.”

Adam Buenosayres crossed the threshold of La Hormiga de Oro and was immersed in a grotto. Faintly limned, the store’s thousand-and-one items appeared to cohabit on the most intimate terms: packs of cigarettes, twenty-cent dolls, shaving soap, detective novels, and boxes of caramels. All was steeped in the reek of fried fish. If the smell brought down the tone of the place, suggesting a low-life tavern, the ambience was somewhat redeemed by the uncertain strains of a shimmy being played further inside, on instruments forced into a grudging attempt at harmony. But where was Ruth? As soon as Adam wondered about her, Ruth appeared, a spider attracted by the buzz of the fly. She emerged through the green curtains separating the store from the backroom, listlessly, her face sad, eyes doleful: poor, misunderstood Ruth, all alone in the world. But when she saw Adam, she instantly brightened up.

— You! she exclaimed, surprised, jubilant.

— Good afternoon, Ruth! Adam greeted her festively. How’re things at La Hormiga de Oro?

— Not good, pouted Ruth. Our friends never visit.

A nervous hand flew to fix her tousled hair — oh my gosh, her head, an owl’s nest! With the other hand she gave her eyes a quick remedial rub — no traces of tears, please! Then she pulled up her stockings and gave her dress a quick shake — might’ve picked up a stray fish scale, anything’s possible in that infernal kitchen!

— Stay away from La Hormiga de Oro? Adam rejoined, giving her an appreciative look. You do yourself an injustice, Ruth!

— It’s been exactly eight days since you last dropped in, she sulked.

“A prettier creature was never conceived by woman after lying with a man,” Adam classically opined to himself.

— You’ve been counting? he laughed. It’s not possible, Ruth! Anyway, who am I that it should matter whether…?

He broke off suddenly and approached, looking at her eyes.

— Ruth, you’ve been crying.

— I have not!

She resisted, turning aside splendid eyes the colour of the horizon, feverish fingers raking the coppery bush of her hair: poor, misunderstood Ruth denied her tears.

— You have too been crying, Ruth! Adam insisted imprudently.

— It’s not true, I have not! she whined, pouted, resisted.

But why not? Why not confide her secret worries to this soulmate who was extending his brotherly voice to her like a bridge? Yes, yes! Poor, misunderstood Ruth entrusted her eyes into Adam’s safekeeping. Poor little Ruth gave in to the kindness of her brother in Art.

— Having to live with one’s wings pinned down, she mused. You, Mr Buenosayres, are an artist, and you must have had to suffer the same thing. One longs to fly, but one isn’t allowed to.

Adam made a vague, noncommittal gesture. Ruth jerked a pink thumb toward the backroom.

— My folks, she sighed. They’re as good as gold, that’s for sure. But all they can think about is money. They just can’t see what a girl’s got inside her, they just can’t. And then, when one sees even her friends are ignoring her…

Her voice broke, her head dropped forward, long bronze locks tumbled down over her eyes. Adam was thrown into turmoil. It wasn’t what she was saying, but the resonance of her voice, the warm depth of woodwind instruments. Where had he heard that sound before? The cry of a wild bird, perhaps, back in Maipú of a misty morn. “Beware the trap of sentimentality!” he thought. “Get her mind on another track!”

— Listen, Ruth. You know I’m a “man of letters,” as they call us now. Ugly, eh? I hate the term. (Now she’s smiling; that’s better!)

— A poet! she corrected heatedly.

— Yes, but nothing out of the ordinary. Look at me, Ruth. No long, unwashed hair, just a rigorously normal haircut, regular baths, casual clothes. This hat? Means nothing, it’s an anachronism. (Her smile dawns splendorous — the lovely bow of Love the Archer!)

— Joker! comes her reproach, even as she wraps him all up in her horizon-coloured gaze.

— No professional tics, at least not the kind you see on the surface, Adam concluded. Of course, there are other things — always in a lyrical daydream, forgetting things I shouldn’t… Do you understand what I’m saying, Ruth?

Yes, Ruth understood. And understanding him, she was beginning to glow with a subtle heat; and glowing, she shared in all the worries and concerns of her spiritual brother. She and he — weren’t they, after all, two birds of a feather? Yes, misunderstood Ruth could give him understanding. But Ruth alone silently reproached blind Destiny for its inability to bring together their twin solitudes. If only she and he could… Madness! And if… Oh, how wonderful it would be to wander together through the wide world, alone together like a pair of eagles, cutting life’s roses by the bushel!

— Yes, burbled Ruth. Poets live on song, they’re oblivious to the world around them.

— Like the cricket, observed Adam.

— That’s it, like the cricket.

— And like the cricket, they remember the ant when they’re in trouble.

Ruth frowned in puzzlement. When she finally got it, a trickle of laughter escaped her — two or three notes of crystal or water.

— They remember La Hormiga de Oro, The Golden Ant! I get it, I get it. The cricket is out of cigarettes.

Still laughing, the golden ant opened a carton, took out a packet, and handed it to her visitor. Then, placing her elbows on the counter, she stared at him and giggled playfully, swaying to the rhythm of her mirth like a tender reed in the wind. Adam stared back at her as he lit a cigarette. “Her even white teeth, wet with sap. A she-wolf’s teeth, quick to bite. The curve of her throat covered in fine golden down like a peach. And the braided copper of her hair.” A dark exaltation began to rush within him, especially when he looked at her laughing mouth. “A fig split open by its very ripeness.” Luckily, the music came to an abrupt halt; a voice in the other room was heard, scolding. Then, with a ferocious stroke of the baton, the musicians picked up the tune again.

— The boys in the band are practising some jazz, observed Ruth. Do you like that music?

— Music? Adam said doubtfully.

Ruth moulded her mouth into a grimace of disdain.

— Barbarian music! she spat out indignantly, her sensibility deeply wounded.

And then she added, fixing Adam with eyes ponderous with intelligence:

— The Serenata by Schubert, the Invitation to the Waltz, the Prayer of a Virgin — now that’s music! A bolt of fanatical zeal flashed across her face:

— And what about the music of words?

Adam, uneasy, blew two streams of smoke through his nostrils. “Oh my god, talk aesthetics with Ruth? No, no. Get her off this subject.”

— My art form is recitation, Ruth concluded. Interpreting genius! Right now I’m rehearsing Melpomene.

— What? cried Adam, scandalized.

— The poem Melpomene.

— You can’t be serious!

Adam’s eyes expressed disappointment and reproach.

— Ruth, he said. I would never have expected that from a sensible girl like you!

Ruth confused, Ruth chastised, blushed suddenly. On her face, a rush of crimson joined battle with the whiteness of her face until the two reached a truce in a pink as delicious as dawn’s rosy fingers. Ruth faced up to her client, twitched her little nose, and slapped his hand — oh, but not very hard!

— It’s marvellous poetry! she protested. You can’t deny it: when the poet, terrified, is chasing Melpomene through the autumn forest, you can practically hear the dead leaves crunching under foot. And when he finally catches up to her…

— That’s not what happens, Ruth! Adam interrupted. That’s a lie!

— A lie?

— It certainly is. The poet doesn’t reach Melpomene. He chased her, yes, there’s no denying that. But catch up to her? Never!

Ruth stared at him, astounded.

— How do you know? she asked ingenuously.

— Melpomene told me so herself. And she was fit to be tied.

— Liar!

— It’s the absolute truth. Look at it this way, Ruth. They haven’t had even the slightest quarrel, and the poet takes off after his Muse. It’s totally outrageous! And if you pause to consider that we’re talking about a placid doctor from Córdoba,10 the affront is simply beyond comprehension.

Coming out of her stupor, Ruth looked at him both amused and scandalized.

— Naughty! she warbled. You’re so naughty!

— Believe me, I’m not lying. The doctor started chasing her, but after half a block he was puffing so hard, he stopped to undo five bottons of his fancy waistcoat and loosen his tie, then sat down on the curb-stone of a well to wipe his brow with a big checkered handkerchief.

The golden ant laughed once more.

— Naughty! she repeated. I know, I know. This is how you poets tear a strip off each other at your literary get-togethers.

— It’s Melpomene’s solemn declaration, Adam insisted. If she’s lying, it’s not my fault.

Ruth threatened him with a friendly wag of her finger.

— Listen to what I’m going to recite. We’ll see if you find this funny, too.

She turned her back on him and walked toward the glass counter, her clogs tapping on the floor. She was in motion! Beneath the material of her dress, hitherto invisible forms were bursting into view, unsuspected roundnesses and hollows. Trembling lines formed and broke apart, according to the rhythm of her steps. When she reached the counter, Ruth stopped and raised her arms toward the upper shelf. Adam could see the grotto of her underarm, with its honey-coloured fleece, and the tips of her breasts cutting soft wakes as they rose beneath the cloth. “Devil of a girl! Temptress, like Circe!” But Ruth came back with a book from the shelf.

— Anthology of Passages for Recitation, she announced with pride. Now, what page was it on? Ah, here it is.

She began to read aloud:

– “I have tarried, I have tarried, but the hour did strike! I wounded him, all is concluded. Indubitably, I acted when he was without defence. First I wrapped him in a web from which there was no escape, in a fine-meshed fish net, in a veil delightful but mortal. Twice did I wound his body, twice he cried out, and he has lost his strength! Upon seeing him laid low, I smote him a third time, and Hades, guardian of the dead, rejoiced…”

“Hell’s bells! Adam recognized the voice of Aeschylus in that hair-raising fragment. He had to admit that Ruth was a very convincing Clytemnestra. She stood erect and rigid as a column. But in relating her crime, she parcelled herself out in gestures, dispersing them in all directions — one eye to the north, the other to the south, an ear to the east, another to the west. Her astonishing dissipation made Adam fear for an instant that she might evaporate completely. But Ruth put herself back together by looking into the mirror above the store counter; a single glance was enough for the reflection to gather her up whole. Then she proceeded:

– “He has sprinkled me with bubbling jets of gore from his wound. Dark dew, his blood, no less sweet to me than the rain of Zeus upon the wheatfields when the spike breaks through its sheath…”

Ruth was again suddenly transfigured. Her cruel eyes were like knives still penetrating Agamemnon, who lay in a heap at her feet. Her nostrils flared with relish at the bitter smell of blood. Acrid brass jazz from the other room underscored Clytemnestra’s harsh declamations, and Adam, standing near her in that cave-like ambience, began to feel an uncanny fear, an inchoate ancient terror.

Ruth must have seen his face change.

— What’s the matter? she asked, closing the book. Didn’t you like it?

Instinctively, as if in self-defence, Adam felt in his pocket for his Blue-Bound Notebook.

— Amazing, Ruth! I don’t give much for Agamemnon’s chances when he falls into your clutches. Brrr! You’ve given me goose bumps.

But Ruth hadn’t missed Adam’s movement.

— Hmm! she intoned, raising her eyebrows.

Her index finger, childlike, suddenly pointed at her visitor’s pocket:

— And that notebook?

“I’m done for!” thought Adam. “Nobody takes liberties like she does!”

— They’re notes, he answered vaguely.

— Written by hand?

— That’s right.

Ruth stretched out an imperious hand.

— Give them here, she said. I want to see your writing. I know a bit about graphology.

— Not on your life! exploded Adam, alarmed.

— And why not?

— Because you might guess right.

The golden ant started to laugh. “Her wolf teeth, her gums of wet coral!”

— The notebook! she wheedled. Right now!

— Impossible! Adam was laughing with her now. To read this notebook is to read my heart.

Ruth’s open eyes went huge.

— Really? she exclaimed, clapping her hands like a child. Let’s have that notebook! I want to read your heart.

— What if you read it out loud? Adam observed prudently.

She stamped her foot, then threatened, half joking, half in earnest:

— Either you give it to me or I’ll have to take it from you.

— Take it from me? Over my dead body!

It was the wrong thing to say. Without further ado, Ruth threw herself like a cyclone at Adam Buenosayres. Shrieking with glee, she tried to wrest the notebook from him by brute force. Adam took it out of his pocket and hid it behind his back. So Ruth grabbed him around the waist, pinned his arms, and tried to reach his hidden hands. In the process, her head came to rest against the shoulder of her enemy; Adam breathed the aroma of that coppery hair (astringent and clean like wild bushes) and his agitation reached new extremes. Finally he broke free of her chain-link arms and lifted the notebook above his head. But Ruth stood on tip-toe and tried to reach it, her whole body leaning into Adam’s chest. What did he do then? He passed the notebook behind Ruth’s back: now she was a prisoner in his embrace. Truth be told, the golden ant did not give in without a fight. But Adam held her tighter and tighter. Their eyes met, their breath commingled. A great seriousness suddenly descended upon them. Just at the moment when in shared rapture they were about to lurch over the edge, they heard shuffling steps coming from the back room. Through the green curtains poked Doña Sara’s gruesome head. The Bogeyman! Adam and Ruth separated as quickly as if a sword of ice had fallen between them. Adam forced an awkward “Good afternoon” in the direction of the Bogeyman; Ruth busied herself picking up some coins her client had tossed on the counter. A gruff bark was Doña Sara’s response to Adam’s greeting, a bark that sounded like an invitation to beat a full-scale retreat. That’s how Adam understood it, at least. Without a word, he turned on his heels and fought his way through the oppressive silence to the door. But before he was gone, he heard Doña Sara’s loathsome voice yelling:

— Shameless! Scandalous wench! And the kitchen still looks like a pigsty!

Whispers, murmurs! The three of them lying in wait inside the zaguán: the One-in-Blue, the One-in-White, the One-in-Green. Three fulsome young bodies, laid out across the cool porch tiles, O grace! And standing at the threshold, two adolescent girls overseeing the street with vulture eyes.

The One-in-White purrs softly into the avid ear of the One-in-Blue; and the One-in-Blue listens, breathless, mouth half open in an enigmatic smile, eyes lost in an enigmatic gaze. And the One-in-Green? Very grave, she has brought her golden head close to her two companions’ heads. The One-in-Green would like not to listen, but listens; she wishes and wishes not to listen, and she hears with her ears, with her eyes, with her trembling skin. She’s listening, the One-in-Green: whispers, murmurs!

With a start, the One-in-Blue sits up, eyebrows arched, pupils dilated.

— No! she exclaims, incredulous. It can’t be!

— No doubt about it, confirms the One-in-White with a deep, insinuating, significant look.

— What about her? asks the One-in-Blue, still not over her astonishment.

With her index finger the One-in-White beckons to the eager heads of her companions. Their lips move: whispers, murmurs. Suddenly the One-in-Blue, who hasn’t missed a word, raises her head and bursts into uncontrollable laughter, eyes half closed, mouth wide open revealing gums of coral, the white pinions of her teeth.

— Oh, oh! exclaims, laughs, sobs the One-in-Blue.

Still laughing, she falls back in slow motion, so that her skirt rolls back like a wave, revealing tanned knees and the troubling zone where her thighs begin. And still the skirt shrinks back!

— Ah, ah! moans the One-in-White as she half sits up.

She is shaken by a gust of laughter; she bends like a palm tree in the wind. The straps of her gown slide down over her shoulders to reveal a Hesperides of incalculable abundance. But the One-in-Green does not laugh: she has reclined on the tiles, her nostrils flaring as though she scented a region of fire.

What are the two adolescent girls up to? The two adolescents, upon hearing the explosion of laughter, have turned their eyes back toward the interior of the zaguán, toward that world still barred to them. Now they look at one another, as if wondering: they smile, enigmatic. Perhaps they guess! But their sharp eyes go back to scrutinizing the street, and suddenly their birdlike faces light up.

— The guy with the hat! they shout. The guy with the hat!

— Where? the One-in-Blue wants to know.

— Right here on the sidewalk.

Escaping La Hormiga de Oro, Adam Buenosayres tasted a mixture of shame and indignation. How long was he going to let himself get caught up in the subtle webs of female creatures? Just now, pompous as a peacock, he’d been contriving lofty concepts about life and death. And a few cute moves by Ruth were enough to bring the entire machinery of his speculations crashing down to the ground!

— But all the same, hell of a girl! If that old bag hadn’t stuck her nose in… And now, the nymphs in the zaguán. Careful, now!

Twenty metres up ahead was the opening of the zaguán with its red paving tiles. Heads up! Where were the nymphs? Suddenly Adam heard their hot whispers, their stifled laughter. Should he turn back or cross the street? Too late! The two adolescent girls standing guard at the entrance were already drilling four malignant eyes into him. They sensed his hesitation and smiled wickedly.

“Glare at them ferociously, they’ll bow their heads. Or stare at them lasciviously, and they’ll look away with a smile of tacit consent. The real danger is with the hidden nymphs.”

Adam Buenosayres forged ahead. Nearing the zaguán, he nailed the girls with a Gorgon stare. They backed away. The easy victory seemed to boost his daring, for when he got to the zaguán itself, he explored it with firm eyes. A single glance took in the cluster of women frolicking and on fire: the One-in-Blue, the One-in-Green, the One-in-White, semi-reclining, propping one another up, their heads together, mouths pressed against attentive ears, lips displaying the entire curvature of laughter, audacious forms being laid bare as dresses ebbed, eyelids drooped, nostrils flared. Whispers, murmurs! Moving on, he thought he could feel eyes biting him from behind; the women in the zaguán must have broken with their poses to poke their heads out and watch him go by. And he was right; a chorus of tremendous laughter filled his ears.

“They’re laughing at my hat. Ergo, they’re not laughing at me. That old rascal Alcibiades!”

But the gaggle of girls had stirred up in him a dark elation.

“Devilishly pretty, and strong! Armed for combat: line of redoubt, parabolic fortress, bastions of curves and angles. Ready for offence or defence. And graceful as colts. A yearning to stroke their sleek necks, or give them a thrashing.”

A dark exaltation, desire for triumphal violence. In short… Adam frowned: he’d just noticed the Flor del Barrio,11 and at the same moment Juancho and Yuyito, who were cautiously manoeuvring in her direction with a mischievous expression on their childish faces.

“Those brats are up to no good,” he said to himself.

Decked out and heavily made up as usual, the Flor del Barrio stood in her doorway, facing down the street in the same direction as always, showing no other sign of life than the feverish activity of her eyes. He would find her standing like this at any time, in any season, peering eternally at the same point. The bride waiting in ambush, perhaps, a terrible image of waiting. So, too, did the men on the street see her, never getting to the bottom of her mystery, maybe not even noticing the presence of an enigma in those unhinged womanly eyes, never wondering what absent love, what stranger might arrive through that sector of the street watched over so agonizingly by the Flor del Barrio.

Yuyito and Juancho were now close to the woman.

— Flor del Barrio, isn’t Luis on his way? they asked, laughing. Flor del Barrio, where’s Luis?

The woman appeared not to have noticed them at all. Yuyito darted closer and lifted her flowered skirt a bit.

— Doggone little brats! Adam rebuked them. How ’bout I fetch each of you a clout!

Cool as a cucumber, Yuyito stared at him attentively. Turning to his buddy, he posed the following question in a singsong voice:

— Who kicked the butcher’s cat?

— The guy in the goofy hat! Juancho sang in serene reply.12

The two of them took off up the street. Watching them flee, Adam had no idea that their childish hands were soon to untie the easy knot of war. He’d crossed Murillo Street and was now walking along blackened walls, amid pestilential wagons, all belonging to the Universal Tannery. The workers of the third shift were stretched out on the ground, sleeping heavily with their caps under the nape of their necks, waiting for the wail of the siren that would soon call them back to work. Adam stole quietly among the sleeping bodies and observed their half-open mouths, their wheezing chests, and their hands scattered here and there like discarded tools.

“Penitential flesh. They can’t hear, the way I do, the subtle, tempting voices. They’re too broken. Broken and worthy: a terrible dignity! Whereas I…”

Among the bodies, old Pipo lay asleep beside a large draught horse whose head was also nodding as he snoozed. Pipo was the local drunk, illustrious for his habit of stripping down right in the street and dancing naked as a satyr, to the consternation of the neighbourhood wives and the hilarity of the local hoods. Adam stopped and bent over to chase away a fly that had landed on Pipo’s nose. The old man woke up and, with a vague smile, got to his feet.

— Good afternoon, Pipo! Adam greeted him. I’d have thought you’d be over in Precinct 21.

– ’Cuzza Saturday? guffawed Pipo. By Jesus! No. Saturday, I tie one on, sleep it off in the jug, and they let me out Sunday.

They were walking together toward the tannery gate, and Adam thought about him with sympathy. A sabbatical bender, was Pipo’s: his moment of exultation and freedom.

— Do you always drink at Don Nicola’s?

— Ecco, Pipo assented.

— His famous plonk, said Adam sarcastically.

— Pure grape wine, by Jesus!

The old man’s hand went to his bony throat.

— But it scratches, you know?

— Ah, the wine of good old Italy! Adam sighed, watching Pipo out of the corner of his eye.

The old man said nothing and gave no sign of any memory at all. Of the man who had immigrated, all that remained was a machine: a faithful mechanism that got drunk every Saturday. In silence they arrived at the gate; the old man waved goodbye and entered the tannery. Adam Buenosayres, meditative, approached the enormous gateway where the wagons came and went. A foul, greenish liquid slithered between the cobblestones. The stench of rotten grease and rancid skins wafted out from the tannery. Adam sucked in his breath and hurried through the pestilential zone, covering the forty metres or so to Padilla Street.

Seated on her bench, Old Lady Clotho had just finished munching a crust of bread. She watched benignly as the little girls nearby played the game of Angel and Devil. The Angel went up to the group and called out with all the heavenly gravity she could muster:

— Knock, knock!

— Who’s there? the other girls asked in chorus.

— The Angel.

— What do you want?

— A flower.

— What flower?

— The rose.

Detaching herself from the group, the lucky rose went off with the Angel, while the girl playing the Devil approached and, trying to sound scary, called out:

— Knock, knock!

— Who’s there?

— The Devil.

— What do you want?

— A flower.

— What flower?

— The carnation.

The sad little carnation left the group, and the Devil took her away amid the laughter of all those predestined flowers. Then the Angel came back:

— Knock, knock!

— Who’s there?

— The Angel.

— What do you want?

— A flower…

Old Lady Clotho looked away, adjusted the nickel-framed spectacles on her nose, took up her spindle along with a wad of woollen fleece she’d left on the doorstep, and fervently went back to work. Her nimble fingers twisted strands together and drew out the thread, all the while turning the spindle. As she spun the mass of fleece, she was also spinning the stuff of her reflections: the cold season was drawing near, and there were nine children to look after.

— Sweaters for the ones going to school, said Clotho from her mental list. Socks for the little ones, booties and bonnets for the ones that’ll come this winter. Yes, the poor mothers are already going around with their bellies up to their chins.

All this work was being prepared in Clotho’s fingers and in her imagination. It was her way of returning the kindness of those good souls who helped her out, who paid the rent for her tiny room and made sure she didn’t go without the bread of God or a cup of soup.

Without interrupting her work, Old Lady Clotho saw the young man at the corner pasting up a poster with bright red letters.

“Another speech!” she thought, smiling tolerantly with lips still speckled with crumbs of bread.

For it was Old Lady Clotho’s wont, of an evening, to approach groups of people gathered at a street corner around a fiery orator. Their harsh words and fanatical gestures railed against everything and everyone — against order and disorder, against justice and injustice, against peace and against war. Clotho always listened with a smile:

— Santa Madonna! What are those fools shouting about? What are they scared of? Haven’t they understood yet that this world is a hopeless mess ever since Adam and Eve in Paradise did that dirty thing behind God’s back?

She would go back to her room, light her kerosene lamp, sit with her elbows on her rickety table and leaf through her yellowing Bible with the large print. She’d brought it all the way from Italy, heroically saving it through thick and thin, along with the picture of Our Lady of Loreto, still in its original brass frame and keeping watch over the head of her bed. Despite her murky vision, but helped by the night silence, Clotho would read the Old Testament stories about God’s patience and men’s folly: tales of love and hate, praiseworthy virtue and appalling vice, patriarchal joys and the gnashing of teeth, earthquakes and floods, plagues and massacres. All this streamed before her eyes, just like the moving pictures she’d once seen at the Rivoli cinema on Triunvirato Street — Doña Carmen had invited her, the Spanish woman who lived at the end of the hall. Thinking about these things, she would slowly close the fearsome book and say to herself that surely the world had always been sheer bedlam and would be until Judgment Day, and the orators on the corner could shout themselves blue in the face. Moreover (and this conviction only deepened with time), life slipped away like a dream and resolved into a parade of images so fleeting she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Then Clotho would recall her own life. Her childhood, hard but happy — oh, yes! — in the countryside of the Piemonte. Her wedding in the church in the mountains. And suddenly that strange sea voyage: they were cruelly ripped out of the earth and left with their roots to wither in the wind. (Santa Madonna! Why? What for?) They got off the boat in Buenos Aires, then came forty-five years of toil with her unruly sons (wrong-headed, the poor dears!), washing clothes from dawn till dusk, her old man growing grey up on the scaffolding. One by one they died, or left, until all were gone. Flesh and gestures one used to love, or that once caused pain: they slipped through one’s fingers, just like that, as easily as a fistful of sand. Yes, it was all like a dream! Old Lady Clotho had no more tears to weep and she had become reserved, skeptical because of the way things change and change. It wasn’t indifference, just caution, perhaps wisdom. But she also glimpsed something that never changed. At the end of early mass, she would shuffle up to the communion rail of San Bernardo; when the officiating priest raised the white wafer, all poverty and strife seemed to melt away around her, and something eternal moved in, something that had been, was, and ever would be one with itself.

An ear-splitting screech took her from her thoughts. Clotho looked up to see where the ruckus was coming from. Spindle in hand, she stood up to yell:

— Degenerates! Bandits!

After gathering all their flowers, the Devil and the Angel, each heading up her legion, had begun the battle that brings the game to an end. But, oh my word! Two authentic devils, Yuyito and Juancho, had infiltrated the innocent flock and were having a whale of a time pinching the girls.

— Get outta here! hollered Clotho, rushing toward them and brandishing her spindle like a lance.

The two scoundrels stood up to her, face to face, and without the slighest affectation let fly a pair of long, loud raspberries. Then they went merrily on their way. No one suspected that those childish hands would soon untie the loose knot of war! Clotho sat back down beside the little girls, who were already hatching a new game. Before taking up her work once more, she glanced casually to her right.

— Ah, it’s that young man, she murmured, her eyes glued to the passerby smiling at her from beneath a wide-brimmed hat.

The more she looked at him, the more he looked like Juan — the same facial expression and the same height. All that was missing were the tube trousers, his high heels, short jacket, silk scarf, and the wide-brimmed hat he was wearing in 1900, the year he died. And it wasn’t true that Juan was a hoodlum! Nothing but a vicious rumour. If he got knifed, it was because he was trying to separate the other two who’d pulled their blades, she was sure of it. Because her Juan was the best boy of all; never once did she hear him raise his voice. Old Lady Clotho had no more tears to cry, but all the same her eyes became moist, even as she did her best to smile back at the young man who was now quite close.

Adam Buenosayres calculated the moment when he should smile. He himself had given the old woman the name of one of the Fates, in reference to the never-absent spindle. She spun so tirelessly, so solemnly, that Adam wondered more than once if the old woman wasn’t spinning the destiny of the street, the fate of men.

“Maybe even mine,” he said to himself superstitiously.

So the smile he addressed to Clotho every time he saw her was almost a liturgical act. The old woman’s anxious eyes demanded it, and Adam made sure she got it, fearing that his smile might be the only food that nourished the Fate.

“One, two, three. Now!”

His smile hit the mark so perfectly that, as he passed her, he saw a beatific face on whose wrinkled chin sparkled a few crumbs of bread. The ring of little girls turned round and round as they sang:

Between Saint Peter and Saint John

they made a new boat.13

“Circular motion. Movement of the angel, the star, the soul. Children understand pure motion.”

Adam stopped in front of the corral belonging to Don Martín Arizmendi. The Basque was inhaling the mild smell of cows and looking at the pigeons asleep in the sun with their throats puffed out. That was peace.

Little did he know that childish hands were soon to loosen the easy knot of war!

— If he isn’t the Messiah, then who is he? asked Jabil belligerently.

Abdulla looked pensively at the glass of anis growing warm in his strong, sinewy hand.

— He too is a prophet, he answered. The last one before Mohammed, the true prophet of Allah.

— That’s what you guys say, Jabil refuted. But our sacred books…

— The Koran is a sacred book, too, replied Abdullah benevolently.

Abraham Abrameto, proprietor of La Flor de Esmirna, sat silent and morose, listening to them in apparent indifference. The three men were sitting round a table in the Café Izmir, and their conversation in the language of Syria blended with others of similar timbre in an atmosphere thick with anis and strong tobacco. By the window, a musician in a seeming trance plucked the strings of a black zither inlaid with mother-of-pearl. At the back, the half-drawn curtains allowed glimpses into a smoky room, in the centre of which, on a yellow carpet, stood a tall narghile, its four tubes leading to four smokers who remained invisible.

— According to our prophets, Abraham said, rousing himself, the Messiah will be a king like David or Solomon, not the son of a carpenter. Our Law…

But Jabil, the Christian, cut him off.

— Israelites! he groaned. You’ve betrayed your Law: the only law you guys know is profit!

— I close Saturdays, protested Abraham mildly.

— You guys crucified your Messiah! Jabil went on. You were waiting for an earthly king, and you’re still waiting. You want the realm of this world.

— I close Saturdays, repeated Abraham. I honour the Sabbath.

Finishing off his anis, Abdulla was about to defend again the splendour of the Crescent Moon, when sounds of war and the din of agitated multitudes could be heard coming from the street outside. The zither player went stone still, the Asian whispers stopped short, and an expectant silence prevailed in the room. The tumult outside grew louder. The café patrons stood up.

Don Jaime, the Andalusian barber, wanting to show off the object of his lengthy oral dissertation, left his well-lathered client and disappeared into the back of the shop. Out of the corner of his eye, another client watched him go. The Carter from the Hayloft, his shock of hair at the mercy of a taciturn assistant’s scissors, was sprawled in the other chair, where he fidgeted like a caged lion, bouncing his slipshod clog on the tip of his foot.

— What the hell’s all that racket! he growled between his teeth.

The sideburns trimmed, the taciturn assistant sighed:

— And the back?

— Cut’er square, grunted the Carter. Rounded, like.

While the Andalusian was gone, and with the shaving soap congealing on his neck, Adam Buenosayres picked out the details of the scene in the mirror. The barber shop was an ordinary space, its walls grimy and the ceiling speckled with fly droppings. It was meagrely furnished with two barber chairs in front of a long tarnished mirror, four Vienna chairs, plus a little table heaped with old issues of El Hogar, El Gráfico, and Mundo Argentino.14 That’s not counting the two colourful posters pinned up on the left wall, one exalting the tragic death of Carmen, the other celebrating the hearty toast of Cavalleria Rusticana.15

But before long Don Jaime was back, carrying a large white pigeon in both hands.

— Look at dis, he said, presenting it proudly.

— Why don’t you shove it up your arse, muttered the Carter to himself.

— Fine-looking bird! Adam commented.

— Now watch dis, said the Andalusian, sticking the bird’s beak between his lips.

Before the astonished Adam Buenosayres, the taciturn and indifferent assistant, and the sourpuss Carter choking with ill humour, the pigeon’s crop swelled voluptuously to a magnificent girth. But Don Jaime, perhaps noting excessive admiration in his client’s eyes, slipped out to the backroom and returned without the pigeon. Then, with vigorous strokes of the shaving brush, he worked the soap back up to a foamy lather on his client’s face, honed the razor on the strop, and shaved him in long swipes. As he worked, he kept up a running patter, garbling his words left and right, all the while dousing his client with a fine spray of saliva. He went on about pouter pigeons this, and thief pigeons that; his pigeon-house out back, the pigeon-house of Arizmendi the Basque; and the Basque ripping him off for some pigeons, so Jaime stealing just as many back from the Basque.

The Carter from the Hayloft, whose head was assuming incredible forms between the taciturn assistant’s hands, shifted and shuffled and squirmed as though he had ants in his pants. First he imagined hauling off and socking the Andalusian with a force that he reckoned should land him halfway across the street. Then he smiled, proud and bitter, on recalling that morning’s set-to. He’d got his horse and cart into a bit of bind, caught between the bitchin’ Lacroze streetcar and some rich bastard’s fancy French sports car. The rich boy, he had to brake real sudden, and so he starts mouthin’ off, actin’ real tough. But the Carter hopped down into the street and invited him to get out of the car and have it out. That’d be the day! Little Mr Fancypants puts the pedal to the metal and takes off cursing.

“Good horse, that old nag,” reflected the lad from the Hayloft. Then he noticed the taciturn assistant was shaving the hairs on the back of his neck.

— Watch the mole, eh! he threatened.

Meanwhile, Don Jaime was shaking the hair out of a none-too-clean apron and Adam was slicking back his hair with a generous dollop of hair cream. Just then, the first rumblings of war were heard in the barber shop. Don Jaime, Adam, and the Carter from the Hayloft all looked at each other. The din of the mob was growing louder. They rushed out into the sunny street.

Adam Buenosayres immediately took refuge in a false doorway beside the barbershop to avoid the riotous first wave of combatants. From this strategic post, he could survey the area that would soon be a raging battlefield. The sector of Gurruchaga Street running from Camargo to Triunvirato was already a-boil, and the clamorous multitude poured out through doors, windows, and skylights. The men were running with long strides, shoving and shouting and egging each other on. The women trotted along heavily in their clogs, children in tow. The kids were laughing and looking for trees to climb so as to get the best view. The old folks stood around exchanging eloquent gestures of excitement.

Adam assessed the human wave and quickly realized they were heading for the vicinity of a grocery store called La Buena Fortuna. Trying to guess what could have started it all, he joined the throng and let the flow carry him along toward the battle. But only at the grocery store did he realize how serious things were. For there, Mars had just thrown his torch and set ablaze the hearts of Trojans and Tyrians alike; and now, his cheeks puffed out, he was blowing on the flames for all he was worth.

When he arrived at La Buena Fortuna, the fight was just getting underway. Doña Filomena, drawn up to her full majestic height, her cheeks red as a rooster’s crest, stood at the centre of a vast circle of men and women. Holding her son Yuyito by the suspenders as he thrashed in vain against her iron grip, she ferociously faced an implacable enemy. Opposite her, pale as the angel of death, Doña Gertrudis took the heat of that gaze, with her son Juancho’s head locked tight against her gut. Between the two champions stood the tano Luigi, owner of La Buena Fortuna. Staring at the shattered glass of his display window, the Italian broke into grand lamentations. The arena was fenced in by rows of menacing faces, and still the multitudes came pouring in from the four quarters of the globe. But before singing of that grievous battle, let the Muse tell the origin of the war that sent so many illustrious heroes down to the underworld of Tartarus.

It so happened that Juancho and Yuyito, after a long morning of banditry, had finally called a halt. Renouncing action, they got to chatting as friends about various subjects, both sacred and profane. Pretty soon Juancho started talking up the Racing soccer team and their famous line of strikers. Yuyito’s brow clouded over. In return, he exalted the eleven players of San Lorenzo de Almagro, burning the finest incense in their homage. Well, one thing led to another, and the next thing you know, they’re no longer singing praises but sliding down the slippery slope of invective. Juancho goes as far as to assert that San Lorenzo are a fumble-footed bunch and recalls how Racing ran circles around them just a while back. Upon hearing such blasphemy, Yuyo feels a knot rising in his throat, but contains himself, then brings up the happy memory of the three goals San Lorenzo shoved down Racing’s throat at the Boca Juniors’ stadium. Ye gods! Who can describe the indignation that overtakes Juancho at the mention of that hateful hat-trick? His right fist flies to Yuyo’s jaw, then he beats a retreat as shameful as it is nimble. Unfortunately, Yuyo has a good throwing arm. His keen eye has calculated his aggressor’s head start. Seeing that chase is out of the question, he picks up a rock and hurls it with such violence that, had it hit the mark, it would surely have knocked Juancho headlong down into dark Hades. But Juno, of the bovine eyes, has for some time now been nursing a divine grievance against Racing, and she steers the rock toward the window of La Buena Fortuna. Result: the glass is smashed to smithereens and the tano Luigi runs out into the street screaming blue murder.

We left Doña Filomena and Doña Gertrudis facing off, still silent, but with razor tongues at the ready. The first to speak was Doña Gertrudis:

— This is the kind of thing that’s been going on, she declared, ever since you and your ragamuffin son moved into the neighbourhood. Just ask the neighbours, they’ll tell you! That little snot-nose is Judas reincarnate!

Doña Filomena turned even redder. Yet she didn’t answer, rage having surely tied her tongue. Taking advantage of her opponent’s silence, Doña Gertrudis pointed at Yuyo with an aggressive index finger:

— Ever since that little bastard took over the street, he’s got us all with our hearts in our mouths. Boys will be boys, they say. No! He goes way over the line. He even steals, so help me God! Just ask the neighbours if it isn’t so!

An approving chorus murmured behind her. Muted voices, stirrings of a hurricane. But behind Doña Filomena, too, silent faces were glowering. She moistened her lips and spoke:

– “So help me God,” you said. I don’t know if God will forgive your serpent’s tongue. In the first place, my son is no bastard. He has a father and a mother.

— Father? questioned Doña Gertrudis, sarcastic.

— Yes, a father — may he rest in peace! I can show you my marriage certificate, I really doubt you could do the same. You talk to me about thievery? It’s the pot calling the kettle black! Because stealing coal from honest households, that’s what your son’s up to. And you look the other way. And spend your whole day spreading gossip from door to door.

Ah, what cries of enthusiasm from Doña Filomena’s tribe greeted so cogent, so folkloric a rejoinder! And how grim the faces of their enemies! Meanwhile, Discord hovered over both Tyrians and Trojans, offering them a bright red apple from Río Negro.16 But no one in either faction saw Her. All were waiting on tenterhooks for Doña Gertrudis’s next sally.

Trembling like a leaf — certainly not out of fear! — Doña Gertrudis pondered in her soul whether or not to pounce and rip from her rival’s forehead the four errant, crazy wisps of hair dangling there. But Minerva, the goddess of owlish eyes, at that moment spoke in her ear and, touching the mortal woman with invisible fingers, imbued her with a radiance not at all human. And Doña Gertrudis stepped right up and let fly at her enemy with the full force of her lungs.

— Me, gossiping? she cried. Everybody knows I’m at my Singer sewing machine seven days a week. But look who’s talking! As if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth! If she had even a shred of decency, maybe she’d look after her son, instead of running around and carrying on with…

Doña Gertrudis hesitated, given pause by the gravity of what she was about to say. For her part, Doña Filomena started trembling so hard that she’d have fainted away, had not Juno, of bovine eyes, intervened and upheld her by the armpits. But Doña Filomena recovered, and in the midst of a terrible hush:

— Carrying on with who? she asked, torn between anguish and rage. Go ahead, I dare you to say it!

— With the Carter from the Hayloft! trumpeted Doña Gertrudis. The whole neighbourhood knows!

Heavens, what a rumpus was raised throughout the street at the utterance of such savage words! Laughs on one side were met by insults from the other. Everywhere jaws tightened, eyes glinted. Owl-eyed Minerva exhorted Doña Gertrudis’s partisans, while Doña Filomena’s band was led by Juno, her hair wild and dishevelled, her mouth grim.

Standing in the first row of the ring, Adam Buenosayres studied the combatants. There were the Iberians of thick eyebrows who’d left northern Spain and their dedication to Ceres to come here and drive orchestral streetcars; there were those who drank from the torrential Miño River, men practised in the art of argumentation; those from the Basque countries, the natural hardness of their heads concealed by blue berets. Then there were the Andalusian matadors, abundant in guitars and brawls. And industrious Ligurians, given to wine and song. Neopolitans erudite in the fruits of Pomona, who now wield municipal brooms. Turks of pitch-black mustachios, who sell soap, perfumed water, and combs destined for cruel uses. Jews wrapped in multi-coloured blankets, who love not Bellona. Greeks astute in the stratagems of Mercury. Dalmatians of well-rivetted kidneys. The Syrio-Lebanese, who flee not the skirmishes of Theology. And Japanese dry-cleaners. In short, all those who had come from the ends of the earth to fulfil the lofty destiny of the Land-which-from-a-noble-metal-takes-its-name.17 Adam studied those unlikely faces and wondered about that destiny, and great was his doubt.

Just then, Minerva turned to spiteful Juno:

— You old coot, you just get crazier with age! she cried. How long will you go on amusing yourself by stirring up hatred among mortals, pushing them into disastrous wars? Let’s leave them to squabble on their own without our help, and find ourselves a quiet nook.

Juno accepted the invitation from her fearsome sister, and the two sat down together on the doorstep of La Buena Fortuna to watch events unfold.

The first to jump headlong into the fray was the Carter from the Hayloft. There’s a metallic taste in his mouth and rage fermenting in his liver, for he has just heard his name ridiculed, the high secret of his love life besmirched in public. He looks daggers at Doña Gertrudis and briefly contemplates bringing his vengeful hand to bear upon a woman. But then he recalls his repute throughout all Villa Crespo. He remembers the three bullies he took down on the banks of the mighty Maldonado Creek,18 the two compadritos he wasted in La Paternal,19 the four slaughtermen he faced down that time on Liniers Street, and the eight students he sent packing in Rancagua Park. Drunk with glory, the Carter lets his gaze sweep in an arc over the crowd, seaching out a worthy opponent. His eyes fall on the gigantic Abdulla, who’s still laughing in the front row.

— Oh yeah? he shouts, applying his trusty left to Abdulla’s jaw. Laugh at this!

Beneath Abdulla’s wiry mustachios, laughter abruptly crumples into a horrible grimace. For a moment he stays on his feet, then falls to his knees with a crunch of bone. Before tumbling over like an ox, he clutches at a crate of oranges from Brazil. Golden oranges scatter over the ground. Face down in the dirt, Abdulla still struggles to get up, panting up tiny dust-storms. The patrons of Café Izmir weep piteously over their champion, now wrestling with the angel of death. Finally it’s all over, or it’s all about to begin: Abdulla’s heroic soul floats up over the multitude to the Prophet’s paradise, enters the great hall of the glorified, inhales the exquisite aromas of divine tobacco and celestial anis; free now of all human weight, he sits down between two buxom houris.

The Carter from the Hayloft looks around in triumph, a bit stunned by the trumpet-blast of glory. But just then, a tremendous voice rises above the clamour of the mob:

— Not hitting a man like that!

Before he knows it, the Carter is in the grip of Arizmendi the Basque who, filled with holy wrath, is crushing him in his cyclopean arms. The multitude emits a murmur of astonishment, then all is quiet for half an hour.20 The two heroes fight; the earth shudders beneath their feet. The Carter does his best to land punches on the head of the Basque, but Don Martín holds him tight against his gigantic thorax, squeezing harder and harder. Now the Carter’s blows are getting weaker, he’s pawing at thin air, his face is turning purple, and a cold sweat beads his brow. Finally his arms fall perpendicular to the ground, the light in his eyes goes out, and the Basque lets him fall like dead weight. But wait! The Carter isn’t out of it yet! He pulls himself together and, bones creaking, struggles painfully to his feet to take an aggressive step toward his enemy! Ah, but it’s his last gasp: down he goes for good. To the hoarse music of a bandoneón, the Carter’s soul goes plummeting down to hell. Rubbing his eyes rheumy with ire, he lurches among flickering shadows, still trying to duke it out with trolls and demons.

But Arizmendi the Basque will not come out of the battle unscathed. Looking to avenge the Carter, three burly lads rush in and grab Don Martín by the shoulders, neck, and waist. He thrashes like a bull attacked by a pack of dogs. Breaking free, he gives his aggressors a taste of the sidewalk. But they’re back on their feet, fists flying, landing terrible blows. Three times the Basque goes down on his knees, and three times he gets back up. But the fourth time he can’t do it. He senses the end is near; mortal sorrow floods his soul. Seeing him beaten, the burly lads leave him to his fate. Arizmendi drags himself over to the foot of a tree and there lays himself down, facing skyward, head pointed toward the east. Beating his breast, the Basque weeps for his sins, two in particular: cutting the milk with water before he sold it and stealing pigeons from Don Jaime. He plucks three blades of grass in homage to the Trinity and offers up his blue beret as a pledge to heaven. The Archangel Gabriel graciously receives it. Then the Basque brings his sinewed hands together forever in a simple and beautiful affirmation of Oneness.

Don Martín’s soul ascends, accompanied by a furious fanfare of angels’ trumpets. No sooner has his soul got to heaven than the battle below becomes general and tremendous. Myriad warriors raise clouds of dust, and the sun himself stops his chariot to take a look. But suddenly the sound of distant hooves is heard. It’s Sargeant Pérez of Police Precinct 21, galloping toward the brawl on his dapple-grey horse! The fighting stops instantly; Trojans and Tyrians flee. The arena is left empty of living and dead alike.

Chapter 2

Ethel Amundsen brought the rhapsody to a splendid close with a crashing chord in the lower registers of the keyboard. The upright piano shuddered, two terra-cotta shepherds sitting on it toppled over, and the merchant ship placed between them began to pitch, as if casting off its moorings. The applause already resounding in the parlour grew warmer still as Ethel spun round on the piano stool, got to her feet, and walked over to the sky-blue divan, swinging her firm, guitar-shaped hips. Señor Johansen cried a hearty Bravo!, and even Captain Amundsen^1 seemed to smile from his bromide photo up on the wall.

— A wonderful little woman! observed the spheroid Señora Johansen, turning her crass eyes to Señora Amundsen, who sat placidly smoking.

Her freckled face smiling, Señora Amundsen was silently taking in the group gathered on the sky-blue sofa. At one end Ethel and Ruty Johansen lounged beneath the intellectual gaze of the astrologer Schultz and the engineer Valdez. Toward the middle of that divan among divans, the bronze heads of Haydée and Solveig Amundsen joined the very dark head of Marta Ruiz in an intimate exchange of secrets. Still smiling in silence, Señora Amundsen stroked the full glass she held squeezed between her thighs.

But Señora Johansen was waxing sentimental:

— All grown up into a fine young woman. It seems like just yesterday… Olga! I can still see them in those heavy boats at the rowing club: Ethel and Ruty in their little-girl bathing suits, their skinny little legs!

— We grow old, Ana, said Señora Amundsen.

Turning to Señora Ruiz, she added, amused and tender:

— The moment we let our guard down, the little imps suddenly grow up and rob us of our illusions.

Señora Ruiz, yellow and dry, her clothes hanging from her stick-like frame, clapped her mousy little eyes on Señora Amundsen.

— Illusions? she croaked lugubriously. Then, correcting herself:

— Oh yes, illusions, quite so. (Silly old fool! she muttered in her soul. She hasn’t lost her illusions, and she’s well into her third youth, after raising Cain for years on end!)

Señora Johansen, however, was not about to give in to such melancholy thoughts.

— It’s not like that, she retorted. Our daughters are like mirrors: we look at them now and see ourselves as we once were; we remember and feel young again.

— Yes, yes, of course, approved Señora Ruiz, critically studying Señora Johansen’s double chin, her torrential udder, her fat haunches. She glanced at Ruty and, in spite of herself, admired her fine figure. “Mirrors,” she mentally grumbled. “Thank God it doesn’t work the other way around. Lord help the girl if her potential suitors saw her in the mirror of her mother!”

Whether because of the music, the emotion of the subject, or the second double whisky she was finishing off, Señora Amundsen, her eyes on the portrait of the captain, felt a knot forming in her throat. Then she looked at her three daughters reclining on the sky-blue divan and whimpered:

— If only the Captain could see them now!

— The captain was a great man! Señora Johansen affirmed solemnly.

— A man with backbone, seconded Señora Ruiz. Going down with his ship, when he could have saved himself. That’s what I call backbone. (Drunken old bag! she said to herself, looking furtively at Señora Amundsen. It’s that skinful of bad whisky makes her weepy. If only Doctor Aguilera would show her what that cursèd drink does to her liver!)

— The law of the sea! explained Señora Johansen in a fateful tone.

With a dainty handkerchief, Señora Amundsen dried her eyes and then proceeded to blow her freckled nose.

— You have no idea, she sobbed, what it’s like to be widowed at such a young age, with three small children and another on the way! I don’t know what would have become of me if it weren’t for poor Mister Chisholm.

— Mister Chisholm is such a good man! Señora Johansen clucked, glaring at Señora Ruiz.

— I’d say he was a God-send, asserted Señora Ruiz. (The incredible cheek of that Englishman, taking over the widow, her children, and the Captain’s pension. I suppose that’s what they call “British phlegm.” Poor Captain!)

A burble of dark laughter stirred in her body and tickled her throat. But she snuffed it out immediately, remembering that laughter too is excitement, and Doctor Aguilera had forbidden excitement. So she arranged her bones in the armchair and took a look around the room, sharp as slander, poisonous as envy.

Insular in body and soul, far from the tertulia, Mister Chisholm was working alone, re-papering the vestibule. He’d just finished the front wall and was perched on top of a small step-ladder, pipe in his right hand and drink in his left, listening with utter indifference to the hubbub from the parlour. His grey eyes, as if entranced, were passing over the brand new wallpaper design: a flurry of green birds in flight across a blood-red sky. Strident voices from the parlour snapped him out of his reverie.

“The natives are arguing again,” Mister Chisholm said to himself. “Shouting and arguing is all they know how to do. About their so-called problems. Poppycock! They think they move of their own free will, but who pulls the strings? Rule, Britannia!”

And he thought:

“Only England knows how to colonize. A unique style. Let the natives fantasize all they want: Britannia makes the wheels turn, the Empire’s solid. All right! But what about…”

Here Mister Chisholm felt a pang of anxiety, though only a very slight one, as behooves an Englishman:

“What about our cousins to the West?”

Two or three lines creased Mister Chisholm’s forehead, then quickly faded away.

“Bah!” he reflected. “Yankee-land! They’ve got no style, they’ve only just learned to walk on their hind legs. Barbarians! They make a mess of everything, starting with the English language.”

Calm now, Mister Chisholm climbed down the steps of the ladder, sucked back the rest of his double whisky, and stirred the bucket of paste, still smoking his pipe newly replenished with tobacco and optimism.

Who was responsible for spoiling Mister Chisholm’s imperial cogitations? In one corner of the parlour — to the right and down-stage for the reader — a singular polemic had just broken out between Samuel Tesler, metaphysician, and Lucio Negri, doctor of medicine. Lord and master of an easy chair, Samuel Tesler had positioned himself at the very corner of the room. To his left sat the melancholy effigy of Adam Buenosayres, troubadour. To Samuel’s right stood the statuesque figure of Lucio Negri, who with amorous strategy offered his finest profile to the girls seated upon the sky-blue divan, without for a moment losing sight of the philosopher who was attacking him ruthlessly. Near Adam Buenosayres, Señor Johansen — fat, pink, neat and tidy — looked on gravely. His tame little eyes went back and forth as each contestant spoke, and Señor Johansen seemed to be wrestling deeply with doubt, as if weighing the words of the two on an untrustworthy scale.

— What in the world has Genesis got to do with anything? protested Lucio, sneaking a glance at the girls. Are you going to tell me the little tales told in Genesis contain even a speck of scientific knowledge?

Samuel Tesler smiled indulgently.

— According to my grandfather Maimonides,2 he answered, Genesis is a treatise on physics. Naturally, my granddad Maimonides, who also happened to be a sawbones, was versed in the language of symbols.

— Hegel dismisses the Scriptures for their lack of verisimilitude, retorted Lucio.

At this point, the philosopher leapt up as if a German trumpet had just blasted him in the ear.

— Hegel? he exclaimed. A strutting peacock! He rejects everything that can’t comfortably fit into his German professor’s skull. A cranium uninhabitable by Metaphysics!

— Of course, said Lucio, you know more than Hegel does.

— Much more! agreed the philosopher, enfolding himself in the flowing tunic of his dignity.

Unruffled, Lucio Negri turned to the melancholy effigy of Adam Buenosayres.

— A flake! he exclaimed, pointing at Tesler and exchanging a smile with Solveig Amundsen, who was watching him from a distance.

Adam Buenosayres hadn’t missed that little exchange, a look for a smile. He would have liked to stay out of the futile argument and given himself over to his melancholy thoughts, especially now that he had to reckon with a new disappointment in love. However, he could see Lucio Negri looking at him, inviting him to intervene in the debate. “Careful,” he warned himself, “don’t say anything inappropriate.”

— In Villa Crespo, he began reluctantly, there’s an old Italian woman I’ve dubbed Clotho. Sometimes I see her in the San Bernardo Church, kneeling at the high altar. And looking at her, I wonder if Clotho doesn’t know more than all the philosophy in the world.

— Don’t worry, confirmed Tesler, she does know more.

Señor Johansen, who was following closely, did not look happy at this.

— Sounds like nonsense to me, he proffered timidly. Although I don’t know anything about philosophy.

— If you don’t know anything, why are you butting in? Samuel reprimanded him acridly.

Señor Johansen blushed red to the roots of his hair — which, truth be told, no longer amounted to much. He wanted to remind those present that he was a free man and had a right to his opinion. He cleared his throat two or three times, anxious to vindicate himself on the spot. But Samuel Tesler’s basilisk eyes bore down and seemed to hypnotize him.

— It is nonsense, Lucio Negri confirmed. How can an old woman down on her knees know more than a philospher seated in his study?

— That’s what I say! How? grumbled Señor Johansen, itching to get his own back.

Adam again felt burdened by the futility of the discussion.

— Truth is infinite, he said. It seems to me there are two ways of approaching it. One is the way of the seer; when he realizes the impotence of his own finitude before the infinite, he asks to be assimilated into the infinite through the virtue of the Other and the death of his ego. (“My Blue-Bound Notebook!”) The other is the way of the blind man; he attempts to encompass the infinite within his own finitude, which is mathematically impossible.

Lucio Negri exchanged an eloquent look with Señor Johansen.

— Bah! he scolded. Who, nowadays, can swallow that cocktail of finites and infinites?

— Truth is difficult, replied Adam with reluctance.

— Apparently not that difficult, objected Lucio. A truth that generously lodges itself in the empty skull of an old woman, just because she happens to be gawking at a wooden image!

Señor Johansen, a man whose rights had been abused, now felt a wave of hilarity taking over.

— A gawking old woman, he squealed with laughter. Hee-hee-hee!

Lucio Negri was looking over at the girls, anxious to see whether his victory had been registered in that quarter.

— A gawking old woman! Oh, oh! Señor Johansen was enjoying his vindication.

Samuel Tesler studied him with analytical curiosity.

— Aristotle says that laughter is proper to the human animal, he said. You laugh; therefore, you must be a man. Good thing you’re laughing; otherwise, we might never have known.

— What do you mean by that? bristled Señor Johansen.

The philosopher looked sadly at his buddy Adam Buenosayres.

— It’s hopeless, he sighed. This gentleman is a pachyderm. The thorn of irony cannot penetrate his leathery hide.

But Lucio Negri, comforted by another smile from Solveig Amundsen, charged impetuously back into the fray.

— You fellows may talk about mystical knowledge, visions, illuminations, he admitted in perfectly good faith. But as science shows us, all that sort of thing is in the domain of nervous pathology, or maybe internal secretions.

The end of Lucio’s sentence was celebrated by Samuel Tesler’s vibrant, unstoppable, staggering guffaws. Señor Johansen was petrified. Lucio Negri turned white, as the twenty-six eyes of the tertulia were trained upon him. Even Mister Chisholm, up on the stepladder, brush in hand, paused for a moment to frown.

— Laughter isn’t an argument! protested Lucio Negri. Nowadays, only a retrograde mind can deny the mystery of internal secretions.3

As though in a state of rapture, the philosopher threw himself at Lucio’s feet.

— Internal secretion! he prayed on bended knee. Ora pro nobis!

Flummoxed by the antics of that fearsome clown, Lucio Negri looked around the room. In one corner, the Señoras Amundsen, Ruiz, and Johansen looked perplexed. Giggles and muffled whispers bubbled up from the sky-blue divan. More adorable than ever, Solveig Amundsen gazed back at him with saddened eyes. In view of which, Lucio Negri decided to take it all as a joke; he took hold of the kneeling philosopher under the arms and hoisted him to his feet.

— Laugh if you want, he said. But believe me, one small variation in the pituitary gland of Jesus of Nazareth, and the course of world history would have been completely different.

Not believing his ears, the philosopher of Villa Crespo stared at him in astonishment. Then, with his gaze, he solicited the testimony of Adam Buenosayres. Finally, he let his head fall on the chest of Señor Johansen, where he laughed long and silently; he actually laughed against the shirt of Señor Johansen, who couldn’t believe what was happening. At length, abandoning Señor Johansen’s unwelcoming chest, he pierced Lucio Negri with irascible eyes.

— Modern science seems to run according to a diabolical plan, he complained. First, science accosts Homo Sapiens and says to him: “Look here, old boy, that business about Jehovah creating you in his image and likeness is a lie. Who is Jehovah? The bogeyman! The priests in the Middle Ages invented him to scare you and make sure you don’t hang around in dance halls. As for the immortality of your soul, it’s a lot of baloney. You blockhead, how do you expect to have a soul?”

— The soul! interrupted Lucio. Pll-ease! I’ve looked for it with a scalpel, in the dissection lab.

— And did you find it?

— Don’t make me laugh!

— No wonder, explained Samuel Tesler. The soul isn’t a tumour in the liver.

He continued:

— Once Homo Sapiens was disabused of the illusion of his divine origin, modern science had to invent a substitute. “Listen, old man, you’ve got to realize you’re an animal. An evolved animal, I’ll admit, but an animal from head to foot. Your real Adam is the first gorilla who, by dint of Swedish calisthenics, learned how to walk on two feet and turned up his nose at raw bananas. That happened back in the pre-glacial era, about a thousand centuries before you invented the flush toilet.”

— Clown! muttered Lucio between clenched teeth.

— Shhh! protested Señor Johansen, casting an uneasy glance over at the girls on the divan.

The philosopher looked at them with scientific compassion.

— Now then, he asked, as if introducing a corollary. What did Homo Sapiens do, as soon as science revealed his true origin?

Lucio Negri and Señor Johansen were silent.

— You can’t guess? insisted the philosopher. Well, Homo Sapiens, thinking about his ancestor the gorilla, listened to the voice of his instinct and started playing with himself.

— Shhh! protested Señor Johansen again. The young ladies!

— In spite of it all, added Samuel, lots of strange things persisted in Homo Sapiens: mystical enlightenment, the gift of prophecy, a whole set of free acts that escaped surgical operations in the clinic. Then science came up with a stroke of genius: they replaced the enigma of the Trinity with the enigma of the thyroid gland.

At this point Lucio Negri lost his patience.

— Now, just a minute! he shouted at Samuel, adjusting his spectacles on his polemical nose. But he didn’t have a chance to continue, for Samuel Tesler had fallen back in his easy chair and was laughing a meditative laugh, or laughingly meditating, shaking from side to side a brow as vast as a landscape.

— My beloved tormenter is laughing, chimed Haydée Amundsen, uniting the sunshine of her curls with the black night of those of Marta Ruiz. With a birdlike movement, the girls turned their faces in unison toward the metaphysical corner.

— An ugly Jew, pronounced Marta Ruiz, still studying the philosopher’s amazing physiognomy.

Haydée Amundsen let out a fine trickle of mirth, a mere thread of sound passing between sugared lips.

— He doesn’t think so! she exclaimed. You may find this hard to believe, but my beloved heartache sees himself as a mix of Rudoph Valentino, Santos Vega,4 and King Solomon, the one with the two hundred wives.

— Him? chirped Marta Ruiz, torn between disbelief, astonishment, and hilarity.

— None other.

A gale of laughter shook their springtime figures. One against the other they swayed like two lilies in the breeze, their foreheads touching and their breaths commingling, scented with tea and vanilla.

— And that pawnbroker’s nose! laughed Marta, turning now to little Solveig Amundsen, who sat quietly smiling.

Three different loves bound up in a single bundle, or three notes of a single song: thus they sat joined and distinct upon the sky-blue divan. Marta Ruiz half closed her eyelids, as though trying to hide the secret ardor, betrayed in her eyes, that was consuming her — oh, to weep! Her marvellous pallor suggested something like the serene cold of moonlit water. But careful, now! Watch out for all that ice and snow! Behind that glacial mask, there was fire. Yes, Marta Ruiz was like the live coal that hides beneath its own ashes. How different, in comparison, was Haydée Amundsen! Her coppery hair, her golden brow, eyes of turquoise, lips of pomegranate, teeth like agates, hands of brass, breasts of marble, torso of alabaster, belly of mercury, legs of onyx: Mother Nature had been pleased to pour all her finest gems into that open jewel case named Haydée Amundsen. So loaded with treasure was she that the most indifferent onlooker would be tempted to plunge his hands up to the elbow into all that mass of bright jewels, were it not for an aura of pure, jovial innocence that, like a shield, inhibited that onlooker, reined in the ignoble greed of that buccaneer. And what to say now about Solveig Amundsen? Everything and nothing. Solveig Amundsen was the primordial matter of any ideal construct, the clay from which fantasies are fashioned. She was still proof against description, like water that has not yet taken on form or colour. Silent and dense with mystery, Solveig was rolling and unrolling a Blue-Bound Notebook.

There they all were, together and distinct, at one end of the sky-blue divan. Their vein of laughter exhausted, the first to speak was Marta Ruiz.

— I see, she said to Solveig, that your Adam Buenosayres has come back to us.

— The fugitive poet! chimed in Haydée. It’s the first time we’ve seen him since that famous Thursday.

— He looks kind of lugubrious, said Marta. He’s another strange bird. Like that ghost Schultz and that hypnotist engineer.5

— The Amundsen Lunatic Asylum is at full capacity, observed Haydée, passing a benevolent gaze over the tertulia.

Marta Ruiz had become pensive. To be sure, none of those fellows with fevered brains was the kind of man who could fulfil a woman’s destiny. Intellectuals? Bah! Weak creatures, frozen men. And Marta Ruiz was a live coal amid ashes.

— A real man, she sighed abstractedly, as if invoking a utopian dream. A real, honest-to-goodness man, with strong muscles, and his feet firmly on the ground!

— A cave man? Haydée asked.

— No, not that! protested Marta.

And no, that wasn’t it at all. A female Diogenes, Marta Ruiz was looking for a true man, searching with no other lantern than her treacherous eyes.

— I’m talking about a man who has the delicacy of a gentleman and the energy of a wrestler. A man with instincts! Someone like John Taylor in Jungle Inferno.

— John Taylor? exclaimed Haydée scornfully. A brute! He always plays the stupid macho with silly women wanting to get whipped. John Taylor!

— He has character, said Marta.

— What? shot back Haydée. Would you put up with a barbarian like him?

— Put up with him, no. I’d stand up to him, clarified Marta, fire amid ashes.

Yes, Marta Ruiz would stand up to him, even if he thrashed her black and blue or dragged her by the hair through an absurdly sumptuous living room. Marta’s soul was a lightning rod, her calling was to be a breakwater, and she longed to give herself over to the realm of untamed forces, although, let it be understood, not without a struggle. Marta was a “character.” And wasn’t History full of similar characters? In that fat volume on mythology, furtively devoured not long ago at the school library, Europa, Leda, Pasiphae, Aegina had all filed by. To be sure, Leda’s adventure with the swan didn’t impress her all that much. But Pasiphae with the young bull! The white bull, at high noon! What a strange stratagem! It was too much. The abyss of dark desire! Don’t look too deep! Marta Ruiz didn’t want to look all the way down, but her nostrils were flaring now, she’d caught a whiff of the fiery region. A live coal amid ashes, she snapped eyelids shut to conceal eyes that were giving her away.

But Haydée could not accept it.

— There’s something abnormal about it, she said pensively. Why can’t a man and a woman get together without war?

— Life is war, Marta declared sententiously, half opening her eyes.

Fortunately, Haydée hated serious subjects. And so her changeable humour, spinning like a weather vane, now showed a face full of mischief. It would be difficult, though one searched lantern in hand, to find a happier cage-full of birds than the one Haydée Amundsen had for a head.

— As for me, I’m happy with my philosopher, she announced. No complications, please.

— Merciful God! wailed Marta. That caricature of a man? Isn’t that even worse than war?

— Bah! said Haydée. Between my suitor and me, war is philosophically impossible.

— What d’you mean?

— According to my suitor, I’m not a woman, declared Haydée with mysterious air.

— So what the devil are you?

— Primordial Matter!

Marta gazed at her for a moment in astonishment.

— What’s that supposed to mean?

— Don’t ask me! He says I’m a ghost, the shadow of a shadow, pure smoke.

— He’s crazy.

— So you see, concluded Haydée, war just isn’t possible with my suitor. You can’t give a ghost a thrashing.

The two young women fell back laughing, their heads flouncing against the sky-blue cushions. Haydée’s laughter sang, Marta’s wept. Meanwhile, Solveig kept quiet and smiled, applying herself to the two only operations that befitted her mystery: she smiled to reveal herself, she stayed silent to hide. With one foot still in childhood and the other in the dance of the world,6 Solveig listened to adult chatter as if to a language still strange but whose general sense she was beginning to glimpse. And the most incredible things were happening in her, oh wonder! Just yesterday she was a little girl, a child nobody noticed. Then suddenly something beautiful and awesome had happened to her. Solveig had begun to sprout firm buds that kept growing; her whole body was breaking out in flowers and fruits, as though an enchanted season were dawning beneath her clothes. And then, oh my God, what was this? Half frightened, half amazed, she confided in her mother, who sighed, stroked her hair, shed a few tears: Spring has arrived for you, dear. It was Solveig’s springtime, that was all. But no, that wasn’t all! Solveig was discovering around her a world transfigured. Different eyes looked at her now, formerly silent lips sang her praises, hitherto anonymous wills paid her homage. She sensed the birth of new power within her, and vague daydreams of conquest wended their way through her imagination. Left alone in the house one night, she’d tried on her sister Ethel’s dress, a long black dress adorned with silver. She’d walked solemn as a great lady in front of the mirror, responding with a slight nod to the bowing and scraping of an invisible court of admirers. And she certainly didn’t understand Marta Ruiz’s taste for violence. What pleased her in Lucio was something quite different, the way he flattered her with his adoring gaze, and the timid tremor in his voice when he spoke to her. And every time he danced with her, he trembled all over and let his eyes half close. Just like her dog Nero, that afternoon at siesta time when she’d been lying on the ram’s skin that Mister Chisholm had brought back from Patagonia, and she had rubbed Nero’s smooth, warm tummy. For Solveig sensed in Lucio a certain diffidence; and if things kept going in the direction they were headed now, she would know how to direct his talent, arouse his ambition, make a man of him, turn him into a “someone” — her, a mere girl! And Adam Buenosayres? Incomprehensible. Why did he leave her that Blue-Bound Notebook? She didn’t understand; she wasn’t an “intellectual” like her sister Ethel.

— Beethoven? Schultz rejoined. A tin-eared banjo-banger. Grieg? A squeeze-box from the sticks. They’ve stuffed human ears with vaseline, ears meant to listen to the music of the spheres!7

But Ethel Amundsen was having none of it. She shook her strong, Palas-like head, the light flashing from her curls as from a warrior’s helmet. She turned to Ruty Johansen, whose solid Valkyrian body shared the other sector of the sky-blue divan with Ethel.

— This crazy Schultz is quite hopeless, Ethel said.

And as she warbled these words, her friendly hand fell on Schultz’s thigh, oh, but lightly! Punishment or caress?

In either case, the astrologer Schultz received it in a speculative spirit: there was no denying that the gross manifestation of his individuality had just responded pleasurably to the brush of that hand. However, thanks to the gods, the astrologer’s subtle manifestation remained free of terrestrial fluids, his astral body perfectly intact.

Once he had reassured himself on that score, a colourless smile moulded itself on his plaster-of-Paris face:

— Stupid-making music, he added. Music for the deaf. Look, how many notes fit into the classical five-line staff? Just seven. Bah! I’ve designed a staff that handles twenty-eight.8

— God help us! exlaimed Ruty Johansen, horrified.

— And our musical instruments? Schultz went on, visibly displeased. We need to invent new ones. In Rome I had just about finished a pianosaxophone-drumset that was shaping up quite nicely.9

— Did you get it to work? asked Ruty.

— No.

— Why not?

— Saturn and Jupiter were messing around up there, muttered Schultz.

The engineer Valdez, bald and pudgy, studious and calm, penetrated Schultz with his cobra-like gaze.

— You go around reinventing everything, he warned. First it’s the language of Argentina, next our national ethnography, and now music. Better watch out! I can just see you with a crescent wrench in your hand, trying to loosen the nuts and bolts of the Solar System.

— The Great Demiurge, Schultz responded, sets us the example, ceaselessly modifying his work.

Ethel Amundsen repeated the punishment to his thigh.

— You know what your problem is? she said. You like to pose as a genius. The demon of originality torments you night and day.

— Me, original? rejoined Schultz with an air of complete astonishment.10

Ruty laughed out loud.

— That’s right, she said, confronting the astrologer in turn. What about the other night at the Menéndez house, when you ate that bouquet of hydrangeas?11

A sad smile dawned on Schultz’s face.

— That’s a good one! he grumbled. Four times a day you people eat anything and everything chewable you can find on the terraqueous globe, and then you get upset because I eat a couple of flowers.

— Okay, we’ll let the flowers pass, laughed Ethel. But you can’t tell me it’s normal to go up to greengrocer asleep at his stall and sniff him.

— He sniffed a sleeping greengrocer? asked Ruty, wide-eyed.

— At the Mercado de Abasto,12 three o’clock in the morning, testified Valdez.

Schultz inclined his brow in modesty.

— What’s so unusual about it? he said sweetly. A nose, if put to proper use, can glean interesting odours from a greengrocer’s body. The armpit area, for example, smells of damp earth, mouldy sacks, and sour sweat. The pelvic zone, on the other hand, gives off a scent of weeds and sheepfold, mixed with perceptible emanations of ammonia.

— That’s enough, Schultz! ordered Ethel Amundsen.

— And the feet steaming with slow fermentations…

— Enough! insisted Ethel, wrinkling her nose.

— The olfactory sense is despised nowadays, Schultz concluded. And yet its possibilities are infinite.

Ruty Johansen, a reclining Valkyrie, began to unfurl Wagnerian laughter. At the same time, Ethel Amundsen, suddenly serious, reflected with some bitterness on the intellectual decadence of the sex that claimed to be superior; men were so proud of their one-kilogram brains, but they wasted them on such nonsense as Schultz was spouting. Just you wait! Women were going to get their own back, and it wouldn’t be long before she recuperated the three hundred grams of grey matter that men had so perfidiously caused her to lose since the Stone Age.

Meanwhile, the engineer Valdez was scrutinizing Schultz’s countenance with the sharp eyes of a hypnotist.

— I’d like know, he demanded finally, if the criollo superman you’ve invented will have only five senses.

Curiosity flashed in Ruty’s eyes:

— What? You’ve invented a superman too?

— It’s grotesque, an abomination, asserted Ethel. A laboratory freak.

Schultz looked at her in mild reproach. Then, turning to Valdez, he said:

— First of all, I didn’t invent the Neocriollo.13 The Neocriollo will be produced naturally as a result of the astrological forces governing this country. Secondly, the Neocriollo will be endowed not with the five senses known to us in the West, but the eleven of the Orient.

— Schultz! pleaded Ruty. Tell us about the Neocriollo!

— There’s nothing otherworldly about him. Imagine, Ruty…

— Schultz, I absolutely forbid you! cried Ethel, aghast.

But Ruty Johansen insisted with her demand, and finally the engineer Valdez came up with a compromise solution:

— Let him tell us about the Neocriollo’s eleven senses, nothing more. Can you do that, Schultz?

— It’s nothing, grunted the astrologer, resisting. A kindergarten theorem.

— Don’t get him going! exclaimed Ethel in alarm.

— The Neocriollo! demanded Ruty, imperiously Wagnerian.

As though forced to explain a mere bagatelle, Schultz adopted a resigned attitude.

— All of you will admit, he began, that the Neocriollo is destined to realize the great possibilities of America, and that he must be born under the most favourable astrological conditions.

— Naturally, allowed Valdez with extreme gravity.

— Goes without saying! said Ruty.

— That being the case, continued Schultz, the Neocriollo’s senses will be more or less as follows. His right eye will be ruled by the sun, his left eye by the moon. Which means that through his solar eye, he will tend to see the light directly, while the lunar eye will see by virtue of reflected light. Or, to simplify further: the right eye will make him holy, and the left will make him scientific. The eyes will no longer be confined to their sockets; they will be exteriorized, on the tips of optic nerves some eight inches long and protrude like insect antennae, capable of extending up or down, right or left, depending on the object of vision. Furthermore, each eye, perched on its antenna, will be rotary, capable of turning on itself like a periscope, and will be fitted with an eyelid-diaphragm, ultra-sensitive to variations in the light.

Ruty Johansen was already shaking with stifled laughter.

— As for his ears, Schulz expounded, the right ear will correspond to Saturn and the left to Jupiter. With the right ear the Neocriollo will tune in to the music of the heavens; that is to say, the nine choirs of the angels. The other will listen to earthly music, which won’t be anything like Grieg or Beethoven. His outer ears, of course, will be shaped like two large microphone-funnels that can be oriented in the six spatial directions.

At this point Ruty released some of the laughter pent up in her body.

— He’s the man from Mars! she hooted.

— If you’re going to interrupt, Schultz told her, then I’ll just pack it up, and that’ll be that.

— Oh no, Ruty begged. I want you to tell me about the Neocriollo’s nose.

— It will be a beautiful nose, said the astrologer. Its right nostril will be ruled by Mars and the left one by Venus. Which means that the Neocriollo will breathe destructive furor through one side, and loving or constructive furor through the other. Imagine an enormous nose, with its windows wide open and pulsating, free of hairs and mucous.

— There he goes with the disgusting details, scolded Ethel.

But Schultz paid no attention.

— The Neocriollo’s tongue, he expounded gravely, will be an organ for both taste and expression, and will be under the dominion of Mercury. It will have the shape of a long, flexible ribbon, like the anteater’s tongue, and the Neocriollo will stick it into all kinds of places, avid for flavours. This means his mouth will be merely a small hole, and toothless, since the Neocriollo will no longer feed on gross substances — ah, no! He will subsist on all that is subtle in this world. And now I must describe his skin, the tactile organ. The Neocriollo will have a very large skin area, accommodating a prodigious number of nerve endings; and, logically, since it will be too big for his body, it will fall down around him in wrinkles and folds, like the skin of Merino lambs.

— A regular Beau Brummell! exclaimed Ruty.14

— I told you so, said Ethel Amundsen, indignant and amused. An abominable freak.

The engineer Valdez seemed to be looking at the Neocriollo in his imagination.

— Let’s just say he doesn’t have a lot of sex appeal, he finally allowed. There’s no accounting for taste, as my old mom used to say. But there are still five senses we haven’t heard about yet.

— Six, Schultz corrected. Five under the sign of Action, plus the single sense of Feeling.

— Go on.

— Don’t encourage him! Ethel pleaded with a worried air.

— If you’re just going to take it as a joke, said Schultz, we’d best drop it here.

But Ruty put on a contrite face, and the astrologer spoke thus:

— The organs of Action are the word, the hands, the feet, the digestive tract, and the instruments of generation. The language of the Neocriollo will be a cross between metaphysics and poetry, without logic or grammar. His hands and feet will be of a magnitude unknown at the present, and will operate on a complex system of second- and third-degree levers. I’ve already mentioned that the Neocriollo will feed on perfumes, dew, and other quintessences. Thanks to this diet, his digestive tract will be simplicity itself and will emit neither putrid gases nor repugnant shitlets.

— Schultz, Schultz! remonstrated Ethel, furrowing her Pallas-like brow.

— What are shitlets? asked Ruty impetuously.

— Now then, concluded Schultz, implacable, let us go on to consider his generative organs. The testicles will be ruled by the sign of Venus and the penis by Mercury. I shall now describe their forms.15

But Ethel Amundsen, splendid in her fury, was already on her feet.

— Schultz! she warned. One more word and I’m throwing you out.

The sense of relief in the salon was palpable when Ramona made her solemn entrance, pushing a cart loaded with clinking bottles. It was clear the tertulia was dying of thirst; dried-out glasses scattered here and there testified to the severity of a drought that was becoming worrisome. Only Mister Chisholm and Adam Buenosayres still held on to theirs, the former because he’d already exacted a new tribute from Ramona, detaining her in the vestibule with truly imperial circumspection, and Adam because he’d forgotten about the empty glass in his hand, distracted as he was by the soliloquy of his soul:

Come, sad friend!

In the shadow of the conservatory,

by the side of fraternal roses.16

He had been right to fear the crucial moment when the heavenly Solveig would be measured against the earthly Solveig. The confrontation had taken place. From now on, all that was left to him was the brackish taste of defeat, as he returned to his tremendous solitude, leading a poetic phantom by the hand. Weaver of smoke! Would he never learn? Yes, a phantom of light, engendered by the night that wept for its darkness; or was born of the solitude that wept for itself and fashioned a bit of music to keep itself company. Was that all?17

Adam Buenosayres contemplated Solveig; in her hands the Blue-Bound Notebook was a dead thing:

I, a potter seated upon the carpet of days

with what clay did I model your idol-like throat

and your legs that turn like streams?18

That’s what she was: clay to be moulded. And the work of his thumbs, wrought in her entirety by his own hands from head to foot, north to south, east to west, zenith to nadir, according to the three dimensions of earth and the fourth of poetry. Weaver of smoke! What for? So that night might not weep; so that solitude might bear a child.

My thumb formed your belly

smoother than the skin of nuptial drums,

and put strings in the new bow of your smile.

The work accomplished in his retreat, kneaded from silence and music. Come to life and breathe, powerful statue! Let red blood circulate in your veins of poetic marble! Ah, she moves not, nor burns! Pygmalion!

Now Solveig’s hands were rolling and unrolling the Blue-Bound Notebook.

Two parallel creatures, reflected Adam Buenosayres. God’s creature on the divan, mine in the Notebook. Perhaps made from the same clay. Two parallel lines, never to meet. And Don Bruno had humiliated him because he didn’t know the definition of parallel lines. But wait, wait! Something of his own remained in the ideal creature he’d forged: the number, measure, and weight of his vocation to love, the sum of his thirst, the physiognomy of his hope. And according to Don Bruno, parallel lines also converged, albeit in the Infinite. What about the others? What would he do with his heavenly Solveig?

Make the fruits ripen

and the rain leave its country of lamentation

idol of potters.

Adam recited the poem in his heart. So well did the verses resonate with the colour of his thought that he felt within a kind of musical excitement that announced the precise moment when the stuff of pain transmuted into the stuff of art. Idol of potters! Whom was he invoking in that prayer? A woman made of literature, who could neither listen nor respond to him from the pages of the Blue-Bound Notebook. What to do, then, with the heavenly Solveig? Fine! Just as he’d given her body, soul, existence, and language, he would also give her a poetic death. He himself would carry the mortal remains of the heavenly Solveig in his arms. For want of earth in which to bury her, he would invent an opulent literary interment. He would do it that very night in the room of his torments, in a solitude shredded by sobs. The Blue-Bound Notebook would have a second part: a cursed funeral and a liturgy of ghosts, their eyes pouring tears down to their feet.

At this point, Adam observed, as so many times before, two external signs about to betray his turmoil: a deep inhalation painful to the chest and an affluence of tears to his eyes. Fearing he might be found out, he took a quick look around the tertulia: by the window, the three ladies engaged in animated conversation; atop his ladder Mister Chisholm struggled with a recalcitrant strip of wallpaper. Marta Ruiz and the engineer were now holding forth on the sky-blue divan. And in the metaphysical sector, the argument was again heating up, Samuel Tesler dominating the conversation as usual. Adam calmed down: it was clear nobody was looking at him. But at the same time he felt the urgent need to let his voice join all the other voices, to share in that audible world, to melt completely into the tertulia, if only to forget himself and set aside the commotion in his soul. A truce! More desperate than thirsty, he knocked back his whisky at a single gulp. As he turned to set down his empty glass, the enigmatic Ramona appeared at his side with another glass filled to the brim. Ancient Hebe. Silent Hebe. Merciful Hebe, ministering angel.

Señora Amundsen underlined her confidential remark with a telling gesture.

— Was it hard? Señora Ruiz asked her in a hushed voice.

— Like a rock. And only once a week or so. And thanks to a laxative of castor oil, belladonna, and henbane — I had to take it on an empty stomach every morning.

Señora Ruiz considered these details with the condescension of a veteran warrior listening to a novice bragging about his first taste of battle. For her part, Señora Johansen listened in visible sadness; bitter memories seemed to be coming back to her, for two furrows crossed her forehead and her chin sank reflectively into her fat neck.

— Yes, she sighed finally. Something similar happened to me when I had Ruty.

— Constipation? asked Señora Amundsen.

— Probably a mere trifle, Señora Ruiz intervened disdainfully. Something quite “banal” as Doctor Aguilera would say.

— How do you know? grumbled Señora Johansen resentfully.

Peevish, half amused, Señora Ruiz looked at the two stupid old women who dared speak of their trivial aches and pains to her — to her, of all people! “How do you know?” indeed! If her nine surgical operations all in a row didn’t give her the right to pronounce herself on these matters, may the Lord shut her mouth and strike her dead!

— It’s those long days lying abed brings on the constipation, she finally declared. Doctor Aguilera always told me so.

— At any rate, my bowels didn’t move for two weeks, explained Señora Johansen in a piteous voice.

But Señora Ruiz frowned.

— Impossible! she objected. No one can go two weeks without a bowel movement.

— Two whole weeks, not a day less, Señora Johansen insisted stubbornly.

— Strange, mused Señora Ruiz. I’ll have to ask Doctor Aguilera about that.

— And how did you feel? asked Señora Amundsen. Any cold sweats, cramps, nausea?

— It was like I had a big lump of lead in my stomach, asserted Señora Johansen, quivering at the mere recollection.

Señora Ruiz’s wizened face brightened with a sudden enthusiasm. Stupid old women! What did they know about nausea and chills? She evoked her nine operations like so many glorious days of battle. She could as easily stretch out on the operating table as lie down for an afternoon nap on her lemon-yellow sofa.

— Trifles, she said dismissively, neither proud nor modest.

Then she leaned toward the other two and asked in a low voice:

— Do you know what a faecal bolus is?

Señoras Johansen and Amundsen waited in suspense.

— So you don’t know? insisted Señora Ruiz, already savouring her triumph. It’s faecal matter that accumulates and hardens into a ball in the intestine.

— Goodness gracious! exclaimed Señora Amundsen.

“Silly old bags!” thought Señora Ruiz. They had never known the anxious pleasure of putting one’s faecal matter in a nickel flask and one’s urine in a clear bottle and taking it all to Doctor Aguilera; nor could they imagine the frisson when Doctor Aguilera sniffed and prodded those ignoble materials, then dignified them with flattering scientific names.

— Massages, purges, enemas — nothing touches it! she went on. The bolus won’t budge, and every day it gets bigger and bigger.

— Can it be possible? murmured Señora Johansen in alarm.

— I ought to know! Señor Ruiz rejoined. Doctor Aguilera took one out of me the size of an ostrich egg.

— I can’t believe it, said Señora Amundsen.

— If you doubt my word, just go to Doctor Aguilera’s office. He still has it there in a glass jar.

Certainty on the one hand, astonishment on the other. Looking in wonder at the rickety figure of Señora Ruiz, Señora Johansen struggled to understand how that stick of a body could produce so wondrous a faecal bolus. Señora Amundsen, on the other hand, sad as sad can be, meditated on how cruelly fate brings plagues raining down upon man, the poor human being who must live out a few wretched days in this world of misery. Señora Ruiz, for her part, was digesting her victory, congratulating herself for the lesson in modesty she’d just given that pair of old fools. She felt exultation rising up irrepressibly from within as she recalled the nine surgical epics starring herself in the lead role — her, all alone! Swathed in gowns of lilac, white and pink, she’d been at the centre of a phalanx of illustrious doctors revolving around her like planets. And foremost among them was Doctor Aguilera, resplendent as an Olympian god.

Marta Ruiz’s skirt had worked its way up a little too high. She gave it a quick tug, clamped it between bony knees, and turned back to the Amundsen sisters, who were listening attentively.

— A darling blouse, she mused, entirely hand-sewn, in lawn. Imagine a jabot made of tiny pleats festooned with genuine lace. It has a high collar with a tie of the same material, and long sleeves with cuffs that end in flounces done with the same pleats and lace as the jabot. It’s just divine!

— What dress would you wear it with? asked Haydée Amundsen with interest.

— I’m thinking about my tailored suit, Marta said hesitantly. Although I wouldn’t mind wearing it with a garnet skirt.

Haydée scowled in disapproval.

— Why garnet?

— Red and white, replied Marta, are the colours that go best with a dark complexion. I’ve tried blues and greens. A disaster, my dear!

But Haydée disagreed. She detested red, even though her fair skin handled it quite well. But she could die for pale blue or navy blue or even dark violet, three colours that enhanced her white complexion and her flaming bronze hair.

— For the fall season, she said, I think I’ll go for the blue silk outfit we saw the other day at Ibrahim the Turk’s store.

— Have you picked out the style? asked Marta.

— Hmm, what do you think about the deux pièces, with a silk print écharpe around the neck?

Marta reflected for a moment.

— Not bad, she decided. But in that case I’d recommend the jambon sleeves.

— How’s that?

— My dear, answered Marta. They’d give your shoulders a little more width, because they are a little narrow.

Haydée bit her lips. The comment had hit the mark.

And Solveig Amundsen? Wearing silks and satins, or a clinging gold lamé dress, she would descend the triumphal steps by the light of great chandeliers or candelabras, passing before the admiring eyes of plenipotentiaries. Heron or peacock feathers on her forehead of bronze: her plumage fluttering in the subtle breeze of praise, and in that breeze alone! Marten furs or astrakhans draped over her shoulders as she stood beside sleighs drawn by horses, their hooves stamping the hard snow. Or autumnal plaids, as she walks through an English garden, her two greyhounds sniffing the yellow leaves, the dead beetles. Or printed fabrics and brightly coloured kerchiefs at the seaside. Or perhaps…

Lucio Negri could not understand the closed-mindedness, the obtuse intelligence, the stone-age mentality of those who refused to recognize the ascendent direction of Progress, a reality so obvious that only eyes blinded by outmoded obscurantism could fail to see it. How could one not cry out in admiration and laugh with joy at the marvels of the contemporary world, so full of novel surprises and so fertile in inventions, through which man, surpassing himself, now dominated the dark forces of Nature and reduced them unconditionally to his service? And what about Science, which through the effort of patient workers was cracking, one by one, the secrets of the universe we inhabit?

Señor Johansen, though silent, heartily applauded such convincing avowals. And his fatherly heart could not help picking out this wise young doctor as the ideal husband urgently needed by Ruty, in view of her twenty-eight years and a vocation to matrimony that was threatening to get out of control. Why not? Chance encounters tended to produce such miracles, and these society gatherings were organized for such praiseworthy ends… But wait a minute! The Jew was talking now.

For his part, Samuel Tesler not only recognized technical progress, but he didn’t mind admitting that certain mechanical inventions (aviation, electric refrigeration, radiotelephony) produced an instant erection in his virile member — a phenomenon, he went on to say, that left no doubt as to his enthusiasm for the cult of machinery. But when he considered that this whole conquest had come at the cost of the most formidable spiritual regression of all time, he, Samuel Tesler, trusted in the sanction of his bladder and pissed buckets on Progress and every single one of its miracles.

With a fervor not entirely unrelated to his second whisky, Adam Buenosayres approved of Tesler’s words and seconded his concluding urinary judgment. Under the influence of the heat in his entrails, a vigorous instinct to fight was awakening within him.

— What cannot be denied, he said, is that the history of man has followed and continues to follow a progressive…

— Aha! So, you finally admit it? interrupted Lucio.

— A progressive descent, concluded Adam, and not an ascent, as modernism seems to believe.

— And how do you know it’s a descent?

— A tradition common to all races, Adam argued, describes the first man as newly born from the hands of a God — a divine work, a perfect work that went quite downhill over time.

— That God really is a convenient joker, laughed Lucio. It’s the wild card that serves as the basis of all kinds of absurd explanations.

Samuel Tesler looked at Adam with eyes damp with melancholy.

— There’s nothing to be done about it, he mused. He prefers his Darwinian monkey. Another joker, but a lot uglier.

But Lucio paid the philosopher no attention and returned to the attack:

— If man once lived in a better age, why is it that it hasn’t left a single memory?

— All traditions remember a Golden Age, answered Adam.

Lucio Negri turned to Señor Johansen.

— Have you ever heard of the Golden Age? he asked him quite seriously.

— Never, said Señor Johansen. Aren’t we living it now?

— For you, yes! groaned Samuel Tesler.

— It’s like this, explained Lucio. In the Golden Age men were born wise. They had no need to work, and ate all the fruits of the earth free of charge. Springs didn’t give us water, as they do now; they were fountains of red wine or white, a piacere. Streams flowed with pasteurized milk, rivers with honey, et cetera, et cetera.

Frankly amused, Señor Johansen gave Lucio a look of solidarity. Hell of a young fellow! What a fine husband for Ruty! Then, his little eyes darting between Adam Buenosayres and Samuel Tesler, he wondered regretfully how two men with intellectual pretensions could talk such old-fashioned claptrap.

— And another thing, Lucio went on. If in fact there ever existed a Golden Age with such sublime men, how is it they haven’t left any monuments, ruins of great cities, or even the slightest trace of their grandiose civilization? Archeologists dig in the earth, and what do they find? Silica knives, arrowheads, bone harpoons, vestiges of a primitive humanity that certainly didn’t enjoy a very comfortable existence. Rivers of milk and honey! Don’t make me laugh!

Señor Johansen was all a-quiver with enthusiasm. “Let them put that in their pipe and smoke it,” he said to himself. “What have they got to say to that?”

But Samuel was boiling over:

— Don’t you make me laugh! he exclaimed, stepping aggressively toward Lucio. Man in the Golden Age was sublimely intelligent and wasn’t subject to gross necessity. His only work was to contemplate Oneness in creatures and creatures in Oneness. Why the hell would he bother about monuments, aqueducts, and flush toilets?

— Of course! said Lucio ironically. He despised action.

— He didn’t need it, the philosopher corrected him. Action would come later, in the inferior stages, until it culminated in this Iron Age we’re living now. This age of ours that pits the pure action of iron-age man against the pure contemplation of golden-age man.

The philosopher gave Adam a quick look and hissed:

— Let them choke on that bone!

Then, spreading his legs wide open in his armchair, he insisted:

— That’s not all. Let’s suppose that the original man did feel a creative urge and built colossal monuments. Do you have any idea how long ago the Golden Age would have flourished?

Lucio Negri made a vaguely dismissive gesture.

— Pile on the centuries, he grumbled. We’re adrift in pure fantasy, anyway.

— According to the Hindus, came Samuel’s lesson, the Golden Age lasted nearly two million years. Then came the Silver, Bronze, and Iron ages. Between one age and the next there were terrible cataclysms that completely changed the face of the earth. So tell me, how could there possibly be any ruins left lying around to keep the archeologists amused?

Señor Johansen, against his will, was impressed.

— Cataclysms? he asked Samuel with a worried look.

— The most recent catastrophe, the philosopher assured him, was the Universal Flood, which all traditions remember. Moses puts it at about 2,300 years before Christ, a calculation that coincides with that of most Asian peoples. The Greek Apollodorus considers that deluge to mark the passage between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, and…

“Ah, would that I had not lived in this generation of men, that I had either died before or been born after! For now we are in the Iron Age!” Adam Buenosayres mentally recited the elegy of good old Hesiod, who was already lamenting this Iron Age back in his time: “Men will waste away with toil and misery during the day and will be corrupted throughout the night. They will sack one another’s cities. There will be neither kindness nor justice nor good actions, but rather men will give their praise to the violent and evil man.” A prophecy, clearly. At the same time Adam reflected on the mystery of the earth’s having been wounded and scarred several times over, now sinking into the sea with its harvest of autumnal men, now rising up again from the waves, naked and virgin once more, to give itself joyfully to new human possibilities. As though the globe were no more than the theatre of a divine comedy, whose stage décor changed according to the libretto. And now? The end of an act, probably: “And the sky shall be rolled up like a scroll.” For some time now he’d been intuiting within himself the gravitation of four ages; it was a fatigue that grew from somewhere beyond his infancy and was assuaged by the promise of a death defined as a return to the original stillness and the blessed beginning of beginnings. And (he now realized) it was a longing to return that informed the plaintive pages of the Blue-Bound Notebook which Solveig’s hands were now torturing. Moreover, his nocturnal nostalgia sighed and brooded over the delightful images of the distant Golden Age that Samuel Tesler evoked with more erudition than sadness — the morning of humanity, when man was newborn and already dying as he contemplated his Cause! And the creatures as radiant as the letters of a book that spoke with wonderful transparency! Yes, why have I not “died before or been born after”? Above all, why is human happiness possible only in a garden in whose centre grows the tree of mortal fruit? Lucio Negri was wrong: the Golden Age had left a monument, not here on earth where things change, but in the soul of man. It was the mutilated statue of a happiness that we’ve been vainly trying to reconstruct ever since.

Adam Buenosayres interrupted his train of thought. Again he was feeling the two dangerous symptoms — deep inhalation and a flow of tears to his eyes. “Don’t do anything inappropriate,” he said to himself. He listened.

— How will the Iron Age end? Señor Johansen was asking. He had listened fearfully to the story of floods.

The philosopher gave him a paternal look.

— Don’t be afraid, he said. Elohim himself has promised there will be no more floods.

Then he smiled beatifically and added:

— Next time around, the world will be destroyed by fire.

— Holy smokes! croaked Señor Johansen, scratching his Adam’s apple.

But Lucio Negri let out a guffaw, and Señor Johansen regained his composure.

— When? he inquired, just in case.

— At the end of this century, answered Samuel with absolute sang-froid.

Señor Johansen sighed. There was still time!

The wallpapering job was finished, and Mister Chisholm, perched on his stepladder, was entirely surrounded by a blood-red sky where a thousand blue birds fluttered in a whirlwind.

— Good, rasped Mister Chisholm in English, obviously satisfied with his work.

He looked toward the parlour. Through the cigarette smoke he could make out the silhouettes of seven or eight figures vaguely gesturing. But he heard with clarity the hubbub of voices: the tertulia had grown livelier, and the tinkle of girlish laughter was joined by the sudden clangour of disputatious voices and the clucking of matrons. Mister Chisholm felt isolated in his sky of blood. He took a swig from his glass and found it dry; he sucked on his pipe, but it was cold. Alone. Mister Chisholm was alone among his blue birds. Desolate? Perhaps. But the fact was, legions of island-men like him were opportunely distributed across the globe, sustaining the most formidable empire this world had ever seen. At this thought, Mister Chisholm stood up straight on his ladder, his eyes instinctively seeking the sea.

Just then, the horde irrupted into the vestibule — Luis Pereda, Franky Amundsen, Del Solar, and the pipsqueak Bernini.19 Four individuals already illustrious in the annals of partying and folklore, they hit the vestibule like a windstorm. The first to enter was Luis Pereda; short-sighted, rowdy, he hazarded a few steps and bumped into the stepladder. Mister Chisholm swayed perilously in the heights.

— Hello, Mister Chisholm! Franky Amundsen shouted in English.

— Excuse me, sir! Pereda boomed, also in English, and passed on like a blind boar.

— Savages! muttered Mister Chisholm, teeth clenched around his pipe.

The four inimitable heroes entered the parlour and were received with cries of joy. Suddenly, Bernini stopped his comrades mid-room.

— Look! he told them, pointing at the diverse groupings. Just as I told you. Men on one side and women on the other. The disjunction of the sexes. Buenos Aires’s great problem!

But Franky, Del Solar, and Pereda continued toward the liquor table; once there, at the udder of the milch-cow, they abundantly replenished the vigour they’d expended on who knows what generous adventures. The pipsqueak Bernini, making no secret of his demographic concerns, headed for the metaphysical sector where he was received with open arms. Not that the three drinkers despised the sort of profound matters Bernini had just raised; on the contrary, once the libations required by their fervent devotion to Mercury had been duly executed, they again took up the inquiry they were racking their brains over. Namely, what was the exact nature of the Compadrito mil novecientos, the Turn-of-the-Century Dude? And what changes had this amazing human type undergone as a result of the influx, since 1900, of new racial contingents to the Great Capital of the South? Leading the discussion was none other than Luis Pereda, undisputed authority on this difficult subject. Brandishing a vinyl disk recorded in 1903 for the department store Gath y Chaves,20 he was about to demonstrate a thesis that at the moment was encountering serious resistance.

— So let’s hear that record, proposed Del Solar. He was sucking at an ivory cigarette holder about half a mile long that looked like it belonged in the boudoir of some cocotte.

But Franky Amundsen was one of those sterile fellows who always have to spit their skepticism on the virgin rose of any enthusiasm. His intellectual baggage, acquired exclusively from detective stories and pirate novels, not only disqualified him for any legitimate intercourse in the field of literature and the arts but was also responsible for his proclivity to erupt in totally anachronistic oaths and curses, thanks to which, in his understanding, he cut the figure of a buccaneer from the Tortuga Islands.21

— By the beard of the Prophet! growled Franky. If that isn’t a stupid disk, may I be eaten alive by ants!

Franky’s curse notwithstanding, the three champions made for the phonograph in a corner of the parlour. Franky, with ironic elegance, wound up the antiquated machine, while Luis Pereda rooted around anxiously in a welter of records, very much as a wild boar uses his snout to snuffle in the earth for some succulent tuber.

— Here it is! he cried at last. The taita of 1900, the genuine article!

With trembling hand, he removed the record from its sleeve, placed it on the turntable, and lowered the armature. The phonograph emitted a twangy voice:

Comin’ down the line

was an Anglo-Argentine tram

when it came upon a wagon

with its wheels jammed in the track.

“Hey Bud, get outta the road!”

said the tram-driver to the wagoner.22

Impossible to convey in words Luis Pereda’s ecstasy when the second-last line was wailed.

— Listen to that voice! he said triumphantly. It’s the original malevo, the gaucho who’s just come into the city. Not a trace of Italian influence yet!

“If they don’t bring a rope,

my wagon’s gonna be stuck

in the tracks all day long!”

The tram-driver, gettin’ mad

shouts back: “How ’bout a knuckle sandwich

big mouth!”

At this point Pereda’s ecstasy gave way to a wave of pugnacity that shook him right down to his toes.

— Atta boy! he shouted and laughed, swaggering like a taita ready to take on an army.23

Franky watched him with a kind of glacial melancholy.

— Terrific! he said, pointing at Pereda. They send him to study Greek at Oxford, literature at the Sorbonne, and philosophy in Zurich. And when he comes home to Buenos Aires, he goes soft in the head over record-industry criollismo, poor sod!

The nasal twang from the phonograph was getting more excited:

The wagoner

parries the knife-thrust

and after a couple more

goes hard for the tram-driver

who, had he not been nimble

and stopped the blow in mid-air

woulda had his guts sliced open

like a field watermelon.

Pereda was laughing so hard, it hurt the eardrums.

— He’s out of his mind! scolded Franky. If this ain’t a case of mental masturbation, the ants can eat me alive!

But at that moment, from the metaphysical sector of the tertulia, an irate voice was heard.

— What does he want? asked Pereda, turning a nobly aggressive mug toward the metaphysicals.

— Shut that goddam phonograph up! Samuel Tesler answered.

Franky Amundsen turned off the machine and went over to the philosopher of Villa Crespo, his two buddies naturally following hard on his heels.

— What’s up, what’s the matter? he said melliflously, patting the back of Samuel’s neck as though soothing a furious cat.

The philosopher pointed at Lucio Negri with an index digit that ended in a long, doleful fingernail.

— I need absolute silence! he demanded. I’m trying to flush a vestige of metaphysical intelligence out of this man.

— Any luck? asked Franky.

— Negative.

— I feared as much.

Taking his eyes off the sky-blue divan, Lucio showed signs of wanting to speak. But Franky stopped him with an authoritarian gesture.

— Silence! he ordered. I’ll bet our philosopher dared demonstrate in public the immortality of the soul.

— You’ve got it, laughed Lucio.

— That’s right, said Señor Johansen, sensing in Franky a new and powerful ally.

Franky Amundsen looked from one to the other pessimistically, then turned to the philosopher:

— I’ll bet, he said, pointing at Lucio, that the young medico has just publicly denied the immortality of the soul.

— Immortality? groaned Samuel. He denies the very existence of the soul.

— Soulless wretch! exclaimed Franky, leveling an accusing index finger at Lucio.

Passing a nostalgic gaze around the room, he added:

— Belly of the whale! To think that my ancestral home has degenerated into a philosophical bordello!

He turned around abruptly and faced the group, a fanatical gleam in his eye.

— Well then, he said mysteriously. As an anonymous citizen, the humblest louse in the world, I can tell you about a fool-proof method for demonstrating the existence of the soul.

Astonished voices, incredulous laugher from the metaphysical sector.

— Yes, Franky Amundsen assured them. When some benighted pagan dares deny the existence of the soul, there is only one sure-fire way of showing him he has one.

— How? asked Señor Johansen.

— By breaking it for him!24

Applause engulfed Franky, who saluted the crowd like boxer, joining his hands above his head of red hair. Suddenly, his brow clouded over and he addressed Luis Pereda.

— Blood of a walrus! he said bitterly. For such idiotic trifles, these pagans made us turn off the compadrito mil novecientos!

Now Bernini’s hour had arrived. Cutting-edge sociologist, the pipsqueak had been born (if we are to believe the horoscope Schultz drew up) under a peculiar set of astrological conjunctions and oppositions, such that for every human problem his mind found a solution that some qualified as whorish and others as rigorously scientific, but which in any case invariably had something to do with the union, as difficult as it is pleasurable, of the two sexes.

— Intellectual squabbles, he pontificated, brawls at the soccer stadium, back-biting in the political meeting hall. What are they, when all’s said and done? Escape valves for a sexually repressed people.

— The sexual problem! Franky announced ominously.

Samuel’s ironic guffaw joined Pereda’s laugh in a thunderous chord.

— Go ahead and laugh! Bernini reprehended. Statistics show an alarming imbalance in the ratio of men to women.25

Franky grabbed him roughly by the lapels:

— Let’s have the hard numbers! he shouted. According to your pimpish statistics, how many women does each of us men get?

— Half a woman! lamented Bernini.

Franky could not conceal his relief.

— I’m in the clear! he exclaimed. Give me the half I’ve got coming to me. Blood of a walrus! Half a woman is better than none.

Then he added, eyes glinting mischievously:

— But with one condition.

— What condition? asked Bernini.

— That I get the half from the waist down.

Annoyed and worried, Señor Johansen put his index finger to his lips and pointed with his other hand at the girls on the sky-blue divan.

— Shhh! he begged. Not so loud!

But Samuel Tesler was glowering.

— How can they make the human enigma turn on the question of sex! he grumbled. The beast crowned with flowers.

— And why not? said Lucio Negri. According to Freud…

— Freud is a German pig! Samuel interrupted, as if he were talking about the devil himself.

Lucio Negri subjected him to a bilious smile.

— My understanding is that Freud belongs to the “chosen people,” he retorted blandly.

With a gesture of intimate pain, the philosopher acknowledged the blow.

— That’s the worst of it, he said. He belongs to a theological race, a race he’s dishonoured.

And getting to his feet, he waxed mightily wroth in conclusion:

— Any prestige that outcast has come to enjoy is thanks to the international bourgeoisie. In Freud’s psychology they find scientific justification for their worst vices. That’s it in a nutshell!

— Bravo! shouted Franky, fervently pressing the philosopher’s hand, which Samuel had raised as if to condemn urbi et orbi.

— An anarchist! squealed Señor Johansen. Just as I feared!

Trembling with indignation, Lucio Negri got to his feet.

— I’m leaving, he said. This is a loony-bin.

And without further ado, he abandoned the field of battle where he’d given and received so many honourable wounds. Neither vanquished nor victorious, Lucio Negri headed for the sky-blue divan along the path of a soft look that had been beckoning him, inviting him to abandon the wrath of war.

To convey the commotion now felt by Señor Johansen when he saw his young ally leave is a task verging on the impossible. Faithful to his hyperborean nature, Señor Johansen put coldness aside and entered a state of belligerent ardour he could scarce contain for another second.

— Barbarity! he stammered, indicating the philosopher who was once more sitting in his armchair. This gentleman is a raving lunatic!

— Good, good! said Pereda. So the Bear from Lapland is getting into it too?

Samuel Tesler considered Señor Johansen with retrospective malevolence:

— This gentleman, he said, was weeping tears of joy when that charlatan was singing the praises of progress.

— I haven’t cried at all, retorted Señor Johansen with absolute innocence, but also very angry.

Franky Amundsen intervened once again.

— Watch out! he warned without hiding his alarm. The Bear from Lapland is timid, but when he gets mad, stay out of his way.

Thrilled at having this new adversary, Samuel wagged his finger at Señor Johansen.

— This man, he said, labours under the unfortunate misconception that he has the right to talk about things he does not understand, never has, and never will.

Pereda turned to Franky.

— Hmm, he said. The Lion of Judah is showing his claws.

— But the Bear is no slouch, Franky replied. Quiet! The Bear’s speaking.

Adopting a dignified air, Señor Johansen looked at Samuel Tesler with great humanity.

— I may not be a man of learning, he declared, but I do have something that you don’t: experience in life.

— Good for the Bear! exclaimed Franky. The Bear speaks like an open book.

A deceptively indulgent smile stole across Samuel’s face.

— Let’s see, he said, facing his rival. How old are you, anyway?

— Fifty-seven, answered Señor Johansen cautiously.

— Well, declared the philosopher. I’m forty centuries old.

His declaration was greeted with astonishment. No one, even in his most optimistic reckoning, had imagined such incredible longevity.

— You’re crazy! protested Señor Johansen, stupefied.

— Either the Lion is lying, observed Franky, or he’s as old as pissing against the wall.

Samuel Tesler raised his arm in a gesture entreating calm.

— I mean, he said as though pregnant with secrets, that my experience has been accumulated over the course of forty centuries, through numerous reincarnations.

— A madman! Señor Johansen insisted.

— Moreover, added Samuel, you will recall that intelligence is a metaphysical gift. One is born intelligent just as one is born blond.

His eyes turned to examine the chubby figure of Señor Johansen.

— Now then, he expounded magisterially, do me the favour of palpating the gentleman’s cranium. Hard as a rock!

— That’s enough insults! shouted Señor Johansen.

— Forty centuries of humanity, concluded Tesler, and a hundred philosophical doctrines could pass over that cranium without leaving the slightest trace.

Señor Johansen teetered on the edge of defeat.

— It’s outrageous, he choked, almost voiceless.

Pereda turned to Franky Amundsen.

— The Bear’s on the ropes! he cried. The Bear is completely groggy!

Franky lowered his red head.

— The Lion’s too nimble, he murmured. Nobody would take him for forty centuries old!

It was true: Señor Johansen was defeated. With more disdain than bitterness, he turned his back on the group to leave, just as the phegmatic Mister Chisholm approached from across the room. Their respective right hands met and clicked with mechanical urbanity. From their hushed conversation, only the odd word was audible: “obstreperous colonials” from Mister Chisholm; “beyond belief” from Señor Johansen, still stammering and looking askance at the metaphysical sector.

Meanwhile, night was falling and darkness was enveloping the parlour. Adam Buenosayres looked at a bit of sky through the window opening onto the garden. Perhaps the terrestrial melancholy of the autumn evening seeped momentarily into his soul, for he felt forthwith a crazy urge to make a clean escape into the enormous, silent spaces of the wide-open sky, hard and cold as a gem. But the lights of the chandelier suddenly switched on, and Adam turned his gaze back to the tertulia where the actors, under the new lighting, were becoming more boisterous. A gust of hilarity was just hitting the ladies’ group. Señora Johansen was laughing noisily, her spongy flesh shaking beneath her clothes like a water-filled balloon. Señora Amundsen laughed a sonorous counterpoint, and even Señora Ruiz discreetly joined in, her hatchet face managing a half-smile. Lucio Negri was now among the denizens of the divan, sitting beside Solveig with the most distracted air imaginable. Adam thought he’d seen Lucio’s hand furtively draw away from Solveig’s just as the lights came on. But he wasn’t sure, maybe it was an optical illusion. Did it matter any more? No. Really? Weaver of smoke! At the far end of the sky-blue divan, not much was new; the astrologer Schultz was speaking to the engineer, Ethel, and Ruty, all of them apparently spellbound.

Adam’s observations were interrupted by a chorus of laughter in his own sector. Franky Amundsen, haughty as a self-important nurse, was approaching solemnly, rolling the cart of drinks before him.

— Let us drink, now that we have peace, Franky invited, stopping the drink cart with a truly maternal solicitude.

Not waiting to have their arms twisted, Del Solar, Pereda, Buenosayres, and the pipsqueak Bernini all accepted a glass and a benediction from Franky. But Samuel Tesler had retreated into sullen silence after the battle and now refused Franky’s generosity.

— Come on, now! cried Franky. Let’s go ashore and hit the bottle! Blood of the whale, have a little humanity! Even Plato, if memory serves, used to drink like a sailor after he’d demonstrated the squaring of the circle.

As he served Señor Johansen and Mister Chisholm, still whispering together in private, Franky exhorted them:

— Pax, gentlemen! Pax vobiscum.

There followed a general flexing of elbows. Even Samuel Tesler, having given in to Franky’s eloquence, raised a glass more out of courtesy than any other motive.

Then Franky suddenly turned to Del Solar.

— I’ve got an idea! he cried, pointing at Buenosayres and Samuel Tesler. These comrades have to come with us tonight.

— Where? asked Adam.

— Shhh! Franky silenced him. A creoley-toughguyee-whorey-suburbyfuneral adventure, as comrade Schultz would say.26

But Del Solar was frowning.

— It’s dangerous, he declared. We’re gonna be hangin’ out with the kind of heavies you don’t mess with.

— Will the taita Flores be there? Pereda wanted to know.

— For sure, Del Solar answered, giving him a significant look.

— Hmm, growled Pereda. If Flores is going to be there, we’ll have to think this over carefully.

This brief exchange between the two criollista leaders charged the atmosphere with a sense of mystery, of lurking danger. Unfortunately, Franky Amundsen couldn’t leave well enough alone.

— One hell of night it’s gonna be, he anounced. By the beard of the Prophet! We’ll get down and dirty on the outskirts of town and up to our balls in criollismo. Are we or are we not talking about a journey to hell? Yes? So that’s why the poet and the philosopher’ve gotta come along, or I know bugger all about the classics.

— Okay, it’s fine by me if they want to come, muttered Del Solar, looking dubiously at Tesler and Buenosayres. But they’ll have to keep their heads up and their mouths shut. Otherwise, I can’t answer for the consequences.

A look of irritation mixed with pity suffused the face of the philosopher from Villa Crespo. He was not unaware of the harm suffered by the current generation due to a doctrine of heretical principles and dubious ends. Concocted in the impure crucible of some irresponsible coterie, it had taken off in a manner unprecedented in the history of our national metaphyics, fully justifying the cries of alarm being heard on all sides. Criollismo was the name of this obscure heterodoxy, and whether it was inspired by Old Nick himself, we’ll only know on Judgment Day toward nightfall. Upon dissecting that body of doctrine with the zealous scalpel of inflexible orthodoxy, one quickly came to realize that it was all about taking certain shady characters from suburban Buenos Aires, whose deeds were memorialized in police files, and raising them to the level of Olympian gods. Now, our philosopher belonged to a race which, although in the course of its frequent migrations it had burned incense at the altar of quite a few foreign divinities, could still boast of having maintained intact the gold of its own tradition. So it was no surprise that that attempt at barbarous idolatry caused Samuel Tesler to cloud over from head to foot.27

— The lengths bad literature can go to! he said. To the point of turning a couple of harmless thugs into national heroes!

— Harmless, the taita Flores? protested Del Solar, scandalized.

— Sure, just a kid! Pereda laughed loudly. Only twenty-two charges on his police record!

The philosopher looked at him sarcastically.

— Probably a pathetic chicken-thief, he said. I’ve got a mind to come with you tonight just to have it out with this joker Flores, slap him around a bit.

Uncontrollable laughter erupted. Franky Amundsen, perplexed, went up to the philosopher and felt his biceps.

— This is what I call a man! he declared solemnly.

But Samuel Tesler pushed him away, drunk with aggression.

— I’ve had it up to here with criollista nonsense, he said. It started with singing the praises of that gaucho^28 who bummed around out there on the pampa — or so you people say, though it cuts no ice with me — out there where nowadays Italian farmers are sweating in their fields. And now you’re picking on those poor sods in the suburbs, mixing them up in a sorry literature of tough guys and dance-hall Romeos!

As the philosopher talked on, Del Solar was turning every colour imaginable. Images of his forebears went filing by in his memory, heroes wearing the tunic of liberation armies or the chiripá of feudal ranchers. Men with tough beards and tender hearts, out there on the native pampas among proud horses. At the same time, Señor Johansen and Mister Chisholm joined the group, attracted by Samuel Tesler’s violent words.

— Devout remembrance of things native, stammered Del Solar, deathly pale, is all we criollos have left, ever since the wave of foreigners invaded the country. And now the same foreigners are making a mockery of our sorrow! It’s enough to make you weep with rage!

— Bravo! applauded Franky. This calls for a guitar!

— I’m serious! Del Solar warned him acridly. It’s true the influx of foreigners put us on the road to progress. On the other hand, it has destroyed our traditions. We’ve been tempted and corrupted!

— Absolutely right! the pipsqueak Bernini corroborated, pawing the ground like a steed anxious to enter the fray.

But Adam Buenosayres intervened unexpectedly:

— I’d say it happened the other way around.

— What do you mean? asked Del Solar.

— That our country is the one that tempts and corrupts, and the foreigner is the one who has been tempted and corrupted.

The utterance of this unheard-of doctrine produced a shock wave throughout the sector.

— That’s preposterous! protested Bernini.

— Let’s hear his reasoning! Pereda demanded. Quiet!

— I speak as a second-generation Argentine and as a close descendant of Europeans, Adam began, already regretting that he’d got himself into this futile controversy. To get some insight into my country and myself, I needed to visit the old country, the land of my parents, and see how those people lived before emigrating. I saw them in their villages, where they scratched out a tough living from their fields. They had a heroic sense of existence; whether happy or resigned, they had discipline, faith in God, the stability of their customs. I’ve seen them: that’s how they were and still are. What did our country do when it dazzled them with the perspective of getting rich? It tempted them.

Franky Amundsen was showing signs of consternation.

— Schultz’s tempting angels! he said mysteriously. Steamboat angels with twin propellers and hides of steel!29

— When they got here, Adam continued, what system of order was on offer in this country that would replace the one they were losing? A system based on a sort of gleeful materialism that mocked their customs and laughed at their beliefs.

The philosopher of Villa Crespo snickered malignantly.

— And why? he said venemously. All because a couple of revolutionary mulattos who’d read Voltaire impressed the hell out of two or three other mulattos and scandalized their nunnish aunts!

This undesirable trait in the philosopher got him into endless trouble: a ferocious racism that rendered literally the entire universe mulatto,30 with the single exception of the philosopher himself. Leaving aside his infinite vanity on this score, and recognizing in him a man obviously favoured by the Muses, his interlocutors wondered: what gave him the right to insult the patriotic feelings of his like-minded colleagues? He, the last offspring of a people that as a result of a theological curse was still wandering the world and had entirely lost its sense of nationhood? Such thoughts perturbed the minds of those who’d heard Samuel’s damnable words. Once the low rumble of protest had quieted down, Franky Amundsen reacted:

— He’s insulted our gigantic forefathers! he roared, threatening the philosopher with his fist.

— A foreigner! shrieked Del Solar. An undesirable!

— He bites the hand that feeds him! insisted Franky, remembering a serendipitous scrap from his sketchy readings.

Here Luis Pereda raised a threatening arm:

— Stop squabbling! We’re listening to a new point of view on our national reality. Would you please shut up!

Silence was immediately restored, and Adam Buenosayres was able to proceed:

— I was saying that what immigrants found in this country was not a system of order but a temptation to disorder. Most of them had no education: they were defenceless. They forgot their scale of values for the easy lifestyle our country showed them. The process of corruption began in the fathers and was completed in the sons. Children learned to laugh at their immigrant parents, to ignore or hide their genealogy. They are the Argentines of today, uprooted and adrift.

Adam Buenosayres had finished; there was a short silence in the metaphysical sector.

— I’d say he’s laying it on a bit thick, Del Solar said at last, turning to the pipsqueak Bernini.

— Real thick, agreed the pipsqueak. He’s talking bull, no doubt about it.

Serious and scholarly, Luis Pereda asked Buenosayres:

— If that’s your point of view, what is your position as an Argentine?

— Very confused, Adam answered. Unable to endorse the reality our country’s currently living, I’m alone and motionless: I’m waiting, I’m an Argentine in hope.31 That’s how I relate to the country. Personally, though, I feel that, since my forebears cut the thread of their tradition and destroyed their scale of values upon arrival here, it’s up to me to retie that thread and rebuild my identity according to the values of my race. That’s where I am now. And I think that when everyone does likewise, the country will have a spiritual form.

For some time now, the pipsqueak Bernini had been chomping at the bit. A man of intellect and passion, his dual nature was threatening to explode.

— Our country doesn’t need to search for her soul abroad, he announced. There’s someone else who will give it to her, and without being asked.

— Who? Adam asked.

— The Spirit of the Earth!

Samuel Tesler’s dangerous laugh was heard once more.

— Naturally! he said. One fine day the pampa will spread her legs and give birth to a metaphysics.

— The Spirit of the Earth will speak, insisted the Pipsqueak, overcome by the mystery of it. The Spirit will speak, you can be sure of it!32

— And cut a sorry figure, said Franky. It’ll moo like a cow.33

But Del Solar was in no mood for compromises.

— With or without the Spirit of the Earth, the foreigners should leave us in peace. This is no longer a country: it’s a colonial trading post!

The line was drawn, positions had hardened, and civil war seemed imminent. And belligerent ardour was already glinting in all eyes, when Mister Chisholm saw fit to put aside his reserve, which hadn’t fooled anyone anyway, and let all the chill of his native English fog fall down hard upon Del Solar.

— That’s sheer ingratitude, he said. Ingratitude and savagery. What on earth would have become of this nation, for example, without the aid of England? That’s what I’d like to know. Upon my word!

The keenest astonishment flashed across everyone’s face. Del Solar, Buenosayres, Pereda, Bernini, Franky — all of them looked at each other in petrified silence. Then, instintively, those men of such diverse origin, humour, and mindset moved closer together, as if closing ranks before a common threat. A wave of heroic zeal blazed in their faces; the hair on the back of their necks rose in anticipation of the impending clash. The first to sally forth was Bernini, a famously intrepid warrior in this sort of international battle.34

— I don’t think Mister Chisholm has quite understood, he began. For us, England isn’t foreign.

— Aha! smiled a pleased Mister Chishom. So what it is it, then?

— England is the Enemy! trumpeted Bernini.

It was the signal to launch the attack. Samuel Tesler suddenly advanced toward Mister Chisholm, performed a deep bow, and solemnly announced:

— Delenda est Britannia!35

— Twice England has invaded us and twice we have repulsed her, thundered Del Solar. But a third invasion has defeated us: the invasion of the pound sterling!36

Flushed red as a fighting cock, Mister Chisholm shook his fist at the insurgents.

— No one can deny England’s civilizing mission, he rasped. Who dares to deny it?

— I do! said the philosopher. Historically speaking, England hasn’t changed since Roman times. It has never been completely civilized, refractory as it is to eternal tradition and order. And these barbarians wrapped in elegant tweeds claim to be civilizing a people with forty centuries of metaphysics in their veins!

— There he goes again with his forty centuries! muttered Señor Johansen bitterly.

— Indians! scolded Mister Chishom. Worse than Indians!

At this point, Bernini sounded the famous charge that was to win him so many future laurels. Turning to his peers, he exclaimed:

— Enough pussyfooting around! Give us back the Malvinas, or else!37

From that moment on, confusion reigned supreme. The pipsqueak’s charge was met by shouts, laughs, and threats. Wielding his garbled Spanish like a broken sword, Mister Chisholm tried to respond to his numerous enemies, but his voice was buried beneath the weight of the many voices beleaguering him. Franky went to the sky-blue divan and plunked himself down between his sister Ethel and Ruty Johansen, his carrot top shaking with laughter. Meanwhile, Samuel Tesler was now standing on the piano stool, shaking an aggressive fist at Mister Chisholm and bellowing:

— Give us back the Malvinas!

The whole room, startled, turned its eyes to the combatants in the metaphysical sector.

— What’s going on? asked Señora Johansen in alarm.

— Nothing, answered Señora Amundsen. I think they’re beating up on my Englishman.

Not masking her displeasure, Señora Ruiz looked at the upstarts.

— Frivolous fellows, she said at last, turning to Señora Amundsen. Frankly, I don’t know why you let such people into your house.

— They’re Ethel’s intellectual friends, explained Señora Amundsen with a benevolent smile.

At the same time, Lucio Negri, installed between Marta and Solveig, was painting the blackest possible portrait of the philosopher of Villa Crespo, who meanwhile continued fanning the flames among the belligerents.

— His case is very simple, he was saying. Simulation of genius, megalomania raised to the third power, and a truly remarkable dose of schizophrenia.

— You call that a simple case? said Marta Ruiz on the theshold of laughter.

— And that’s not all, Lucio went on. The man suffers from mystical delusions. A while back he tried to make me believe that, when he enters a state of heightened awareness, his head emits sparks and his skin exudes exquisite odours. They say he’s spent some time in the loony bin. He went around calling himself the Black Christ and slapping the faces of the wardkeepers.38

But Haydée Amundsen wasn’t going to accept this.

— Slander! she protested, gracefully covering her ears. He’s a misunderstood genius.

— Come on, Haydée, implored Marta. The Black Christ! A man letting off sparks and aromas!

— I haven’t seen the sparks, Haydée declared very seriously, but I’m quite certain about his scent. It’s a cheap aftershave he puts on every Thursday and it’s called Nuit d’amour.

— What? cried Marta. It’s aftershave lotion?

Marta’s and Haydée’s laughter intertwined like twin braids. Even Solveig condescended to smile, distracted perhaps from her own mystery.

Meanwhile, Ethel Amundsen’s group, which had not yet intervened in the incidents of the tertulia, had just launched a discussion about an apparently harmless subject, but one that was to produce extraordinary events in the very near future. Valdez the engineer was developing an implacable thesis which scrapped, just like that, the eternal doctrine of free will; his thesis encountered quite contradictory reactions. Ethel Amundsen repeatedly interrupted the orator, alternately voicing firm objections and shaking her beautiful head in disagreement. Schultz, for his part, half-closed his eyes and smiled benignly, like an initiate listening to a novice expound the most rudimentary truths of occult science. As for Ruty Johansen, her astonishment turned to disbelief, and disbelief weakened to vacillation.

Weighty, no doubt, were the concluding words of Valdez’s allegation. What was certain was that Ethel ardently sprang up from the sky-blue divan and demanded the attention of the whole room.

— Listen, listen! she exclaimed. The engineer claims he can hypnotize anyone here.

A hush fell over the Amundsen salon as eighteen gazes interrogated Valdez, the engineer nonchalantly resisting the weight of so many eyes.

— It’s the commonest thing in the world, grumbled Schultz. Absolutely pompier.

— Hypnotism, Samuel Tesler declared with repugnance, doesn’t rise above the order of the natural. A parlour trick any minimally trained shopclerk can perform on anemic young women.

Affable as usual, Valdez the engineer agreed with a nod of his bald head.

— Exactly, he said. I was trying to explain as much to Ethel.

— When Charcot was conducting research at Salpêtrière… Lucio began to say.39

But Ethel cut him off and challenged the engineer:

— Prove it! You’ve promised to hypnotize one of us in this very room.

— At your service, responded the engineer, studying those present with cold, cobra-like eyes. Who would like to volunteer for the experiment?

There was a general movement of aversion in the room. Obviously, no one wanted to be hypnotized. Even Samuel Tesler, who didn’t give an inch on any terrain, let it be known that he disapproved of this type of experiment, informing his already alarmed listeners about how dangerous it was to fool around with certain energies which, though of the natural order of phenomena, could sometimes breach the ramparts and leave one’s being exposed to a possible invasion by “errant influences.” But Marta Ruiz had a passion for the dark forces and craved all that was violent and unleashed. Disengaging herself from her frightened female companions, she took one step, two steps, three steps toward Valdez, as the engineer beckoned her with the most deceptively benign smile.

Who may tell of the wonderment that fell over the tertulia and of the respect inspired by Marta’s risky advance? Naturally, the serpent’s gaze that fascinates the little bird was the image on everyone’s mind. And who shall speak of the anguish of a mother who, forgetting even the wisdom of Doctor Aguilera, watched the fruit of her womb walk slowly toward the abyss? Señora Ruiz cried out once in protest:

— No, Marta! I don’t like these games!

But Marta Ruiz was already there; the engineer Valdez was stroking her sensitive wrists. Coughs, shifting chairs, whispers: the tertulia nervously readied itself to look deep into the darkness of the unknown. Señor Johansen had joined the group of matrons now trying to console Señora Ruiz, whose eyes bored holes in the presumed hypnotizer. On the sky-blue divan, the three Amundsen girls, Ruty Johansen, Schultz, and Lucio Negri formed a single block. All of them looked very excited, except for the astrologer, who was ostentatiously stifling yawns. In a front-row seat, Franky Amundsen swore like a trooper, announcing to his sidekicks that he’d learn the noble art of hypnotism if only to put his numerous creditors to sleep. Faithful to the metaphysical corner, Samuel Tesler and Adam Buenosayres waited, the former entrenched in hostile silence, the latter seemingly absent from the tertulia. Mister Chisholm — who after his battle had taken refuge in the Buenos Aires Herald^40 — folded his favourite newspaper, curious to see what silliness the “colonials” were up to now. All was ready: stage, actors, and spectators.

The beginning was nothing sensational. Impervious to the general sense of expectancy, Valdez ordered the lights dimmed and began to chat with Marta in way that most took for quite offhand. But those versed in the hypnotic arts weren’t fooled; they knew he was using that soothing, mellifluous voice with consummate mastery to spin a subtle web for his prey. Little by little, Marta’s responses began to trail off. Her eyelids fluttered as an irresistible drowsiness overwhelmed her. Then the engineer touched her pulse with one hand, at the same time using the thumb of his other hand to stroke her temples. Marta went rigid.

— You are sleeping, he said. Are you asleep?

— Yes, came Marta’s barely audible response.

— Sleep, then. But calmly, in a state of perfect calm.

Only now did everyone realize the enormity of what had just happened; astonishment was expressed in barely contained whispers. But Señora Ruiz had turned the colour of autumn leaves.

— Let’s see, said the hypnotist to the sleeping girl. What’s your favourite piece of music?

— The overture to Tannhäuser, she replied without hesitation.

— Fine. Now listen! A distant orchestra is playing the overture. Do you hear it?

Marta seemed to strain her ears.

— Yes, she stammered. A distant orchestra.

— But it is drawing nearer. Do you hear the brass instruments getting louder?

— Yes, the brass instruments!

— Now you are in the very midst of the orchestra, said the engineer. You can see the musicians’ faces, the seesaw of the bows, the gleaming brass. And the music is rising, growing stronger, making the room tremble. Do you hear it?

Her nostrils flaring and her face lit up, the sleeping beauty listened to the crescendo of Tannhäuser. The tertulia guests scarcely breathed, so amazed were they. A cold sweat bathed Señora Ruiz’s face. But the engineer calmed the sleeping creature’s agitation by passing his hand a few times over her forehead. When he judged that she was sleeping placidly once again, he told her:

— You are sad. A deep sorrow is engulfing you.

Marta’s face contracted into a pout of sorrow.

— You are weeping, suggested the engineer. Weep!

And Marta began to cry with such gusto that the observers, human after all, felt knots of anguish rise in their throats. Fortunately, Valdez restored the sleeper’s serenity by telling her:

— Your sadness has passed. Now you are feeling great happiness. You feel a desire to laugh completely flooding you.

— Yes, agreed Marta. A great happiness.

— Laugh! ordered the engineer.

A thin little laugh came out of Marta.

— Louder! the hypnotist ordered again.

Marta laughed so uproariously that everyone at the tertulia, in spite of themselves, started to shake with hilarity. Franky Amundsen went so far as to swear he’d seen Mister Chisholm busting a gut — an absurd claim nobody believed, of course. What was beyond discussion was the engineer Valdez’s success. Closing his eyes to the buzz of admiration, he concentrated in preparation for his master stroke.

— You are all no doubt aware, he said to those watching, that people are reluctant to let themselves fall backwards, even when they know someone is there to catch them.

The spectators nodded their agreement.

— Well, then. Watch carefully!

Turning to the sleeping girl, he ordered her:

— Let yourself fall back!

Without a moment’s pause, Marta tipped backward like a felled tree. Señora Ruiz shrieked. Everyone else stood up in unison like so many spring-loaded marionettes. Easy, now, it’s okay! The honourable engineer caught the slumbering creature in his arms and set her back down on the sky-blue divan. Franky and his crew broke into applause, but the others shushed them into silence. The session was over. It was time for Marta to awake.

— Listen, Marta, ordered the engineer. I’m going to start counting. When I get to number five, you will wake up, but in a completely calm state.

A tomb-like silence fell as Valdez counted out loud:

— One, two, three, four, FIVE!

Great God! Instead of coming around, Marta started to squeal and thrash about on the sky-blue divan. The general consternation was indescribable. Without so much as a cry of anguish, Señora Ruiz fell into a dead faint upon the generous bosom of Señora Johansen. An instinctive movement — how adorable! — took Solveig into the arms of Lucio Negri. All faces had turned waxen.

— What’s happened? What’s going on? shouted the men, some rushing to the mother, some to the daughter.

— It’s the “errant influences,” yelled Samuel Tesler. I told you so!

Without letting go of Marta, the engineer turned to the tertulia.

— Don’t get upset, he ordered. There’s some interference.

He manipulated the comatose girl as she went on kicking and screeching. At his side, Franky Amundsen too leaned over Marta, apparently following the operation with great interest.

— Have you checked her carburetor? he asked at last, looking at Valdez with a studious air.

Franky’s question provoked a rumble of indignant protests. But now the hypnotist was regaining control over Marta.

— Are you calm now? he asked her.

— Yes.

— I’m going to clap three times. At the sound of the third clap, you will wake up. And you’ll be happy, all right? Very happy.

At the engineer’s third handclap, his prisoner at last awoke, smiling as if she hadn’t a care in the world. What a sigh of collective relief passed through the tertulia, now that Marta had left the gloomy realm of the night! Brows shed their furrows, colour flushed back into pale cheeks. Señora Ruiz recovered from her fainting spell, thanks to Lucio Negri’s potent science, or more likely to the three fingers of no-less-potent whisky that Franky, the blackguard, poured down her throat, heedless of Doctor Aguilera’s existence in this world. And the joy with which mother and daughter embraced is beyond the powers of verbal expression. Valdez wiped the sweat from his bald pate and took a few deep breaths — fatigued, yes, but loaded with laurels.

— A magnificent subject, he declared, still panting and pointing toward Marta Ruiz, whose post-hypnotic exultation was evident.

Everyone was feeling fine, and even better when Franky the Magnanimous set about distributing the first fruits of a bottle whose virginity he authenticated in the most exalted terms. And jubilation overflowed when Ruty Johansen, the northern Valkyrie, sat down vehemently at the piano and tore into the first bars of the “Blue Danube.”

— Let’s dance! shouted Marta Ruiz, all aflame.

— Find a partner! Everyone find a partner!

Then something beautiful happened: stray souls divined one another and embraced under Ruty’s spell. The first to enter the whirlwind was Schultz, that disquieting astrologer. His hand on Ethel Amundsen’s waist (slender as an Indian reed!), he made her spin in precise astronomical circles. Señor Johansen and spouse, joining spherical bellies and short arms, began to turn with the grace of two bears on an ice floe. Next came Valdez and Marta Ruiz, her eyes still pregnant with the darkness of the abyss, the engineer modest and unpretentious as ever. They were followed by Samuel Tesler, clinging to the jovial Haydée Amundsen like a storm-tossed sailor to his mast. Then came Lucio and Solveig (Daphnis and Cloë!), a pair of tremulous doves. Franky, Pereda, Del Solar, and Bernini, in a single wobbly bundle of humanity, were trying out the “four-let’s-dance,” the neo-dance Schultz had learned from a certain funnel-shaped Spirit during a conjunction of Venus and Saturn. But who was that glacial, frowning gentleman with Señora Amundsen, the one who danced with the stately rigidity of a strongbox? Why, it was Mister Chisholm, the administrative manager of the world plus its environs! Ruty Johansen was working the ivories, tickling mermaid crystals and Tritonesque seashells out of the “Blue Danube.” And everybody was whirling together in happy abandon. Except for two motionless souls: Adam Buenosayres and Señora Ruiz.

Adam Buenosayres, immobile in the centre of the circle and the dance, could not tear his gaze from Solveig and Lucio. The pair were lost in each other, following the rhythm of the music and of their hearts. All too sensitive to the nascent spell bringing those two creatures together, Adam Buenosayres was sinking into desolate jealousy. But watch out! She, too, might some day feel the weight of her autumn, and find herself alone and immobile like a thirst far from water. Then Adam and Solveig would meet again: it would be an afternoon the colour of dead leaves. Where? Didn’t matter. And Solveig would understand the kind of love she’d disdained to read about in the Blue-Bound Notebook; her remorse would speak through a gaze extending like a bridge toward him. Too late! Glorious and sad (his literary genius by now known to the world), Adam Buenosayres would be beyond human passion (moribund, perhaps? No, tone it down a bit!). Nevertheless, between today’s not-to-be and tomorrow’s sweet might-have-been, they would be irremediably beset by ineffable sorrow. And then she would be overcome by tears, while Adam’s eyes would be as dry and hard as stones… Ah, how sweet those images of consolation!

Meanwhile, the waltz was attaining its peak in splendour. The dancers, in the grip of vertigo, traced absurd trajectories and spun like coloured tops. Bravo! Ruty Johansen’s fingers were playing like the devil. At this point, Adam Buenosayres noticed his Blue-Bound Notebook lying — insulted, belittled! — on the sky-blue divan. And suddenly, his soul began to faint and his mind to stray into dangerous labyrinths of wrath. Orlando Furioso!41 Like the fabulous chivalric knight, Adam too is fleeing into mild dementia. He’s in his underwear, like Sir Lancelot of the Lake, and he’s running down the streets of Villa Crespo pursued by ubiquitous jeers and catcalls. Two endless streams of tears flow from his eyes to his mouth, two bitter rivers from which he drinks day and night. The mob points at him. Kids pelt him with their slingshots. The malevos on street-corners clobber and spit on him. Toothless hags empty chamberpots on his head as he passes. Ferocious females throw old boots and rotten fruit. Adam falls, gets up, keeps on running, falls down again! But on the third day a tremendous fury displaces his passive madness. Now he’s ripping a paradise tree out of the pavement of Gurruchaga Street. From its gigantic trunk he fashions his mace. Hell and damnation! The multitude recoils with frightful howls. Too late now! Adam’s mace is carrying out its mission of total destruction: skulls are cracking like nuts; the wake of the furious lover’s passage is strewn with bodies in twisted postures; black blood flows into the tannery’s sewers, which swallow it with a sinister glug-glug. Now where are all the insolent faces, the malignant eyes, the jeering teeth! The big sleep has descended on all eyelids, everyone seems comatose in Gurruchaga Street! No, not everybody. The survivors have slunk into their hovels, their dark cellars, their zinc kitchens. But Adam’s fury can no longer be reined in. Now he tackles the buildings. Beneath his formidable mace, walls crack and tumble, roofs cave in with a frightful din. A cloud of red dust rises from the ruins and obscures the light. Amid the rubble can be heard muffled moans, death rattles, a tangle of prayers and curses. By noon Adam is feeling hunger pangs. He storms into the corral of Arizmendi the Basque, disembowels his three auburn cows, and wolfs down the steaming entrails. Then he goes back to his task of devastation. Villa Crespo is nought but a pile of rubble! But in the late afternoon, Adam finds himself in front of the Church of San Bernardo. The hero brandishes his mace, as though about to raze the temple with a single blow. Upon raising his wrathful eyes, he sees the Christ with the Broken Hand, and the weapon falls at his feet. Adam backs away, filled with dread. For, in the palm of his lacerated hand, the statue is showing him a heart of stone, and the stone heart is bleeding… Enough!

Enough! cries Adam Buenosayres to himself. A mad weaver of smoke! No need to glance at the salon’s mirror to know his face was contorted and his eyes wild. He took a look around. Did anyone notice his dementia? He could relax; the tertulia was still wheeling to the strains of the “Blue Danube.” The bewitched souls were conjoined in a single rhythmn, a single rapture. And Adam was immobile in the centre of the round, as he was yesterday, as always. Until when?

Suddenly Adam Buenosayres was inspired to do the strangest thing. Whether out of mortal anguish or some liberating impulse, he wafted as though in a dream to the circle of dancers. Approaching Señora Ruiz, he gallantly offered his arm and invited her to dance. Astonishingly, Señora Ruiz accepted, and the two of them executed the first steps of a danse macabre. Hip! Hip! Adam was dancing with a skeleton. Hurrah! His hands clasped a rickety ribcage, and the breath of his funereal partner (a sad smell of catacombs) blew straight onto his face. Fine! Adam spun madly, clinging to a handful of bones. As he turned round and round, his perceptions came in snatches: whirling bright faces, vivid gestures, bits of laughter, shreds of conversation, flouncing skirts, lights that rolled and tumbled, along with bodies, souls, smoking heads. Hurrah! Hurrah! There was fire in the feet of the dancers, and the whole salon danced as if possessed. Bravo! Outside, the city was dancing beneath a million lights. In the immensity of space danced planet Earth.

BOOK THREE

Chapter 1

In the city of Trinity and its port, Santa María de los Buenos Aires, there is a frontier zone where burg and wilderness meet in an agonistic embrace, like two giants locked in single combat. Saavedra is the name cartographers have assigned to that mysterious region, perhaps in order to hide its true name, which must not be uttered. “The world is preserved through secrecy,” affirms the Zohar. And it is not for all and sundry to know the true names of things.

The traveller who turns his back on the city and directs his gaze toward that landscape will soon be overcome by a vague sense of dread. There, from rough and chaotic ground, arise the last spurs of Buenos Aires, primitive mud huts and corrugated iron shacks teeming with tribes that hover on the frontier between city and country. There, bride of the horizon, the pampa shows her face and extends her boundless breadth westward beneath a sky bent on demonstrating its own infinity. During the day, sunlight and the happy buzz of the metropolis obscure the true face of the suburb. But at nightfall, when Saavedra is no more than a vast desolation, its feral profile is unveiled, and the traveller may suddenly find himself staring into the very face of mystery. In that hour, at ground level, you can hear the palpitations of a darkling life. Shrill hoots cut the air, voices hail one another in the distance; the silence, thus suddenly disturbed like the surface of a pond shattered by a stone, restores itself instantly, deeper than ever. The zone is dotted with bonfires; they greet one another across wide spaces, converse in their igneous idiom. And human faces blow on burning coals, silhouettes arrive and exchange greetings, hands turn great spoons in pots filled to the brim. The old folks of Saavedra say that when the moon is out and the sky turns ashen, it is not uncommon to see will-o’-the-wisps flickering around an abandoned shack, the parapet of a well, or the twisted roots of an ombú. They’re ghosts of the dead, still tied to the earth by some cursèd lasso. Errant flames darting senselessly to and fro as if buffeted by some implacable wind, they can be snuffed out in mid-air by the recitation of a short prayer. But on nights when the moon is new, the supernatural irrupts under another sign; the sleepless hobo, tossing on his bed of paper bags in his sad tin-can shelter, will hear a sudden distant roar that rapidly approaches, growing gigantic and thunderous. Soon he perceives the din of horses pounding on the drum of hard earth, their neighing chorus, the clash of lance upon lance, ferocious war whoops, a total pandemonium menacing as though a bloodthirsty squadron were galloping through the night. Hardly will he have drawn his knife and placed blade against sheath to make the sign of the cross, when the phantom malón flies over his roof with the force of a hurricane.

At ten o’clock on the night of Thursday, April 28, 192–, seven adventurers halted at the edge of the dread region we’ve just named. Their leader and guide, prudent but resolute, advanced a few steps, seemingly in search of a trail in the line of prickly-pear cactus that formed a border between street and badlands.

— Here’s the entrance, he muttered at last, turning to his squad at rest.

A mocking laugh rent the darkness.

— What about the dead man’s house? asked the laugh’s companion voice. We were heading for the house of a dead man.

The voice belonged to a strange-looking fellow, long of torso and short in the legs. His voice, laugh, and body language clearly announced that the atmosphere of mental asylums and the intensive use of straitjackets had played some part in his murky past. The guide, perhaps aware of this, let the question go by without reacting.

— The trail starts here, he said. We just follow it straight ahead until we get to the ditch and the teetery plank. From there, I’m sure we’ll be able to see the lights of the house.

— Hell’s bells! growled a voice, jesting and skeptical. I’ll eat my hat if this joker doesn’t get us up to our balls in mud.

— So what if he does? the short-legged fellow argued facetiously. It’s the mire of the suburbs. Sacred mire!

Ignoring the sarcasm, the man with the jesting, skeptical voice sketched a gesture of resignation in the air.

— All right, he said. If we must, then let’s get a move on. We’re not going to stand around here all bloody night.

He began to walk toward the prickly-pear hedge. But he immediately turned around and cast an inquisitive glance over his taciturn companions.

— By the belly of the whale! he exclaimed. Where have they got to now, that scurvy astrologer and that swine of a bard?

The two personages so grossly described were not far off, their shadowy profiles readily visible some twenty paces away. One of them stood out, for his form rose cyclopean in the night, his stature denoting not the insolent pride of the material world but his serene command of occult wisdom, key to the enigma of the Three Worlds. The other was skinny, unprepossessing, altogether nondescript, were it not for his slouched broad-brimmed hat, which looked like a funnel of the style that in days of yore had covered heads lousy with metaphors. What were they doing over there, standing face to face, far from their comrades-in-arms at the very moment when the code of solidarity most urgently beckoned them? The fact was that, shortly beforehand, the cyclopean man had scented in the dark the baleful odour of hemlock. He’d so informed the man in the funnel-shaped hat, whereupon both had set out in search of the plant, sniffing the air like bloodhounds. Once they’d found it, the began to chew on the deadly leaves, whereupon a swarm of classical reminiscences softened their hearts, the sudden upswelling of an ancient emotion bringing them close to tears, especially when the pathetic image of Socrates flashed up in memory. Generous souls! There they would have stayed all night long, savouring the bittersweet mystery of death, had not a chorus of strident voices called them back to the reality of this world.

— Schultz! Buenosayres! We’ve found the opening!

The astrologer Schultz and Adam Buenosayres — for these were the names of the hemlock-eaters — retraced the steps separating them from their friends. A kind of irrepressible nervousness came over the group as they were about to set off. Some scrutinized the blackness stonewalling them with its sphinx-like hermeticism. Others glanced back at the metropolis they were deserting and watched its lights winking at them from afar. To be sure, all those men, porteños by birth or by vocation, had bid a long and ceremonious farewell to the marvellous city. Every single dive on Colodrero Street between Triunvirato and Republiquetas, each and every one of the noisy pubs and welcoming cantinas that offer a zinc countertop to the thirst and fatigue of the traveller — all had received the adieu of those magnanimous heroes, whose religiosity forbade them to undertake any adventure without first beseeching the favour of the gods on high by means of an enthusiastic libation of aguardiente from Catamarca, guindado from Montevideo, caña from Paraguay, zingani from Bolivia, grappa from Cuyo, pisco from Chile, and other liquors suitable for so pious a liturgy. Now there was nothing for it but to leave. And leave they would, any minute now, albeit on legs not entirely steady, and with tongues a tad thick, but with a serene valour proof against any obstacle.

The signal to advance was given. The seven men marched toward the prickly pears. One by one, the adventurers slipped sideways through a narrow opening in the thorny tangle. Their leader was the first to embark on the path of danger, followed by the short-legged man and the jester. Hard on their heels came two heroes who had so far remained silent: one of them, robust, swayed like a wild boar gone blind; the other was not quite pint-sized. These five made up the group’s vanguard; the astrologer Schultz and Adam Buenosayres brought up the rear.

They’d all crossed the line now into the land of adventure. Before them, the land sloped away gently, coated in an armour of aggressive bushes, all barbs and quills. But the seven men hardly noticed them, so powerful was their exaltation before that Argentine night, the purity of its gloom, the firmness of its flesh: it seemed to fuse heaven and earth, man and beast, in a single block of darkness. Their eyes soon tired of trying to penetrate the obscurity below. But when they raised their gaze aloft, a sacred dread filled their hearts before the vision of stars clustered in the sky like the thousand eyes of a blinking Argos. It was an ancient terror that rained down from above, and a silence so deep, one seemed to hear the dew distilled in the flasks of the night trickling down to earth. From that point forth, the explorers were enflamed by a kind of telluric rapture: it was a mad cutting-loose from all worldly ties, the soul’s release into the realm of marvels. Ah, but little did they suspect in their exalted state that soon, only three hundred metres away, the supernatural was to give the Saavedran adventurers quite a fright when, crossing the abyss on the wobbly plank, they would hear the tremulous croak of the toad-swans.

The first to show signs of poetic delirium was Adam Buenosayres. Stopping suddenly, he demanded silence:

— Hark! he exlaimed. Listen!

Six anxious faces surrounded him forthwith.

— What’s up? they asked in alarm.

— There! replied Adam, extending his arm toward the horizon. Listen to it! It’s the song of the River!

— What river? growled the jester.

— The Silver River! declaimed Adam, exhilarated. The eponymous river, as Ricardo Rojas would say. The river has raised his venerable torso over the waters. His brow is wreathed in water hyacinths. He sings a song of mud, his mouth full of mud, his beard dripping mud!1

General laughter was heard in the night. But the jester proffered a brutal curse:

— We’re done for now! he announced. The bard’s pissed as a newt!

But Adam insisted:

— He who has not heard the voice of the River will never understand the sadness of Buenos Aires. The sadness of clay in search of a soul.2 The idiom of the River!

Choked up by a fit of weeping, he couldn’t go on. His head fell against Schultz’s chest, there to be succoured by the astrologer’s gentle hand. (Schultz later avowed having experienced the distinct impression of clasping a broad-brimmed hat wracked by sobs.) Later, everyone would realize that a recent disappointment in love had provoked that unexpected tearful outburst.

— The problem isn’t with the river, the pint-sized hero began to say. If we resist the temptation to wax lyrical and just open our eyes…

But a flaccid, mollusc-like hand touched his back. It was the robust man who swayed like a blind boar.

— Hold it right there, he said, his breath an effluvium of caña quemada. I gather that Buenosayres was offering us a poetical-alcoholical-sentimental version of the River.

— I repeat: the problem is not the river, insisted the pint-sized fellow with an insolence far exceeding what might be expected from his scant bulk.

— And I maintain that you’re lying through your beard! shouted the robust man, blind to his opponent’s clean-shaven face.

This anachronistic apostrophe (a reminiscence, no doubt, from long-ago classical readings) stung the little man like a whip.

— Me, lying? he snarled. Now I’m gonna tell you the way I see Buenos Aires and its problems!

But he didn’t, because the jester loudly interrupted him.

— Cut him off! he implored in the darkness. In the name of divine Saturn, for the sake of the sacred night, shut that pipsqueak up before he gets started. Can’t you see he’s picked up the scent of the Spirit of the Earth? The sly fox is about to club us again with his bloody theory!

It was a call to order, an exhortation to prudence heeded by all. Especially when their guide, chomping on his foot-long cigarette holder, declared in no uncertain terms that he hadn’t dragged them way-the-hell-and-gone just so they could horse around; no, they were there to accomplish a heroic exploit that would leave them either beaten to a pulp or covered with laurels.3 Fortunately, the counsel of these two men prevailed, and the group set out once more, intrepid, but in a sullen silence that boded no good.

Among the heroes walked one who, miraculously, had not yet intervened in the dispute — the man with the short legs. True, he’d made his presence felt during the course of the argument with a few hostile grunts and two or three orchestral guffaws. But the fact that he hadn’t actually got his oar in was an unmistakable sign that some nocturnal genie had just possessed him. Unless, as was more likely, his apparent restraint was the handiwork of the Catamarca firewater for which the short-legged man had that night displayed a devotion bordering on the fanatical. But whatever the reason, our hero was now brightening up and showing clear signs of excitement. And then something remarkable occurred: he began passing cigarettes out to his comrades. This unheard-of act plunged the group into profound consternation.

— Am I dreaming? asked the jester.

— Miracle! It’s a miracle! answered the others.

Filled with humility, the man with the short legs attributed the miracle to the generosity of Mercury, the god, he said, who’d stood by him through his perennial tribulations. After this confession, he pulled out his automatic lighter and lit his cigarette. The wavering flame revealed his facial contours: a hawkish nose, two enormous fan-shaped ears, thick sensual lips, all betraying the son of that race once favoured by Jehovah and later scattered like ashes for having stained their cruel hands with the blood of a god. In truth, the man of short legs was Samuel Tesler, the illustrious philosopher of Villa Crespo.

Next, without breaking his stride Samuel Tesler used his lighter to illuminate in succession the faces of each of his friends, and so it was that the four figures not yet named emerged from anonymity. Strictly in the order of their enlightenment, they were the following: Luis Pereda, theoretician of criollismo, the robust man who sways like a wild boar gone blind; Arturo del Solar, activist of criollismo and acting leader of the seven; Franky Amundsen, radio host and animator, heretofore known as the man of the jesting voice; and the pipsqueak Bernini, sociologist, the one we’ve been calling pint-sized.

His act of illumination complete, Samuel Tesler shut his lighter, and the night closed in darker than ever. Great God! At that moment of overwhelming darkness, the philosopher decided to let fly one his unnerving guffaws. Hearing it, the adventurers trembled for the first time.

— What’s the Israelite laughing about? asked Franky Amundsen uncertainly.

— Was that a laugh? Pereda doubted. It sounded more like the squawk of a vulture.

Franky assured him it was a human laugh. Unless, he added, the Israelite had without warning turned into a vile bird of prey under cover of night — not such an unlikely metamorphosis, given the structure of his nose. But the philosopher retained his normal shape, with which he was well satisfied, thanks to his incredible powers of self-suggestion.

— I was laughing to myself, he declared, as I thought how woefully inadequate is our earthly sense of hearing. Just ten minutes ago, a poor sentimental slob, drunk on mythology, if not on something worse, tried to make us believe he was hearing the voice of the river.

— Are you talking about me? shrieked Adam in the darkness.

— Quiet! said Franky. The Israelite’s got the floor.

— What he’s got, shot back Adam in a booze-thickened voice, is three sheets to the wind.

At this unjust accusation, the philosopher croaked something between a hiccup and a laugh.

— And why not? he said. Just as Anaxagoras was a sober man among drunks, I am a drunk among the sober.

— Well said, my son! exclaimed Franky, embracing Samuel. The confession honours you. That Catamarca firewater is the elixir of sincerity.

— Who said anything about firewater? retorted Samuel, stung to the quick. I’m referring to a higher state, the inebriation of Dionysus.

But Adam Buenosayres had got his dander up; he was struggling in the arms of Schultz and swearing to teach that Jew a lesson he wouldn’t soon forget.

— Lemme go! he bellowed like a street bully. We gotta settle this right now.

— He’s soft in the head! said Samuel scornfully. Only a moron could cast the River Plate in a mythological mould. Bah! It’s a dead river, a cocktail of water and mud.4

At these odious words, the adventurers bristled with indignation.

— Hey, whoah there! thundered Pereda menacingly.

— Damnation! whinnied Franky. He’s insulted our Father River!

— What’d he say? shouted Adam. Just a minute here! I’ll teach that no-account bum!

Discord reigned once more among the group, and Del Solar cursed the hour when Franky Amundsen had included that pair of madmen in the expedition to Saavedra. Franky, in response, solemnly avowed that only the desire for self-improvement had moved him to solicit the company of the neo-sensitive poet and the illustrious philosopher, and that their drunkenness was more apparent than real, since thanks to them his eyes had been opened to a vast horizon of hitherto unknown wisdom. As for Luis Pereda, who had been following the details of the Buenosayres-Tesler conflict from a strictly criollista perspective, he thought the two champions ought to settle their differences in a knife fight, though he admitted it wouldn’t be easy to find such weapons in that place, at that hour. But then he suggested the two taitas have it out with pen-knives (and he happened to be carrying one with a bone handle, which he generously offered to any taker); a fight to the death, he added, was not strictly necessary, for a traditional slash across the face, or from ear to ear, was more than enough to salve a Christian’s honour, though it were caked an inch thick in filth.5

Fortunately, at the height of the altercation, harmony was restored when Samuel unexpectedly donned the mantle of equanimity, an act that would subsequently earn him much praise, declaring he hadn’t had the slightest intention of offending his friend Buenosayres, for whom he felt — and was not ashamed to admit it — an absolutely indestructible fraternal devotion, notwithstanding the gaping lacunae he couldn’t help noticing in his philosophical formation. For his part, Adam — who never failed to respond to those ardent calls of human cordiality — didn’t even wait for Tesler to finish his apology before rushing toward him with outstretched hand. The sight of them embracing in the very gut of the night was enough to melt a heart of stone. Their literally intoxicating breaths commingled. All of a sudden Samuel broke down weeping like a Magdalene, imprecating himself as an ignoble drunk who’d just insulted his best friend the poet and his best poet friend. Adam, sobbing his heart out, swore up and down that Samuel wasn’t drunk but fresh as a rose, and that it was he, Adam Buenosayres, who deserved the dishonour for having drunkenly offended a man of genius who busted his ass night and day studying the most abstruse sciences. Samuel persisted in his self-accusation, Adam rebutted him again, and since neither was about to give way in that generous challenge, it wasn’t long before they were at loggerheads again and very nearly came to blows.

The imperious invitation of their leader, Del Solar, to get moving again cut short the two men’s effusions. The expeditionaries obeyed, responding instinctively to the worry in the guide’s voice. Something had happened. Shortly beforehand, wanting to get away from the odious squabble, Del Solar had resolutely set off into the night. Once alone, he noticed a dog barking his head off nearby, and all the canines for twenty miles around were starting to yap in response. Judicious guide, he realized that the group’s hullabaloo was putting them in danger of arousing the wrath of the wilderness. He called Luis Pereda over and confided his fears. The two of them peered anxiously into the dark, and horrible shapes seemed to be sliding ominously toward them. Their hair stood on end. Del Solar cried out in alarm, and Pereda began to whistle the tango “La Chacarita.”6 This was a sure sign of distress, for he hardly ever whistled it, except at night in certain barrios, La Paternal or Villa Soldati,7 walking the streets deep in meditation on the future incarnations of the Buenos Aires taita.

Brought to heel by their guide, the seven men advanced in silence now, eyes peering left and right. A strange ill humour was coming over the group, and a certain nervousness, which peaked when Samuel began to speak again. The philosopher, grave and mysterious, intoned that it didn’t surprise him that the night was getting aggressive, for its silence had been profaned by their vain and puerile chatter. For a while now, he added, certain clues — pointless to reveal them, given the abysmal ignorance of his audience — had given him to understand that they were in a sacred place, whose dangerous nature he couldn’t divulge for now. However, just to give them a taste of what was in store, he warned that the dog barking in the night might well be Cerberus, guardian of the gates of Hades. The impressionable men did not find his observations at all reassuring, and they let him know as much. To top it off, Bernini, carried away perhaps by some folkloric reminiscence, alarmingly suggested that the dogs, whose barking was growing louder, might be chasing a lobisome, or werewolf, the legendary seventh son who used to leave his human form and morph into a barking monster to prowl the night in search of his unspeakable banquet.8 But eventually Franky Amundsen, his urbanity outraged, solemnly declared that he pissed on the sacred silence and on the venerable night and, moreover, on the very spot they were traversing just now; and as for the scary monster, he went on, everyone should just relax, because in case of attack all they had to do was remove the shoe from one of the philosopher’s feet, peal off his sock, and toss it straight at the monster’s snout — an extravagant procedure, if you like, but infallible and authorized by many classical tales. Now, whether by sheer coincidence or as a result of that threat, it so happened that as soon as Franky finished speaking, the ghostly dog stopped barking. The group’s dread turned to astonishment, astonishment gave way to relief, and relief spawned the glory of Franky Amundsen, who thenceforth was held to be a great enchanter and conjuring expert. Unfortunately, that glory quickly lost its lustre when Franky, carried away by excessive pride, formally gave notice of his intention to put the boots to all the ghouls of the night, whether they came at him one at a time or all at once.

— Recklessness! exclaimed the philosopher in metaphysical indignation. You bunch of animals, do you realize where we are?

— Up the bloody creek without a paddle! answered a grouchy Pereda.

— Hmm! mused Samuel. And what if this were a battlefield?

His words were met by impatient growls and incredulous jeers. But the philosopher raised an imperious arm skyward.

— Listen! he exclaimed, ecstatic. Up there, way up high! What do you hear?

Six noses turned upward, tracing a forty-five-degree arc in the shadow, and twelve ears listened attentively.

— Nothing! Bernini said after a few moments. You can’t hear a thing.

— Poor earthly ears! Samuel mumbled testily. You need more than ears to hear the Battle of the Angels.

Although not entirely unexpected, the philosopher’s obscure revelation nonetheless provoked irresistible curiosity in some, skepticism among others, and shock in most of them. Franky Amundsen worried out loud that he must be going deaf, since a while ago the voice of the River Plate had escaped him and now the angels’ fisticuffs were eluding his auditory sense. Luis Pereda confessed his interest in the dubious skirmish on high because, if true, it would confirm the existence of angelic taitas gathered in a celestial ’hood. Del Solar, for his part, expressed his displeasure in tough-talking criollista mode, formally threatening that he was “outtahere” if the others didn’t quit goofing around. But Schultz and Adam clamoured to hear more on the subject; Samuel, thus encouraged, demanded silence and got it. He raised his arm to point at the lights of the city, still visible on the horizon.

— There lies Buenos Aires, he told the group. Two million souls…

— Two and half million, Bernini the statistician corrected him.

— I’m talking in round numbers, grunted Samuel. Two million souls caught up, most of them unawares, in a terrible supernatural fight. Two million souls in battle. They fall down here, get up again there, succumb or triumph, oscillating between the two metaphyical poles of the universe.

— Obscure, said Franky.

— Very obscure, Bernini concurred.

But the astrologer Schultz and the poet Adam understood.

— I was talking about a fight here on earth, Samuel continued, an invisible and silent fight. It’s not only men who engage in this metaphysical combat. The true battle is decided above, in the sky over the city: the battle between the angels and the demons who contend for the souls of porteños. Listen! It’s right here, in this suburban wasteland!

— Unforeskinned knave! Franky chipped in. Didn’t we agree that it’s only the fat-assed angels who live around here?

— What fat-assed angels? asked Samuel, disconcerted.

— Schultz’s angels, the ones that are supposed to hatch new neighbourhoods in the Buenos Aires of the future. Hey, just imagine the butts on those broody little angels!

A squall of hilarity shook the group of adventurers. Even Tesler, forgetting his solemnity, let go a guffaw that echoed deep in the night. But the astrologer Schultz, affable as always, explained that his incubator angels could easily exist alongside Samuel’s martial angels, since both types were under the sign of action, the only difference being that his, Schultz’s, were more faithful to the creative aspect of that entity qualified as angelic, according to the Oriental doctrine he professed. And as for the culeiform observation of our friend Franky, he continued, it betrayed the grossest kind of anthropomorphism; only an uncultivated mind, like our friend Franky’s, could attribute human form to an angel. Shamed to the marrow of his bones, Franky asked what form Schultz assigned to his hatching angels. Schultz replied that he’d conceived them in the form of an upright cone whose radius was equal to its height, a design that ensured a base adequate to incubation purposes. But, he added with some reserve, he’d already surpassed his own theory and was currently working out another one, truer and less conventional. When Franky humbly beseeched him for some hint as to his new theory, the astrologer flatly refused, wrapping himself in a silence no one dared disturb.

But there was one among those men who could no longer contain his irritation. Luis Pereda, furiously pacing back and forth in the dark, thundered that he’d had it up to here with angels. The nation’s literature had been suffering an epidemic of angels, he averred, and all this angelic blather was getting to be a royal pain in the arse, etcetera, etcetera. Samuel Tesler responded, threateningly, by asking if the literature of the suburbs that he and his sectarians were promoting wasn’t even more pestilential. Pereda retorted that criollo literature was grounded in Buenos Aires reality, whereas all that angelic junk was like second-hand costume jewellery. Samuel Tesler then called him a blind agnostic and accused him of denying the existence of pure intelligence, because what was truly non-existent was the universe of taitas and compadritos he’d been glorifying with an enthusiasm worthy of a better cause. At this blasphemy, Pereda staggered in the night as if knifed in the back; it was all he could do to stammer that he’d soon show Tesler a couple of nenes who’d knock his socks off.

At the same time, Adam Buenosayres, overwhelmed by anguish, was confiding an intimate secret to the discretion of his brother Franky: yes, the world of angels did exist, and he personally had been struggling with an angel for three months now. It wasn’t a body-to-body combat, naturally, but something like the thrashing of a fish that’s taken the hook and fights the pull of the fisherman. Attentive and respectful, Franky listened to his brother Adam, then embraced him tenderly and implored him to take it easy, assuring him that the fresh night air would soon smarten him up, incredibly sloshed though he was. But far from soothing Adam, Franky’s words only provoked another fit of tears of such emotive depth that Franky, in spite of himself, had to wipe moisture from his ocular conjunctivas.

Meanwhile, the dialectical combat between Samuel and Pereda was heating up — voices were growing shrill, the pipsqueak Bernini was itching to get into it, and Schultz was trying to put some kind of order into their ideas — when suddenly, a frightful shout came out of the dead of night, from not far off. They all went still. What voice could that be? Who was crying out in the night? But Franky quickly recovered his wits.

— It’s Del Solar! he exclaimed. Something’s happened to him.

He ran ahead of the others in the direction of the shout. After twenty paces, he saw a dark figure get up off the ground, vigorously cursing and swearing.

— What’s up? asked Franky, recognizing their guide.

— I tripped over something, said Del Solar. Don’t come near yet.

— What the hell is it? One of those conical angels?

— An angel it ain’t, Del Solar grumbled. Its smell is enough to turn your guts.

Sure enough, as the expeditionaries approached, they detected a suspect fetor in the air.

— It’s a dead body! Bernini finally exclaimed.

Before long they had gathered round the dark form outstretched on the ground. The stench had become unbearable, and they all held their breath, except for the astrologer Schultz, who was inhaling the pestilential air with relish, declaring with ascetic piety that the odour was a great tonic for the soul. Wild conjectures flew as the group tried to identify the shape. But Samuel Tesler, in the nick of time, activated his famous lighter and, by its dim light, the mystery was cleared up: the dark mass that had tripped Del Solar was a dead horse.

The animal appeared phantasmagorical in the quavering light. It was a pampa-brown horse, ugly as can be, with a big head and ungainly feet, its bone structure visible beneath its dirty, mangy hide. Both its eyes were wide open to the night (the left eye had been pecked at by some night buzzard). Its drooping lower lip revealed worn and stained teeth, and from those teeth Adam, almost in tears, plucked a blade of grass the horse would never finish chewing.9 The soil where it lay had been churned up, and Schultz surmised the poor beast must have struggled to stand up when in its death-throes. But he took a keen interest in the little pile of manure deposited beneath the horse’s tail, which elicited from the astrologer a few profound reflexions on the ars cacandi^10 and its relation to death.

One can easily imagine the elegies those pious souls dedicated to the deceased pampa-brown. Franky Amundsen stared at it, apparently immersed in a morose meditation that finally yielded this heart-rending aphorism:

— That’s the way it goes!

— Poor old hack, said Bernini, giving the corpse a kick. Its owner left it here to croak — out of sight, out of mind.

— Must have been some ignorant gringo, protested Del Solar. No criollo would abandon his cob so heartlessly.11

The entire group agreed with him. Thus encouraged, Del Solar began to curse the destiny of criollo horsedom. It had figured heroically in all the nation’s great episodes, but had now fallen into the coarse hands of city coachmen. The magnitude of its dishonour was plain to see in the noble steed they beheld before them, victim of a treacherous urbanism that was threatening to ensnare in its web all that was pure in the Argentine tradition. In his rapture, he quoted these memorable verses from a song already in the minds of the adventureres:

Dear little criollo horse,

short in stride

and long in wind.12

Del Solar concluded by taking off his hat in reverence to the fallen beast. The others followed suit, revealing just how close their hearts were to the seraphic spirit of Saint Francis. Then, as though the blood of Martín Fierro were coursing through his veins, Franky Amundsen spoke out in solidarity with his guide: treacherous urbanization notwithstanding, the virtues of the centaur still glowed in our race, for within every Argentine there was a horse in potentia, as had just been revealed by the brilliant orator who had preceeded him. Adam, with no more audience than Schultz and the night, improvised a confused elegy featuring late afternoons in Maipú, radiant dawns, and a hundred horses beating the resonant earth like a drum at high noon on days whose paradisal taste still lingered, as he put it, on the tongue of his soul.

Franky Amundsen understood that so much melancholy risked breaking the spirit of his comrades. He pulled out a flat, gleaming metal bottle, marvellously fitted to his back pocket and endowed with a capaciousness that looked promising even to the least clinical eye. One by one the expeditionaries made use and abuse of the prodigious bottle. Then, prompted by their guide, they set out once more, not without taking their leave of the dead pampa-brown with a final glance. But no sooner had they set out than Del Solar stopped short as if in alarm.

— We’re screwed! he said as he turned to his comrades.

— What is it now? asked Franky.

— We’re lost!

This unpleasant news was not well received. The heroes muttered and grunted their discontent in a distinctly unfriendly way.

— Hell of a guide! Franky griped.

— It’s because of you guys! shouted Del Solar aggressively. All your goddamned arguing put me off the trail.

The injustice of these words exacerbated the group’s discontent to the point of mutiny. The darkness rumbled with hostile voices, malevolent laughter and threats of mass desertion. But then the astrologer Schultz intervened.

— Just a minute! he cried and turned to the guide. Let’s see, now. Where did the trail start?

— Just off Colodrero Street, Del Solar answered.

— In what direction does the street go?

— Northeast, assured Pereda, who as a sterling criollista carried the map of Buenos Aires etched upon his grey matter.

— Does the trail go in the same direction as the street? insisted Schultz.

— No, replied Del Solar. It veers off to the right.

— A lot?

— I’d say about forty degrees.

— Hmm, Schultz concluded, that means the trail follows an almost perfect northerly direction. He tilted his head back and seemed to search for something in the starry vastness.

— The Southern Cross! he exclaimed at last. Its main axis runs between the stars Alpha and Gamma, and right now it is almost perpendicular to the horizon. So Gamma marks the direction we must take.

His observations concluded, Schultz set off decisively, taking over as head of the platoon without a thought for the former guide, who brooded silently over his failure. The men now marched with the confidence inspired by science, their adventurous spirit renewed. The earth stretched out wide and free beneath their feet, and the southern sky enveloped them in the scrutiny of its stars. Although they could see nothing in the dark, their ears picked up myriad sounds from the night — beating feathers, clacking coleopteran wings, rustling leaves, creaking branches, the whole set of instruments being employed by invisible entities to sculpt the hard block of silence. The men breathed the strong odour of autumnal fields, the aroma of earth heavy with seed. A rush of wind, from who knows what far-off place, suddenly lashed the faces of the heroes, prompting various conjectures as to its origin and meaning. Adam Buenosayres, who made an image out of everything,13 took it for the very breath of the pampa. Samuel Tesler scented in that wind an “enormous freshness of Flood,” alleging a sense of smell directly inherited from his forefather Noah. Del Solar, drinking the wind in great draughts, was quick to smell fragrant haystacks, autumn stubble in April fields, crumbling cowflaps, damp clover patches, and little peaches baking in smoky ovens. And though Franky cast doubt on their freakish olfactory capacity, in truth they were filled with legitimate pride at the thought of their immense Argentine homeland, naked and virgin, like a child just delivered from the Creator’s hands. Pride turned to tenderness when the poet Buenosayres, transported in dreams to the eclogues of Maipú, began to sing:

In my poor old shack

vidalitá

there is no peace

ever since he’s been gone

vidalitá

the master of my soul.14

Del Solar, in thrall to nostalgia for the north country, answered with this one:

Oh, to be a dog,

my little dove,

so as not to be able to feel,

Farewell, sweet life!

Dogs don’t take any offence,

my little dove,

they just sleep it all away,

Farewell, sweet life!15

Franky Amundsen chimed in with this sentimental ditty:

An old woman was taking a leak

(so long, I’m on my way)

underneath a wagon

(who will be her love!)

and the oxen took off running

(so long, I’m on my way)

thinking it was a rainstorm

(who will be her love!).16

But the contest would not have been complete without the voice of Luis Pereda. With fine grace, giving it his all, he threw to the winds the following verses:

From up yonder I have come /

(not a word of a lie)

stepping on the flowers

(let’s go, sweetie, under the walnut tree):

Since I’m a sensitve lad

(not a word of a lie)

I’m all worn out from love

(let’s go, sweetie, under the walnut tree).17

Unfortunately, not all the adventurers of Saavedra had surrendered to such wholesome lyricism. Among the seven there was one who shut his ears to the Muses’ call, his attention taken up by base speculations of a scientific nature. I refer to the illustrious and never-sufficiently-praised pipsqueak Bernini. This man (if such we may call five-foot-nothing of indisputably human stature) had corrected the stingy hand Nature had dealt him in terms of physique by diligent devotion since childhood to the most curious of sciences. The two heterogeneous races responsible for his gestation fought within him, so he said, the most ferocious battle. While his Anglo-Saxon side tended toward a severe pragmatism manifesting in ghastly orgies of rationalism, his Latin side, thanks to a subliminal process invariably involving liquid spirits, impelled him to frequent fits of Dionysian frenzy that amounted to so many slaps across the left cheek of the goddess Reason. With one and the same bow, the young hero played medicine, history, geography, numismatics, sociology, aesthetics, and metaphysics. Word has it that when he read the Critique of Pure Reason, he had made Kant sweat bullets by scribbling marginal notes such as “You’re talking through your hat, old man” and “Gotcha there, Mannie old boy,” among other equally trenchant objections. However, those who admired the pipsqueak’s erudition had recently been lamenting his weakness for an unholy genre of statistics whose smuttiness was incompatible with scientific decorum. As I was saying, then, Bernini, oblivious of the others’ chatter, was mentally turning over some original conceit. And it was surely no mere trifle, for the mental exertion had Bernini breathing heavily, his arms jerking forward then dropping again, heels digging into the ground — signs of agitation soon noticed by his companions.

— Hey, what’s got into you? Del Solar finally asked him. Have you gone crazy?

The pipsqueak mumbled a few choice words in the night and concluded:

— That’s my business. Just thinking.

— Thinking, were you? said Franky. Assuming such a phenomenon is possible, what were you thinking?

— I won’t talk! growled Bernini resentfully. A while ago I wasn’t allowed to; I had to shut up, just when everybody else was running off at the mouth.

— None of that, Pereda joined in. Let him speak. Here everybody has a voice and a vote.

Franky’s laughter rattled in the darkness.

— That’s just what he wants! he exclaimed. I know that sly pipsqueak as if he were my own child.

— Fine, then, said Bernini, giving in to his buddies’ concern. I was thinking about how we’re walking across an ancient seabed.

— Hey, hey! shouted Franky. Watch out for the pipsqueak!

— The ground of the pampa, Bernini insisted, is a marine formation. The entire pampa is the vast floor of an ocean that at one time lapped up against the Andes, until it withdrew.18

Two or three indignant voices exploded in the blackness:

— Have an eye for the pipsqueak!

— That hasn’t been proven!

— The pipsqueak’s spouting nonsense!

— And it’s not merely the scientific aspect of the theory that interests me, Bernini concluded. It’s something else.

— What else? Schultz wanted to know.

— The voice of the sea will be present when the Spirit of the Earth makes itself heard.

Hostile shouts and Homeric laughter greeted Bernini’s latest sally.

— He’s coughed it up! Franky exclaimed in astonishment.

— What has our famous pipsqueak coughed up? Del Solar inquired.

— The Spirit of the Earth. He had it in his craw!

Whatever their purpose when they set out on their journey, the explorers should never have uttered, in that dark place and at such an hour, words with the magical power to spring open the invisible portals of mystery. Until that moment, despite numerous irreverent slips of the tongue, the expeditionaries had faced nothing out of the ordinary. But the extraordinary figure that suddenly appeared before them now was not of this world. Monstrous offspring of the night, it looked like the ghost of a giant peludo, an enormous armadillo radiating a vivid phosphorescent light. The excursionists might well have succumbed to incurable awe, if not for the pipsqueak Bernini who, thanks to his Anglo-Saxon side, identified the beast as the famous Glyptodon, a dinosaur indigenous to our prehistoric pampas.

The creature was paleontologically old. Its cracked carapace was encrusted with the salt of a thousand centuries that formed a second shell as tough as the original. Protruding from the carapace, four gigantic legs ended in dirty, bitten toenails. The Glyptodon’s ridiculously small head was held aloft with much dignity. But what most amazed the aventurers was the monster’s scar-filled face: a toothless mouth, nostrils scabby with antediluvian snot, and two little eyes peering out through fossilized rheum with a faraway look, as though adrift in memories of barbarous geological sorrows.

Asked by the astrologer Schultz whether it was mortal, immortal, or an intermediary being, the Glyptodon promptly self-identified as the selfsame Spirit of the Earth just summoned by the High Priest Bernini. Schultz inquired after the purpose of its advent. The Glyptodon replied that his sole object was to correct the error committed just now by the High Priest, whose theories about the pampa’s loess betrayed a macaronic erudition picked up from dime-store manuals. Vacillating between indignation and respect, the High Priest Bernini asked how he had erred. By inventing a marine origin for the pampa’s topsoil deposits, came the Glyptodon’s response.

— And what proof is there to the contrary? challenged Bernini.

— The absence of horizontal strata left by any transgression or regression of the sea.

— What about the fossil remains? insisted a stung Bernini.

— And the schistic-crystalline sediment? shot back the Glyptodon, unyielding.

Defeated and humiliated, the High Priest Bernini withdrew from the fray. Then Schultz beseeched the monster, by the god Erebos and the night, by the soul of Darwin and the shade of Ameghino,19 to reveal to us sad wanderers the authentic origin of the pampa’s loess. The Glypdoton muttered he’d have been spared the bother if his High Priest Bernini had read the work of Roveretto, Bayer, Richthofen and Obermayer,20 instead of wasting his time skulking around the shabby secondhand bookstores on Corrientes.21 After a professorial pause, the Glypdoton declared the Aeolian origin of that loess:

— In principium, he solemnely intoned, the pampa was a crystalline base formed by mountainous structures. Or better put: the peripheral relief pattern left by the metamorphic and eruptive activity of rock. Or, to make it even clearer: the pampa was a great plain of destruction.

— How so? inquired Del Solar, whose patriotic ears didn’t like the sound of the word “destruction.”

— Because, anwered the Glyptodon, thanks to a relatively warm and dry climate, the vertically outstanding rock structures of metamorphic, sedimentary, and crystalline formation underwent, in situ, a process of hydrolithic alteration or partial lateralization. Gentlemen, the topographical relief got flattened!

— What about the Aeolian origin? Adam Buenosayres wanted to know. The versifier’s ears were fondly anticipating the strains of ancient harps strummed by the god of wind.

— I’m getting to that, said the ghostly beast. A great wind then blew from the West, an implacable wind that tore at the disintegrating material, blowing it down from the mountains and depositing it in the valleys and plains. That’s how the pampa’s soil was formed. And since that sedimention, as its structure demonstrates, the pampa has suffered no more disturbances, neither aquatic nor aeolic.

— That must have been some phenomenal wind! exclaimed Pereda, struggling in the arms of doubt.

— Ha! laughed the Glyptodon. Just look into my right eye!

One by one, the seven men looked through the ghost’s eye. They saw an extensive landscape, sad and sterile, mountain ranges being eaten away by a ferocious wind that gnawed away bits of matter and set it a-whirl in eddies. Clouds of sand obscured the sun or settled slowly like ash from a volcanic eruption. In the midst of the great simoom, large animals, armour-plated and armed to the teeth, lumbered heavily across the plain, claws and snouts picking at the mineral pampa in search of sustenance.

The prospect was bleak, and the excursionists of Saavedra went mute as statues. But Schultz the astrologer, after thanking the spectre for the valuable lesson in geology, asked if he would be so kind as to answer two or three questions from his friends, noteworthy one and all in the arts and letters. The ghost said yes, so Samuel stepped forward to ask about the origin of the human contingents who would likely come to settle that unpopulated region. The Glyptodon seemed to hesitate, mumbled something about not being allowed to reveal the future, and ended by insinuating that the plain’s ethnographic formation would be quite similar to its geological formation, for the human contingents mentioned by Samuel would also be a re-aggregation of elements in destruction, swept from the eight directions of the Globe all the way to our plains by the terrible and ever restless wind of History.

The philosopher of Villa Crespo was more than satisfied with the Glyptodon’s mysterious prophecy. And the creature’s goodwill might have reached the sublime, if Franky Amundsen — skeptical worm in the bright red apple of the ideal — hadn’t piped up, asking point-blank if its peludo-like structure didn’t have something to do, symbolically at least, with a famous political leader who at the time was both the darling of the masses and the delight of the Muses.22 His millenarian honour offended, the Glyptodon replied he was not about to listen to stupidities, or sign autographs, or give any interviews, or get embroiled in petty politicking; whereupon he threatened quite seriously to pack up and go home to his phantasmal realms. But the High Priest Bernini devoutly implored him to leave some message for future generations before departing. The Glyptodon nodded, lifted his tail to let fly three large spheres of fossilized manure, then disappeared into the blackness whence he had come. Fortunately, that message has not been lost to posterity. One of those spheres can be found today in the National Museum of Natural Science,23 erroneously classified as aerolite. Another, in the Museum of History, is displayed as a mortar shell left over from the War of Paraguay.24 The third is the terrestrial globe held aloft by two cyclopean figures of reinforced concrete standing atop the building of daily newspaper El Mundo.25

“The Adventure of the Glyptodon,”26 as it later came to be known, would have been enough to set off anybody’s imagination, and all the more so in those men, well seasoned in the dangerous game of fantasy. No sooner had the monster faded into the night, according to the epic heroes’ subsequent testimony, than a great confusion descended upon their minds and memory, producing a strange blend of reality and appearance, history and legend, the possible and the absurd. Clearly, Franky Amundsen’s metal flask, circulating with a frequency no less generous than alarming, was not completely innocent of the turbulence afflicting their souls, nor of the visions and mirages that followed one after another, culminating in “The Adventure of the Teetery Plank.” But what most inflamed the group’s fantasy were the geological and stratigraphic mysteries still up for discussion: the wildest hypotheses were buzzing like bees. The astrologer Schultz, however, eventually expressed his boredom:

— What do I care about the earth! he exclaimed disdainfully. To me, the important thing is man. After all, the earth is merely a station, a phase — and only one! — in the evolution of Universal Man.

— Fine! thundered Samuel Tesler. But what the heck is Universal Man?

— What, you ask? answered Schultz. Why, it’s MAN, in capital letters.

Franky Amundsen raised his arms toward a sky teeming with stars.

— O wisdom! he cried in exultation. What an unfathomable definition! Eat your heart out, Perogrullo, Master of the Obvious!27

He turned to Del Solar and whispered in his ear:

— Just watch! The Neocriollo can’t be far away.

But Bernini was stepping back into the arena, his Anglo-Saxon side more alert than ever.

— That’s right, he said. Let’s talk about Man. Even there, all honour goes to the Pampa.

— Eh? interrogated Samuel. What honour are you talking about?

— Practically nothing, laughed Bernini. Just this: in the Tertiary era, when the whole world was still mired in the most terrible bestiality, the first humans appeared on our plains.

The peal of laughter that shook the philosopher of Villa Crespo echoed long across the landscape.

— It’s no joke! Berinini protested indignantly. It’s a proven fact, and by an Argentine, to boot!

— By an Argentine, unfortunately, declared Del Solar bitterly. If it had been some Frenchy or Kraut, this gentleman — he pointed at Tesler — would swallow it hook, line, and sinker. But, oh no, even prehistoric man has to be imported from Europe!

— I didn’t say anything! Samuel demurred.

— Nobody said anything about Europe, said Schultz.

— And if not in the pampa, Bernini bellowed, in what other Tertiary era have they discovered traces of homo sapiens?

— None at all, responded Schultz. The pampa’s not the place to look for them. You’ll find them at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

The adventurers’ stupefaction was limitless when they heard this novel idea. But the astrologer hastened to reassure them.

— Have any of you read Plato’s Critias?

— Schultz and his whoring books! groaned Franky. The poor guy’s got bats in his belfry!

Unfortunately, Adam Buenosayres, Luis Pereda, and Samuel Tesler had all read the Critias. And so the inevitable argument broke out, thanks to Schultz, who held that the sunken island of Atlantis was rightfully the true cradle of humanity.28 The legendary Altantians were a red-skinned race, he added. But Samuel Tesler, his voice dripping with irony, wanted to know the basis for such a rash conjecture. Schultz replied as follows: given that man’s creation was a work of divine charity, and red being the colour symbolic of charity, the first humans must necessarily have had red skin. When Samuel Tesler’s only comeback was a nasty, ill-omened little laugh, Bernini jumped, declaring the astrologer’s thesis deficient in scientific rigour. This in turn roused the ire of Adam Buenosayres, who countered that, fortunately, the thesis had plenty of poetic rigour. For Schultz at least, there could be no doubt about it: the descendants of Neptune and Cleito had achieved an amazing civilization in Atlantis and then scattered over the face of the earth, perhaps moved by their Neptunian instinct to sail the seas, or by their need for conquest, or in flight from the barbarous despotism of the last Atlantian kings, whose inquity earned the island the terrible punishment of the watery god. And it was equally evident for the adventurers of Saavedra that Schultz was spouting more balderdash than ever uttered by mortal on this sorry planet. As he went on talking, a zephyr of mockery began to stir amid the group, a breeze that stiffened into a wind when Schultz alleged that the Incan and Aztec civilizations were remote vestiges of another, far more ancient civilization, a colonial reflection of Mother Atlantis, which had once flourished in North America. But when the astrologer dared to maintain that our aboriginal peoples had descended from those northern cultures, or more precisely, that great hordes of them, in flight from servitude or war, had wandered south to the pampas where they descended into barbarism; when Schultz tried to pass that one off and once again make us out to be the backwater of the world; well, then the derisive wind swelled to a full-fledged gale, and the members of the audience expressed themselves by exuberantly heckling, stomping their feet, shouting obscenities, and blowing raspberries; these, courtesy of Franky Amundsen, whose excellence in that difficult art had won him many an admirer. But that beautiful celebration of the spirit didn’t last long; the party was spoiled when the pipsqueak Bernini, who never rested on his laurels, began to show new signs of agitation.

— The origins of our Native Americans! he snorted resentfully. We’d do better to think about their final destiny, or dedicate a moment of respectful reflection to their memory.

— What bee have you got in your bonnet now? asked Franky Amundsen, the raspberry artist.

— Weren’t they the natural masters of the pampa? Bernini mourned. What right did the white man have to invade their land and exterminate them like savage beasts?

Franky hugged the pipsqueak and stamped his forehead with a reverential kiss.

— A heart of gold! he explained. The most exquisitely sensitive dwarf of them all!

— A bleeding heart, Schultz corrected. If he knew anything about history or metahistory, he wouldn’t lament that violent clash between two races — the one’s time had come, and the other had a mission.

— That’s pure militarism! cried Bernini.

— A Teutonic brute! said Franky. All these Krauts have heads shaped like mortar shells.

But the astrologer was not backing down.

— The world is renewed through the spear of Mars, he announced. It’s the spear that destroys in order to rebuild.

— No! No! protested voices in the dark.

— Yes! Yes! agreed others.

And then it happened that Bernini finally took leave of his Anglo-Saxon side and gave free rein to his Latin side: he began to weep inconsolably.

— Poor Indians! he sobbed. Exterminated down to the last one, right here on the very ground we’re standing on.

A vigorous drumroll, as of a hundred horses pounding toward them; a hundred throats howling in the night; a hundred unanimous cries of Winca! Killing! Winca! All this mixed together suddenly assaulted the alert ears of the heroes, and they turned on their heels, ready for flight. But they stayed right where they were, for the same din was coming at them from all directions, as if they were encircled by a threatening chorus: Winca! Killing! Winca!29 Still recovering from their initial surprise, they saw a figure on horseback come galloping full tilt toward them out of the night. Rider and mount both gave off a greenish, ghostly, otherworldly light. But it was the horseman, naked as Hercules, who really looked menacing; he was twisting and turning atop his mount like a gesticulating demon. Within five paces from the adventurers, he pulled up savagely on the reins, his horse digging all four hooves into the soil. Then, brandishing above the seven enemy heads a spear adorned with flamingo feathers, he howled: Bicú, picué, tubú, picá, linquén, tucá, bicooooo? Not one of the seven responded, so the Indian shouted again, perhaps translating his first question: “Cursèd wincas, by whose permission passing here?” And then he threatened: “Winca passing here, winca paying.” Then one of the heroes, obeying a sudden flash of insight, took the flat, shiny flask out of his pocket and showed it to the savage: “Winca tricking!” roared the rider, not bothering to hide his suspicion. “What being inside shiny gualicho?”30 Without a word, the anonymous hero uncorked the flask and passed its neck beneath the Indian’s nose. The latter was transfigured, almost ecstatic: “Peñí, brother!” he exclaimed. In view of his manifestly ardent desire to establish contact with the magic bottle, the astrologer Schultz asked him to tell his name first. The savage proudly introduced himself: “Me, Chief Paleocurá.”31 Ignoring the group’s astonishment, Chief Paleocurá hopped down from his mount, went to the hero with the bottle, took him in a bear hug and lifted him into the air, shouting for all he was worth: “Aaaaaah!” A hundred invisible phantasms, tapping their mouths with their hands, howled in chorus: “Ah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah!” The same ceremony was repeated with the rest of the expeditionaries. The greetings finally over, Paleocurá said with rustic diplomacy: “Giving shiny gualicho, then passing.” The bottle was surrendered by acclamation. Quickly, the chief raised it to his lips, then leaned back to stare at the stars for a good five minutes. “Yapay!” he shouted at last, handing the bottle back to its legitimate owner. “Yapay!” the latter responded, and took a swig every bit as astronomical. The Native chief exchanged the same toast with each and every one of the explorers. Then he returned the empty bottle, leapt onto his horse in a single bound, saluted with his spear, and trotted off. Presently, the drumbeat of a hundred invisible horses was swallowed by the night.

Del Solar found Bernini’s lament for the extinction of the Natives unjustifiable and anachronistic. After all, that race had more to do with the pre-history than with the history of Argentina. But before that aboriginal race died out — and this is the main thing — its withered vine produced a painful new shoot. In a heroic perpetuation of its blood, it bequeathed the nation a crucial type, a magnificent warrior. At these observations, a single image leapt to the minds of the adventurers, and a single word to their lips: The Gaucho!

— The gaucho, Del Solar assented mournfully. Whether he be the child of love or hate (who knows!), we see him labouring on the foundations of the nation, in the dark, yes, but with the worthy darkness of foundations supporting the exterior grace of the architectural whole.

— Good image, acknowledged Adam Buenosayres as an expert.32

— Too literary, Bernini objected.

— Obviously plagiarized, Franky Amundsen remarked slanderously.

For all that, the majority of the heroes adopted a respectful attitude and yielded unreservedly to the emotion of that memory. But the group harboured two men whose hearts, hardened perhaps by the glacial pole of metaphysics, showed no signs of melting: they were Samuel Tesler and the astrologer Schultz.

— Pestilential literature! grumbled Samuel. They’ve invented an incredible fable around a pathetic half-breed. The gaucho glorified by legend never existed.

— Never existed? shouted Pereda, righteously indignant. Why, from the travellers of colonial times up to the nineteenth-century chroniclers…

— There’s no need to go back that far, Adam interrupted. I’ve seen the gaucho, back in Maipú. The gaucho of legend, with his chiripá, his calfskin boots, and his great big soul: my friend Liberato Farías, the horsebreaker!33

But at this point Schultz intervened decisively:

— I’ll admit the gaucho existed, he declared. But if he was anything like the way he’s described in poetry, rebelling against all law and order, a thuggish drifter with no respect for hierarchy, then I think it’s a good thing he disappeared.34

Lord, what a fuss the criollista faction made upon hearing such outrageous blasphemy!

— If the gauchos have died out, Del Solar yelled at him, it’s because gringo immigrants like you killed them off!

— The defeat of Santos Vega, intoned Adam mysteriously.

A distant strumming of guitars came to the ears of the explorers; a tremor of tearful strings seemed to come wafting on the wind from some distant horizon, snaking through the air like a musical shiver. And suddenly a great hush fell, as though the entire plain were breathlessly listening through a thousand invisible ears. The strains of the mysterious vihuela quickly grew stronger, or nearer, like a song mounted on a galloping horse. Soon a human voice could be heard, interwoven with the thrumming strings. It was a ghostly voice singing dark, unintelligible words that nevertheless pierced the heroes’ souls like the daggers of melancholy; sweet words as of long-ago mornings; lachrymose words to be shed on the tomb of a long-lost love; battle cries like lances erect beneath the noonday sun, or like repressed sobs erupting from the sound chamber of a body or guitar; and a rustic idyll now lost in the South; and the sadness seeping like bitter juice from the plump fruit of southern skies. All this was expressed by the nocturnal canto; and in sympathy the domed ether hummed, the stars drew nearer, the wild grass trembled, and the orb grew silent. At one moment, the song exploded like a tempest overhead; the travellers looked up in dread and saw high in the Eastern sky the figure of a rider on his mount, shimmering as if forged from burnished metal. His arms cradled a vihuela, which though mute seemed the source or centre of the marvellous song. A unanimous cry of recognition flew forth from seven throats:

— Santos Vega, the payador!

Thus invoked, the phantasmal horseman stopped and turned to the men of Saavedra, who waited expectantly. But the ghost’s face, momentarily brightening, clouded over once more. His noble head turned in the night, tracing a long, slow movement of negation. Then, spurring his mount, the apparition galloped away to the west.35 When the adventurers were about to take off after him in pursuit, a spiteful laugh rang out behind their backs.

– ’Tain’t no use, gentlemen! came a voice. That good ol’ boy won’t be singin’ no more here on earth!

Turning around, the men saw a phosphorescent character, ridiculously decked out gaucho-style, standing there in an insolent sort of attitude, his craggy and malignant face inspiring an apprehension impossible to gainsay. He was sporting a wildly embroidered chiripá, a thick leather belt studded with more gold coins than a Basque milkman’s moneybox, a silk shirt, and a great knife that seemed to skewer him like a roasting spit.

— And why won’t Santos Vega sing? Del Solar asked him, moved to the marrow of his bones.

— Go on with ya! responded the figure. I licked him fair and square, guitar against guitar.

A lightbulb suddenly lit up in the heads of the expeditionaries.

— Juan Sin Ropa!

Looking back and forth between the group and the troubador fading into the distance, the figure laughed again:

— At yer service, pardners, he assented in his odious, sarcastic drawl.

But Adam Buenosayres, full of wrath, shouted right in his face.

— You lie, varmint!

And turning to the group, he thundered:

— This man is no good old boy! He’s the devil incarnate!36

Would that he had never said it! When he heard that name, the figure commenced contorting and sizzling like a denizen of hell, and a terrible stench of sulphur and gunpowder filled the air. As the startled heroes backed away, they noticed other sinister clues confirming the identity of the spectral gaucho: his eyes flashed like two electrical storms at night; his broad-brimmed hat sported an ominous cock’s feather; worse still, his blunt-toed calfskin boots formed two cloven hooves. It was enough to justify any amount of alarm.

— Cross, Devil! Cross, Devil! Franky began to exorcize, tracing rapid crosses in the air.

Juan Sin Ropa let out a vaudeville guffaw.

— Now don’t get sceer’t on me, fellers! he said. I didn’t come to buy yer souls. Y’already sold ’em!

But the astrologer Schultz was not about to have the wool pulled over his eyes. The demon there before them, he said with almost aggressive disdain, was no imperial Lucifer; nor was he Prince Beelzebub, nor the Grand Duke Astarot, nor Prime Minister Lucifuge, nor General Satanachia, nor Lieutenant Fleurety, nor Brigadier Sargantanás, nor Field Marshal Nebiros. No, he was but a lowly tipstaff called Anthrax, a kitchen boy, a poor devil without a pot to piss in — the wretch! So where did he get off with his talk of buying souls? When Juan Sin Ropa muttered something between his teeth, Schultz told him he was to answer any questions put to him, and threatened to stuff him into a bottle of Scotch whisky if he refused. Seeing him nice and tame now, Del Solar got up the courage to ask a question:

— What really happened in your payada with Vega? How did you beat him?

— He was an innocent, still wet behind the ears! replied Juan Sin Ropa. Easiest job the Boss ever giv’ me. Well, we duked it out, verse for verse, and Vega wasn’t half bad. But, hey, us devils’ve got the edge when it comes to pickin’ guitar — tougher fingernails, eh.

— So what did the Boss stand to gain by defeating a poor gaucho? Adam Buenosayres wanted to know.

— Don’t kid yerselves, that there gaucho was a bit of tricky business, Juan Sin Ropa assured them. What with his lack of ambition, his down-to-earth simplicity, and his guitar and lil’ ol’ horse, we were runnin’ the risk of a new age of innocence bein’ established in these here parts, just when the Boss was on the eve of universal victory and the nations of the world was gettin’ down on all fours to kiss his royal upite. (Here, Juan Sin Ropa gave himself a pat on the behind.)

From the shadows came a snicker of incredulity, and the pipsqueak Bernini spoke up.

— Baloney! he laughed. Everybody knows the legend means something else. In reality, Santos Vega is barbarism and Juan Sin Ropa is progress; it’s about progress defeating barbarism.37

— Good old pipsqueak! celebrated Franky Amundsen in treacherous adulation.

— Am I right? Bernini asked him.

— As usual!

— Was that a pipspeak just spoke? inquired Juan Sin Ropa, incredulous. If he was a few inches taller, I’d teach him the word “Progress” is the name I use when I’m travellin’ incognito.

At this point Del Solar, the folklore expert, intervened to set the record straight on the gaucho myth under discussion. In his view, it should be understood quite literally.

— Juan Sin Ropa, he declared, is the naked gringo who defeated Santos Vega in a fight our countryman didn’t understand: the struggle for life.

No sooner had he said this than Juan Sin Ropa began the first of his mutations. The flamboyant gaucho dissolved, and there appeared in his stead a big, burly, red-headed fellow wearing a checked shirt and trousers, and yellow boots. Completing his get-up were a gaudy knife and a riding whip, its grip almost entirely adorned with silver. The adventurers felt a wave of sympathy as they immediately recognized the smiling image of the Cocoliche.38

— Sono venuto a l’Argentina per fare l’America, he declared. E sono in America per fare l’Argentina.39

— Aha! cried Del Solar. Just as I thought! Aren’t you the gringo tavern owner who robbed the local folks of their land with your sharp practice and mortgages?

Cocoliche stretched out his arms to display his big, calloused hands.

— Io laboro la terra, he said. Per me se mangia il pane.40

Hostile laughter mixed with words of encouragement celebrated the Cocoliche’s comeback.

— The gringo is right on that score, Pereda admitted.

— He’s a tavern owner! insisted Del Solar. All he cared about was getting rich!

And now the Cocoliche in turn metamorphosed into an old man whose patriarchal beard shone like polished brass. His gaze seemed to open up vast horizons; he was wearing a vicuña-wool poncho and a dark chiripá. Adam Buenosayres trembled like a leaf when he recognized the authentic effigy of his grandfather Sebastián.

— Not always, young feller, retorted the grandfather, looking at Del Solar with friendly eyes. A hundred times I crossed the pampa in my horse-drawn cart; a hundred times I smuggled loads across the river in my whale boat. I ploughed the virgin land and raised flocks. And now, even the land where my bones lie mouldering, I can’t call my own.

— It’s absolutely true! exclaimed Adam Buenosayres, succumbing to his third fit of tears.

But Del Solar wouldn’t give in.

— An exception. Honourable, but rare.

The discussion became general around this subject, which touched them all to the quick. And the legendary figure of Juan Sin Ropa, having already undergone two mutations, now took on the physiognomy of all peoples, the rampant aspect of all ambitions, the sadness of all exiles, the colour of all hopes. In the form of Mister Chisholm, he offered them a shiny locomotive in exchange for our fourteen provinces. Then, as Uncle Sam, he tempted them with the glory of becoming one more star in his illustrious top hat and letting them feature in a cowboy movie. Next, he appeared as the Wandering Jew and offered to buy up everything from their boots to the Southern Cross. Finally, in the guise of a derby-hatted Frenchman from Marseilles, he proposed they refine their culture, cuisine, and ars amandi. Through it all, each of the heroes defended his own cause and cast aspersions on the others. Just when their ardent spirits were threatening to spill into the terrain of Mars, the seven expeditionaries of Saavedra witnessed the arrival of a naked horseman, a radiant halo over his brow; as he drew nearer, he exuded an exquisite scent as of a glorified body.41

— Let there be peace! exclaimed the horseman. Peace be among you!

— Who are you? Adam Buenosayres asked him.

— Martin, the soldier, he responded. It was I who gave the poor man half my cape.

— Sir, what dost thou in the deep of night?

— I stand guard over the city assigned to my custody.

— And why so naked? insisted Adam.

— I willingly gave the poor man half my cape, and the poor man took away the other half. The poor man is a figure of Christ, and he who gives his possessions to the poor lays himself bare in Our Lord. But it is not meet that the poor man take away the other half of our cape.42

No sooner had he delivered this cryptic utterance than the naked horseman melted away into the night. But the astrologer Schultz was not accepting these childish versions of the legend. For him, the fable had an esoteric meaning. Juan Sin Ropa, winner of the lyric contest, was none other than the prefiguration of the Neocriollo who would inhabit the pampa in the distant future. At the word “Neocriollo,” Juan Sin Ropa underwent an incredible metamorphosis, the last of the series. His gaucho clothing fell away as he suddenly grew twenty feet tall, displaying the most disconcerting of manly forms that human ingenuity is capable of imagining. He was completely nude: his thoracic cavity and abdomen were X-ray transparent, his finely traced internal organs clearly visible. He stood on only one of his gigantic legs, while the other was folded up flamingo-style. But most astonishing was his great head encircled by a radiant nimbus: phosphorescent eyes swinging like headlights on the tips of two long antennae; a saxophone mouth; ears like two gyrating funnels, which were now trained upon the nonplussed heroes.

Franky Amundsen wanted to know what new demon this was, and Schultz replied that it was the Neocriollo himself. When Samuel Tesler opined that he was no thing of beauty, the Neocriollo’s saxophone snout rose and fell three times like an elephant’s trunk.

— Listen! said Schultz. The Neocriollo wants to speak.

Indeed, an inarticulate stream of sounds gushed from the saxophonish schnoz: a voice imitating the whistle of a partridge, the goldfinch’s aria, the cooing of turtledoves, the croaking of frogs, the owl’s hoot, the sparrow’s chirp, the shrill cry of the crested screamer, and the squawk of the lapwing.43 The Neocriollo alternately grew enormous or shrank to dwarf-like dimensions, in proportion to the greater or lesser sublimity of the sounds he produced.

— What did he say? asked Franky, as soon as the sound stream stopped.

Schultz qualified it as a sort of ineffable political harangue, then translated the Neocriollo’s words as follows: “If the laxative jacket and the reinforced concrete smile were not to sweet opprobrium as Neon, the harpsichord, is to the seagull in a daydream mouldering amid flowers, then much might be expected from the cosmic elephant, at the hour when pale fig trees resolve Baluk’s theorem. But beware, mortals! The non-submersible president has broken the pact, and already his thighs are clad in the black undershorts of doubt.”

That fragment of prose left the explorers absorbed in contemplation.

— Bah, scoffed Pereda. It’s too logical for his tender years.

— Logical! Samuel lamented. Regrettably logical.

Adam Buenosayes didn’t try to hide his melancholy.

— To escape logic, he exclaimed, one must be a madman or a saint!

But the Neocriollo’s saxophone snout suddenly emitted a very bright light.

— And that? asked Franky.

— Excellent! said Schultz. The Neocriollo is in a good mood: he just tossed out his tri-coloured laugh.

— Is that all he can do to show his good humour? grumbled Franky.

Upon hearing this, and with robotic grace, the Neocriollo began to dance the malambo, the cueca, the escondido, the zamba, the aires, the cuándo, the chacarera, the sombrerito, the pala pala, the marote, the resbalosa, the pericón, the huella, and the chamamé.44 Unfortunately, the explorers showed no signs of appreciation. What they wanted was a miracle. Lo and behold, the Neocriollo heard this request with his infundibuliform ears and wagged his trunk to call for attention. Then, turning around on the spot, he pointed his buttocks at the heroes and let fly a luminous fart: up into the night it sailed, ensconcing itself in the Centaur constellation between the fixed stars Alpha and Beta. His performance complete, he faded into black.

The next series of events took place in the natural realm. Until then, the terrain had been flat enough to accommodate an infantry advance, and the expeditionaries had encountered no obstacles. But now they sensed a downhill slope, and soon their feet were splashing through water, as though in a swamp.

— Hey! Hey! cried Bernini. What are we getting into now?

— Don’t worry, Del Solar cautioned them. We’re getting close to the ditch.45

Franky Amundsen started to moan softly.

— Just as I imagined! he groused. Up to my balls in mud — me, the best-shod dude in Buenos Aires!

But Del Solar admonished him severely, asking him whether by some excess of Nature his balls hung down to his heels. Then, reassuring, he told his men they weren’t really walking in mud; it was grass covered by standing water.

— Onward! he finally ordered. The land rises again not far up ahead.

In fact, after a few more steps the heroes perceived a slight uphill slope and gradually their feet ceased splashing. At the same time, the batrachian chorus met their ears.

— Brekekekex, co-ax, co-ax! Brekekekex, co-ax, co-ax!

— The ditch! announced the guide, not hiding his relief. Watch you don’t fall in!

Heeding the leader’s warning, the men advanced cautiously. Suddenly they were in a dense thicket with scratchy leaves up to their chests. They struggled for a bit through the tangle, but after several yards their guide stopped.

— Halt! cried Del Solar.

After glancing at the ground, he added:

— Okay, come closer.

They were on the very edge of the ditch. A revolting stench rose from its stagnant waters. The astrologer Schultz flopped down on his belly, crept up to the edge, and saw only blackness. But he could hear the music of the batrachians, their watery tambourines, their double basses of moss, their cellos of clay.

— Good evening, creatures of the water! he cried.

— Brekekekex, co-ax, co-ax! Brekekekex, co-ax, co-ax! came the batrachians’ reply.

At that point, Adam Buenosayres recited these mysterious words: “Pan and the Muses love us / Our song draws down Apollo, golden-lyred / Ours are the march-reeds, god-inspired / That sing to his heavenly fingering / Their music with our own mingling.”46

— What’s the poetaster on about now? asked Franky.

— The chorus of the frog-swans, in Aristophanes, explained Adam. It came back to me when I heard these creatures in the ditch.

— They aren’t frogs, protested Bernini. They’re toads.

— The toad-swans! exclaimed Schultz rapturously.

From the depths up-swelled the chorus of the toad-swans.

CHORUS:

Brekekekex, co-ax, co-ax! Patience, greenish brothers of the aqueous realm. Witches use us, hobble us with the cursèd hair of the women they’ve bewitched, and pierce our hearts with needles, nails, and thorns. They herd us into their terrible lairs; they offer our services as guides for children who have died unbaptised. And yet, the toad is the most innocent creature on earth. Brothers, beware the folklorists! They’re a hairy and flea-bitten lot!

— Superstitions! Bernini laughed scornfully.

— What about their healing powers? Schultz reminded him.

CHORUS:

Brekekekex, co-ax, co-ax! O, brothers, patience! They open up our mouths and spit inside to cure their pitiful tooth-aches. With knives they cut open our backs and apply us to snake bites. They tie us to the necks of their mangy old nags. They throw us alive into ponds to purify the water. Men humiliate us with jackboots, women insult us with their silly fears, children play by tormenting us. But nevertheless, the toad is the most beautiful creature in the universe: in the beginning was the Toad. Beware the folklorists, brothers of the water! They’re a hairy and flea-bitten lot!47

Just when it looked as if the colloquium with the batrachian swans was never going to end, the irate guide called them to order.

— Enough horsing around! We have to cross the ditch.

— Okay, fine, conceded Franky. Where do we find that famous board?

Del Solar laughed bitterly in the dark.

— That is the question, he said. We must find the plank.

Distinctly unappealing was Del Solar’s injunction, cherchez the plank,48 and the adventurers made their displeasure clear in language most injurious to the guide who’d embarked them on such a hazardous voyage. To be out searching for a bloody plank across some goddam ditch, all on a night that no one, out of decorum, had dared compare to the raven’s wing — well, it was all a bit much for those men accustomed to gentler activity. Their discomfort was aggravated by another doubt: just how well did Del Solar really know the terrain? And it became frankly insufferable when the suspicion dawned that Schultz knew as much about navigation as they did about neutering monkeys. Fortunately, the voice of reason prevailed amid the general uncertainty, and the glory of talking good sense fell to the pipsqueak Bernini. With a logic worthy of another century and an eloquence reminiscent of the greatest classical authors, Bernini demonstrated that they had only two options: either they crossed the ditch (board or no board), or they retraced their steps. But the pipsqueak’s science didn’t stop at spelling out that cruel choice. Declaring himself in favour of the first option, he advanced the original idea of dividing the group into two parties to explore the shore of the ditch until the hidden plank was found. Shouts of unanimous approval resounded. Franky saluted the genius of that young strategist, albeit with a touch of melancholy, for such talent was wasted in times of peace. In any case, two exploratory parties were promptly struck. Adam, Samuel, Schultz, and Bernini were to head westward. The pipsqueak demanded to be leader of this group, fearing that, given their predilection for abstraction, the other three wouldn’t see the board even if they tripped over it. Franky Amundsen and Luis Pereda, under the dubious leadership of Del Solar, would explore to the east. Duly formed, both parties received their marching orders. Whoever found the board was to whistle, though Franky Amundsen suggested the signal be the more traditional cry of the hoot owl. Their instructions received, the two groups separated without a word.

The pipsqueak Bernini led his silent men in single file toward the west. The bank of the ditch was not cooperative; it zigged and it zagged, lurched up and down, and bristled with thorny bushes that attacked them under cover of dark. And through it all the toads sang, monotonous and tightly scored, as though reciting from memory an interminable chronicle of the flood.

— Places like this, Samuel Tesler said at last in a pensive voice, evoke the shore of damnation: a pitch-black river; the eternal death of the spirit hovering over its waters; the silence of the spirit, bereft of hope in the Word; and voiceless shadows, like us, crowding round the fatal riverbank.

Adam Buenosayres, in spite of himself, felt a shiver run up his spine. But Schultz broke the spell.

— The infernal waters, he pontificated, are no mere accidental feature of Dante’s mise-en-scène. In the language of symbolism, the rivers of Tartar represent…

— Yeah, yeah, Samuel interrupted irritably. That’s Metaphysics 101.

— Nut-House Metaphysics 101, growled Bernini. Keep an eye out for the board!

Silence descended again on the steadily advancing group, and once more Samuel disturbed it by launching into an exegesis of the Original Hermaphrodite, as famously expounded by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium. But just when he was getting to the good part, a sharp whistle pierced the nocturnal calm, and the secret of the Hermaphrodite was left only half revealed.

— The signal! shouted the pipsqueak Bernini. Did you hear it?

— We aren’t deaf, snorted Samuel.

They turned immediately and struggled back over the same rugged terrain. They hadn’t covered fifty yards when urgent voices beckoned from the shadows.

— Over here, over here! cried the voices triumphantly.

— No doubt about it! Bernini exclaimed. They’ve found the board.

Indeed they had. The two parties having reunited, Del Solar pointed at the end of a narrow plank: this was the bridge across the abyss. At the prospect of doing a tightrope act on a rickety board crossing a fissure of unknown depth, the heroes’ morale took a plunge. The astrologer Schultz announced he wouldn’t take a single step on that plank until he had categorical proof it could bear the weight of a man. Adam and Tesler roundly declared there was no way they would, either. Then Franky Amundsen indignantly cursed the cowardice of those intellectuals who took chances only when writing verse. But Del Solar, true to his vocation as leader, set the example; without hesitation, he stepped forward. They watched as he advanced along the oscillating board, arms outspread for balance, until his swaying figure disappeared in the shadows. Presently, they heard him happily announce his safe arrival on the other side. In emulation, Schultz and Luis Pereda too went forth onto the board with great good fortune. Adam Buenosayres followed in turn. Halfway across, a gust of wind nearly made him lose his balance; teetering dangerously, he listened to the lullaby of the batrachians tempting him to join them in the depths. Then Bernini went across, with Samuel Tesler hard on his heels. Only Franky Amundsen remained on the hither shore, now deserted.

— Watch this! he said as he began his crossing. I’m going to show you how it’s done in the circus. Check out the elegance of my form.

He set off along the board, one hand on his hip and the other holding an invisible parasol. As he advanced, he sang a famous tango in a hoarse faux-soprano voice:

I’m the circus girl,

for a penny I give…49

Suddenly, when he was almost there, Franky Amundsen lost his balance, swatted desperately at the air, and plopped into the pit, making such a commotion that the batrachian singers went silent.

Immense laughter resounded on the bank.

— Pride goeth before a fall! exclaimed Tesler. The best-shod dude in Buenos Aires!

Del Solar wasn’t laughing. He peered over the bank and asked anxiously:

— Franky, are you there?

From the deep a whiny voice cursed in response:

— Nice question! Where the Sam Hill do you think I am?

— Is it very deep? asked Del Solar.

— Don’t think so, said Franky. I’m getting out now.

A moment later Franky Amundsen’s head poked up over the dark bank, and his comrades reached to take him by the armpits and hoist him ashore like some monstrous fish.

— Are you hurt? asked Luis Pereda, palming his back and chest.

— Not even a scratch, said Franky dolefully. But covered in mud from head to toe.

For the third time on that memorable night, Samuel Tesler got out his lighter. By its light, it was obvious that Franky was exaggerating: his feet and trousers were muddied not quite up to the knees. On the other hand, the whole of him reeked of putrefaction. The astrologer took a swipe of mud from Franky’s clothes onto his fingers and commented on its interesting origin.

— Mm-hmm, said Schultz, smelling the mire with relish. It’s putrimuck.

— Putri-bullshit! roared Franky, losing his temper. I’m in no mood for cute little terms from your neo-idiom. Why don’t you give me something to wipe this crud off with, instead!

His plea did not fall on deaf ears. His comrades, in a fit of generosity, offered him handkerchiefs, pages from notepads, personal letters, brilliant jottings, strange manuscripts. Adam Buenosayres, no less generous, was tempted to do his part by donating a certain ineffable Blue-Bound Notebook which he’d liberated that evening from an ingrate; but his infinite modesty stayed the gesture, reminding him that those pages belonged not to him but to posterity. In any case, Franky Amundsen managed to repair his misfortune at least partially. And the explorers, having regrouped, set off into the new territory before them.

Now, the dubious guide named Del Solar had promised that once across the ditch they’d be able to see the lights of the Dead Man’s House. But as it turned out, all they could see in every direction was universal darkness. Worse, the ground was getting rough and unpredictable. Sometimes they would climb a hill only to find that on the other side it fell away in a nearly sheer cliff. Having no idea of their elevation, they had to feel their way dangerously down, gingerly seeking toe-holds on the mysteriously steep slope. Other times, going downhill, they would come up against a wall of earth impossible to scale; then they would have to circle round until they found a way past the obstacle. All this increased the expeditionaries’ ill humour, and they advanced in a silence disturbed only by sounds of their laboured breathing.

Just as they were getting round one those inaccessible hills, the heroes stopped short in surprise at the scene before them. Twenty paces ahead, they beheld a man seated by a campfire, its flames darting in the wind. With a stick he was stirring a makeshift pot, its contents bubbling over onto the fire. Around him, seven incredibly emaciated dogs lay stretched out on the ground, snouts resting between paws, staring in rapt contemplation at the dance of the fire.

— A linyera, whispered Adam as he stared at the stranger.

But Schultz was sure the man was an authentic magus, and he based his observation on proofs he would provide forthwith, if the group was so willing. Since no one made any objection, the astrologer pointed to an ombú not far from the bonfire; its deformed trunk grew from roots twisting and turning like knotted serpents in the nervous glare of the flames.

— From here we’ll be able to observe him without being seen, he sensibly pointed out.

The explorers approached the ombú by way of vast circular detour around the luminous zone. But suddenly the dogs pricked up their ears, got up, and started barking furiously.

— Not to worry, Schultz told his companions. I’ve got my canido-blade on me.

Sure enough, he pulled out a regular-sized jackknife, opened the longer of its blades, and confidently continued forward, followed by the others. The man by the bonfire, perhaps still unaware of the intruders nearby, whistled softly. The dogs instantly quieted down, their bony frames slinking back to the fire to lie down. Gaining the foot of the ombú, the adventurers climbed onto its tortuous spurs and attentively observed the details of the scene. The fire illuminated the man entirely; they could see his tattered clothes, feet wrapped in rags, and bearded face. Ruddy with firelight, his face nevertheless gave the impression that an inner spark had gone out or died. The man kept on stirring the pot, all the while reciting an unintelligible monologue between his teeth.

Franky asked in a whisper what the strange man was muttering about. Schultz said it was probably a magic spell. And that in the pot he was probably brewing a philtre which, when applied to his head, would turn him into a cat or a lion or any other creature. Not hiding his apprehension, the astrologer said he wouldn’t be surprised if the dogs surrounding the magus were the human victims of some metamorphosis. As he talked, Schultz got himself so worked up that not even the incredulous snickers of his companions could dampen his exultation.

— I’m going to ask the man a few questions, he said at last, throwing caution to the winds.

— What if he throws the pot at us? objected Franky.

— Look here, Adam announced solemnly. You don’t play around with stuff like that.

Heedless of any warning, the excursionists left the safety of the ombú and headed for the fire. The sorcerer’s dogs came at them, ominously baring their teeth or snapping at the heels of the intruders. But the man by the fire didn’t even look up from his boiling pot.

— Good evening! Schultz said to him.

— Good evening! echoed the group in chorus.

A most worrisome silence was the only response. And so the astrologer, hoping to break it, pelted the wizard with questions about the dark art he surely professed, including its ritual formulas and magical ingredients. But the bonfire man, as if in another world, didn’t answer.

— Could he be a foreigner? Adam Buenosayres hazarded.

The hypothesis was accepted by most of them, so Schultz uselessly repeated his questions in a few modern languages. Then he tried in disastrous Latin, then again in even worse Greek. At Schultz’s last words, the magus raised his head.

— He’s understood! exclaimed Schultz. He’s going to talk to us!

The adventurers of Saavedra were all ears. And then the bonfire man, his gaze fixed upon them, said in tranquil voice:

— You sons of whores.

Great was the surprise of all upon hearing such familiar language.

— That’s gotta be pure Sanskrit! exclaimed Franky, delighted.

Surprise was quickly succeeded by the most violent fit of hilarity yet recorded on that memorable night. Abashed and piqued, the astrologer threatened to take the pot and put it like a hat on the detestable imposter. His truly pathetic indignation kindled the others’ laughter until they were howling. But the bonfire man, riled by the astrologer’s aggressive demeanour and the hoots of the rest, lurched to his feet, grabbed the pot by the handle, and menacingly made for the explorers. They all took off running, the demonic mastiffs hard on their heels.

After resting to catch their breath, the adventurers set forth once again, giving vent to their glee at the expense of Schultz and his black magic. The astrologer suffered the slings and arrows of mockery in silence. His magnanimous heart pitied the ignorance of those men who knew not the horror of certain occult forces and who, swinging between the poles of Good and Evil, were as helpless as children when it came to manifestations of the demonic. But as the jeering got more outrageous, Schultz’s charity degenerated into an irascible will to take revenge on the jokers.

— You scoff, he intoned mirthlessly. But you haven’t even an inkling of the invisible horde lurking in the dark. Perverse eyes are watching us, as I speak. Hmm, it’s the witching hour.

— The dark powers exist, Samuel affirmed in a voice from the tomb.

The astrologer Schultz noticed that everyone was quiet now, and he deliberately prolonged the moment of silence.

— They’re invisible forms, he added. But if we focus our will even slightly, they’ll become visible. Look closely into the shadows, and you’ll see it’s burgeoning with monstrous silhouettes.

The pipsqueak Bernini forced a nervous little laugh, trying to break the spell. But his laugh found no echo in the group. Instead, their wary eyes darted left and right, seeking in the night what they dared not find.

— Yes, said Adam Buenosayres. The devil is quick to answer any call. Nothing to it! All you need to do is invoke him in thought, and there he is!

— Hmm, Del Solar spluttered. The outskirts of Buenos Aires have a long tradition of witchcraft. Apparitions of both the Pig and the Widow are commonplace.50

At that point, Buenosayres had the bright idea of telling the ghost story he’d heard as a child from his grandfather Sebastián. It’s wintertime, one midnight in August. Grampa is sleeping the sleep of the just, out there in his cabin lost among hills and dales, when suddenly he wakes up to the sound of someone or something knocking at the window. Must be the wind, he thinks. He half sits up in his cot and listens. Now the noise is at the cabin door — an insistent tapping as though huge wings were beating at the door. Grampa lights his lamp and cries out: Who’s there? No answer, the wings just keep on beating. So he gets out of bed, takes the bar from the door, and opens it. Outside he finds a flock of enormous turkeys. Spreading their tails, they push past him and barge into the cabin. Now, Grandfather Sebastián has never seen such huge turkeys and he begins to suspect witchcraft, especially when the turkeys, making an infernal racket, crowd round and push him against the wall. So he grabs the bar and starts battering the turkeys with it. Far from backing off, they seem to revel in each blow. His hair standing on end, Grampa runs over and pulls out a silver-plated knife hidden under the head of the bed. He makes the sign of the cross by putting the blade over the sheath and shoves it at the beasts. What banshees! They all back away, screeching like old crones after a flogging. Grampa sees them pile out through the door and flee across the fields into the night like souls rounded up by the devil.

Gradually, as Adam’s tale unfolded, the group had tightened around the storyteller as they walked. Even Schultz, regretting he’d embarked them on such a dire demonology, was walking cheek by jowl with his comrades, anxiously peering into the shadows in spite of himself. Such was the state of the group’s morale when Buenosayres finished his yarn. Next, as if one ghost story weren’t enough, Samuel Tesler began to recount a gloomy tale of love and hate. It had taken place in his native land, Besarabia, vaguely remembered from childhood. It was about a woman and a man. She was as adorable as she was disdainful. He was a victim of unrequited love that had turned into implacable rancour. The two of them lived in the same house, separated by a wall. For no apparent reason, the young woman started showing symptoms of a rare disease. Every midnight her fever would come to a crisis, at the very same moment when, on the other side of the wall, three hammer blows were heard. Day after day, at the stroke of midnight, the hammer pounded three times on the wall, and the young woman’s condition worsened. For a month the young woman went on wasting away. Then, at the final blow of the hammer, she gave up the ghost. Several days later, the love-stricken man mysteriously disappeared. The police entered his room. On the wall separating his room from hers, the shape of a woman had been drawn in pencil. A nail had been driven deep into the figure’s heart. The hammer lay on the floor.

Samuel’s story, told in that place and at such an hour, was the last straw. The group had just come to the top of a hill. What happened there was as fast as it was inexplicable. Luis Pereda suddenly tripped over something massive. He went tumbling down the slope without so much as a shout. The others ran to help him, but before they got to the bottom where he lay, he got up and took to his heels at full speed.

— The Devil! he screamed. The Devil!

The explorers looked back to where Pereda had fallen. They could make out a dark bulk arising from the ground and raising two horns like those of an ox. Simultaneously, the silence of the night was broken by a long “mooooo.”51 The entire group, panic-stricken, took off after the fleeing Pereda, with Schultz in the lead, the very vanguard of terror. An accelerated fugue dragged them all indiscriminately across merciless terrain. As they fled, the night semed to unleash all its secret fury against them. Behind them, invisible arms reached out, straining to seize them in clawlike fingers. The napes of their necks prickled under the icy breath of the pursuers. Heathen war whoops, bestial panting, and burlesque snickers filled their ears. They bounded along, afraid that at any moment they might step on some repulsive shape slithering over the ground.

How long did that giddy career last? They never knew. Later, they only remembered suddenly topping a rise in the ground and seeing two or three street lamps emerge in the near distance.

— Lights! they shouted. Lights!

And they ran as fast as they could down the slope.

They had arrived.

Chapter 2. HERE LIES JUAN ROBLES, MUD-STOMPER

Adam Buenosayres, the astrologer Schultz, and Samuel Tesler were tarrying, deep in thought, in the chamber where the deceased lay in state. As men who have plumbed the ancient mystery of death, all three contemplated the mortal remains of the man who had been Juan Robles (a fine specimen of a criollo, if ever there was one). According to the neighbours, he’d kicked the bucket after fifty-nine years in an existence both happy and laborious. He’d whiled away his time on earth drifting from pulpería to pulpería, from siesta to siesta, watching his famous mares stomp mud for brick-making.1 And just now Juan Robles was looking quite ceremonious, stuffed into his wedding suit and stretched out full length in his black coffin with bronze handles.

Surrounding the coffin were six candlesticks, dripping wax, the flame at their tips gradually shrinking around the charred wicks. At the head of Juan Robles’s casket, a metal crucifix glinted in the scant candlelight, and the curved torso of the cross projected its terrible shadow onto the wall deep in the chamber. Four potted palm trees and a few flowers from the neighbouring garden decorated the funeral chapel. The lid of the casket had been propped against one wall like an ominous door waiting to close forever. The Three Crones, huddled in one corner of the room, had just stopped clucking to spy on those three strangers staring at the cadaver as though at something outlandish. In the opposite corner, the Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law seemed to be sleeping, cocooned within their capacious black shawls.

It certainly wasn’t the mud-stomper’s mortal flesh, already cold, that attracted the strangers’ interest. The essential thing, in their view, was Juan Robles’s imperishable soul, recently detached from its earthly coil and launched into who knows what obscure regions. What regions? For the astrologer Schultz, initiate of Eastern mysteries, the question permitted only one answer, and he was explaining this to his friend Tesler in the grave voice appropriate to such a mournful occasion. If every individual born into this world had just died in some other world, he said, and if every individual who died here had just been born on another plane of cosmic existence, it obviously followed that Juan Robles, now dead on earth, was at that moment crying for the first time in another world, eagerly clinging once again to a maternal nipple, being swaddled in solicitous diapers, and provoking a new set of joys and worries. In what form? Under what new life conditions? There lay the great question! But Samuel Tesler, accustomed to a more colourful philosophy, repudiated that abstract mechanism of births and deaths; moreover, to imagine the deceased Juan Robles already in another world, bawling and pissing his diapers, was an Orientalist notion that he, for one, had a hard time swallowing. For his taste, what was wanted was a tribunal of souls with plenty of pomp and colour, presided over by straight-talking judges who could meticulously ferret the dirt out of a conscience, post mortem. In the opinion of the philosopher of Villa Crespo, the soul of Juan Robles had been brought by jackal-headed Anubis to the ineluctable scale of merit- and demerit-points; the deceased’s heart would now be sitting on one side of the balance, while on the other side weighed the severe feather of the Law. What was Thot doing as he stood beside the weighing machine? Inclining his graceful ibis head, Thot was etching the exact weight of that heart on a little tablet.

Unfortunately, Schultz had never been able to stomach the sort of zoomorphic divinities his lugubrious interlocutor was referring to. To his mind, turning Thot into a dull bookkeeper was an act of lèse-majesté against the immortal gods, and weighing up the raw meat of Juan Robles’s heart was a gross display of butchery. In reality, his lugubrious interlocutor, being a Semite, tended more toward the ethical sense of things than to their metaphysical and profound meaning, because of racial influences causing him to see in every god a grotesque policeman.

— What about the Hebrew Kabbala? Samuel said acridly in refutation.

— That’s another kettle of fish, Schultz retorted.

Adam Buenosayres listened in silence to the polemic between his friends. In his mind the funereal scene, despite its garish reality, only prolonged the phantasmagorical series initiated that night by the group in their crossing of Saavedra. But Adam was sobering up now, the dense fumes of drunkenness breaking up enough that he could notice how profanatory was the tone of the argument between Samuel Tesler and the astrologer, standing as they were next to the black box, shaped like a ship, in which Juan Robles was sailing away. And furthermore, how striking was the absence of the soul in that vanquished body! Adam examined it where it lay: already the facial lineaments were sharpening, like the edges of a chunk of rock, the skin becoming clay-like, slick and opaque; a cold, earthy clamminess and a mineral silence seemed to waft up from that recently abandoned machine. Not ten hours ago had Juan Robles given up the ghost, and his body was already a mere clump of mud crumbling back into the earth it was made from, true to her plastic laws. “The soul’s instrument,” he thought. “It’s served its purpose and now the artisan throws it away before departing — a worn-out tool, all chipped and battered, spotted with bits of the earthy stuff it touched and worked throughout its days.” Adam looked again at the dead man’s face, tanned and hardened by the sun and the elements, then at the calloused hands, especially the fingernails — there were still traces of brick-making mud under them. An infinite pity invaded him; he felt the misery of that man as his own, and as everyone else’s too. And the soul? Samuel Tesler and the astrologer Schultz (two literary types, after all) insisted on dragging Juan Robles’s soul through every infernal twist and turn imaginable. But Adam trembled as he reflected on the fearful judgment awaiting the creature before his Creator. Through the alcoholic fog still clouding his awareness, he heard once again the admonitory drums beat within him, the eloquent resonance-chambers of his penitential night. “Not yet!” he cried within. “Don’t give in!” In spite of himself, he had raised his eyes to the bronze Crucifix, then looked away quickly. (Yes, a fish squirming on the hook, a fish no longer in the water nor yet in the hand of the fisherman.)

Just then, María Justa Robles entered, bearing coffee and little glasses of anisette on a tray held in both hands. Circumspect in her grief, María Justa went up to the three men who stood in vigil and silently offered them the tray.

— No, thank you, Schultz refused ceremoniously.

— Where are our friends? asked Adam.

— In the kitchen, she replied.

The three made polite gestures and went out to the yard, not without dedicating a final look at the deceased Juan Robles, wishing him god-speed. Then María Justa turned to the Three Crones lurking in their dark corner.

— Coffee? Anisette?

— Thank you, m’dear, murmured Doña Carmen, taking a cup from the tray.

— Ladies? María Justa invited Doña Consuelo and Doña Martina, who were hesitating.

— You’ve gone to so much trouble! whispered Doña Martina.

— You shouldn’t have! sighed Doña Consuelo.

Finally the two old women each took a cup of coffee. María Justa then approached the Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law, who looked as if they were dozing, and offered them the tray. Three hands suddenly emerged rampant from amid the swaddling dark cloth, three hands or three claws that quickly snatched glasses of anisette and withdrew with their prey, sinking back down into the somber chaos of their shawls. María Justa, careful in her grief, put aside the load of drinks, picked up a pair of scissors, and went from one bronze candlestick to the next, trimming the curled wicks. One by one the flames shot up and chased the skittish shadows back into the four corners of the room. The Necrophile Sisters-in-Law, offended by the sudden excess of light, fled backward, like the shadows, and hid their faces in their shawls of mourning. At the same time the Crones’ faces were lit up: three faces amazingly unanimous in their expression of fateful tranquility. Then María Justa walked to the head of the coffin and contemplated the deceased for a long time. A single tear left her eye and rolled down her cheek. Then she picked up the tray and left the room, minimal and silent as ever.

The Three Crones, who hadn’t taken their eyes off María Justa for a second, turned and looked at one another.

— Poor thing! Doña Consuelo lamented softly.

— So humble, isn’t she just? whispered Doña Martina. Ever so thoughtful in her sorrow!

At this, Doña Carmen stopped blowing on her coffee and frowned.

— A pearl in the pigsty, like the saying goes, she said in a low growl. She’s one in a million! Carries the cross for the whole family. And what a family! Don’t deserve her, they don’t. Lord knows they ain’t worth her little finger!

Doña Martina and Doña Consuelo, curious, pricked up their ears. But Doña Carmen said nothing more and eyed the Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law suspiciously.

— Did you see her just now? insisted Doña Martina. On the verge of tears, but she held back.

— She shouldn’t have, opined Doña Consuelo. Better to let go and get it off her chest.

Doña Carmen’s lips smiled sadly.

— She can’t, she observed. Just like her mother in every way, my dear departed comadre, God have mercy on her soul! I wore myself out trying to convince her, “Cry, m’love, it’ll do you good.” But, no, she wouldn’t shed so much as a tear. The parade went by inside, you might say.

— Yes, yes, purred Doña Martina. I’ve heard talk.

— She took it all to the grave with her! Doña Carmen concluded. Anyway, she’s better off than us now.

But Doña Consuelo was dying of curiosity.

— Bad life? she asked a in low voice.

— A dog’s life, muttered doña Carmen. If these four walls could talk!

— I’ve heard talk, Doña Martina purred again.

Then Doña Carmen, her tongue itching so badly she could stand it no longer, leaned toward her two neighbours and whispered something. It must have been something incredible, for Doña Consuelo’s mouth fell open, as if she couldn’t believe her ears.

— Him? she exclaimed finally, looking askance at the coffin.

— May God forgive him! affirmed Doña Carmen. He wasn’t what you’d call a nasty lot. But when a man’s on a bender…

— And with the same whip? Doña Consuelo asked, still dumbfounded.

— The very one he used on the mares, grumbled Doña Carmen. I seen ’m with these very eyes that’ll return to dust one day! And there was no talking to him, ’cause when he was in his cups, he was a holy terror and wouldn’t have listened to Christ on the cross.

— An outrage! sighed Doña Martina, clapping her eyes on Juan Robles’s casket.

Doña Carmen followed her gaze.

— Like I said, she went on, he wasn’t bad at heart. You should’ve seen him the next day when he sobered up. Eyes downcast, like the man was carrying a burden of remorse. Circling around his wife, wanting to say something but not knowing what. So he’d bring her a little something — a length of cloth, a pound of chocolate, some guayaba sweet. But she got away on him anyway! We held her wake in this very room.

— Very long ago? asked Doña Consuelo.

— Let’s see. Wait, now. María Justa would’ve been ten, if memory serves. Now she’s twenty-eight. Figure it out.

— Eighteen years ago, Doña Martina calculated.

— That’s right, Doña Carmen assented. I can still see her! Just before she died, she made me swear by the Virgin of Candlemas I’d take care of her kids, especially María Justa, my godchild. The neighbours can tell you whether I did my duty.

— Oh, Doña Carmen! the other two women protested in unison. Everyone in the neighbourhood agrees. You’ve been like a mother to María Justa.

— Yes, yes, Doña Carmen admitted, finishing off the cold dregs of her coffee. But what about the others?

Doña Consuelo and Doña Martina didn’t know what to say.

— Bad eggs, grumbled Doña Carmen. Ever since they were kids. Just think about it: their father out at the bars, drowning his sorrows in cane liquor or whatever, and the little brats bumming around in the streets all the blessèd day long. Forget about discipline! Pointless. They just laughed in my face!

— Hmm! commented Doña Martina and Doña Consuelo.

— With Juan José, it doesn’t matter, insisted Doña Carmen. After all, he’s a man, and it’s up to him look out for himself. But the little ladies… Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t have taken it upon myself and paddled their bums with my slipper till they were red as tomatoes.

— Hmm! Doña Martina and Doña Consuelo intoned again, noncommital.

— But who was I? Doña Carmen argued. A Johnny-come-lately, like they say. And bein’ as the mother wasn’t there for them…

— Motherhood! Doña Martina and Doña Consuelo sighed in chorus.

Lost in memory, Doña Carmen muttered some unintelligible complaint.

— That’s how they turned out, she said at last. A real lot of gems! Phff! Juan José, he likes work, so long as it’s someone else doing it. Fritters away his day drinking mate. And at night, who know what he’s up to! Because he’s never short of shekels; they say he gambles, or worse. Márgara, she’s hopeless, a high-steeric, what with her fits and her endless aches and pains. And the Other One, the Other One!

— But María Justa… Doña Consuelo began to object.

— Yes, yes, admitted Doña Carmen. She’s the Cinderella type. I always told her, “Courage, my child, your mother is blessing you up there in Heaven.” But inside I was thinking, “The day I see the back of her going out that door in a bridal gown, I’m gonna get myself righteously squiffed.” But I never got the chance to!

— They did her dirty! protested Doña Martina. It wasn’t her fault that the Other One… Fiancés nowadays! Bah, why bother getting engaged?

But Doña Consuelo was out of the loop.

— Whose fiancé? she wanted to know, anxious and flustered.

— María Justa’s fiancé, Doña Martina clarified. Just imagine, standing her up like that, when her trousseau’s all ready and everything. All because the Other One…

— I see, said Doña Consuelo, not understanding a word.

Doña Carmen bowed her head as though burdened by a well-ripened sorrow.

— It had been going on for a long time, she began. When María Justa met that penpusher… a nice-looking boy and with good intentions, to be sure. But when it came time to act like a man, he turned out to be spineless. The day he broke the engagement, I gave him a darn good piece of my mind, and the lad turned every colour in the rainbow. Even Ciruja went after him in the yard, barking his head off — just about broke his chain, he tugged so hard. Because sometimes animals seem almost like Christians, even if they don’t have a soul.

Doña Carmen paused, in thrall to a great agitation, and her bony hand swatted at what must have been a swarm of painful images.

— Where was I? she asked at last.

— You were talking about when María Justa met the penpusher, Doña Consuelo reminded her eagerly.

— That’s right, Doña Carmen resumed. War broke out the day they met. It was Márgara who did her best to upset the applecart. If the betrothed pair talked together in the street, Márgara would say it was a scandal and the neighbours were already gossiping and the boy’s intentions weren’t honourable. If the boy came to the house, well, he was coming every night and he was a nuisance, and this, that, and the other. All out of jealousy, of course. Because no man came calling for her; the wretch didn’t have so much as a dog bark at her.

— Isn’t it always the way! Doña Martina chimed in, her disgust on display. A dog in the manger!

— So, of course, Doña Consuelo ventured to break in, the penpusher got fed up and…

— No, no, interrupted Doña Martina. That wasn’t why!

— So why, then? asked Doña Consuelo, more baffled than ever.

— Let Doña Carmen tell the story, Doña Martina demurred cautiously.

But Doña Carmen was unexpectedly reticent.

— I don’t know if I should say… she whispered at last, with a furtive glance at the Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law.

— But Doña Carmen! Doña Martina encouraged. The whole neighbourhood knows!

— How could they not know? Doña Carmen burst out. Yes, yes. María Justa had her trousseau all nicely done up. What lovely sheets! The hems all stitched by her own hand — she was an angel with the needle. Yes, like I was saying, they even had the wedding date fixed. Then all of a sudden, the Other One takes a wrong step…

— The Other One? asked Doña Consuelo, definitely disconcerted. What Other One?

— La Beba, whispered Doña Martina. The Babe, the youngest sister.

Doña Carmen glared at her.

— Don’t even mention her name in front of me, Doña Martina! she censured. Don’t mention her name in front her poor dead father! You know full well that the heartache she caused was what drove him to his grave. His youngest daughter, the apple of his eye!

— Yes, yes, responded Doña Martina, somewhat abashed. But who would have thought…?

— Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth! growled Doña Carmen. Knowing her as well as I did, I always had my suspicions. Good as gold at home, but a vixen once she was out the door. Good at dodging work, but fond of dance halls and luxury. And flighty as all get out — had to have everything she saw. Well, now she’ll have everything she wants.

— They say she’s got a car, furs, and diamonds the size of chickpeas, Doña Martina revealed.

The three old women set their cups on the floor. Doña Carmen and Doña Martina withdrew into themselves, apparently brooding dolefully. But Doña Consuelo still didn’t have a firm grip on the whole story.

— So that was enough to make the penpusher leave María Justa? she inquired.

Doña Carmen opened her half-closed eyes, looked long and hard at Doña Consuelo, and decided the poor thing must be quite gaga.

— The penpusher? she yawned. His parents put him up to it, but he was spineless. When dishonour strikes a family…

— Spineless, echoed Doña Martina.

Satisfied, illuminated now, Doña Consuelo seemed to pick up a thread that had slipped from her grasp up till now.

— The Other One! she said. Let her have her diamonds! I don’t give her very long. When her youth fades and there’s no one around to tell her, “knock ’em dead!”… Then she’ll see. God punishes without stick or whip.

The candlelight was growing dim again. The silence was absolute but for the spluttering wicks. The Three Crones began to nod gently, their eyelids drooping and mouths purring. Suddenly, just as Doña Carmen was dozing off, a high-pitched explosion of flatulence escaped her. Her two neighbours half-opened their eyes.

— Alms for the poor, Doña Martina declared sententiously. But the rich can pay.

— Doña Carmen! reproached Doña Consuelo. Right under the nose of the deceased!

Doña Carmen smiled, half embarrassed, half gleeful.

— It slipped out when I was asleep, she clarified. What does it matter, anyhow? The departed won’t hear it. Nothing matters to him anymore. I washed him myself with aromatic vinegar and dressed him from head to foot. Heck, it’s just a corpse!

— You did? Doña Consuelo whispered admiringly.

— Habit, affirmed the other woman. I’ve dressed the corpses of the whole neighbourhood. I made a promise to the Virgin of Candlemas.

Doña Carmen got to her feet, rubbed her cramped knees, and took a rosary of black beads from her apron pocket.

— The Rosary, she invited her two neighbours.

— Yes, yes, they assented as they stood up as well.

The three old women approached the head of Juan Robles’s coffin and made the sign of the cross.

— Thou, O Lord, wilt open my lips, Doña Carmen began to recite.

— And my tongue shall announce Thy praise, responded her neighbours.

— Incline unto our aid, O God.

— O Lord, make haste to help us.

The Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law, who seemed to be snoozing beneath their black mourning shawls, suddenly brought their heads together in unison.

— Just take a look at that and drop dead! whispered Dolores, her eyes darting toward the three old women.

— The very picture of piety!2 said Leonor. I’ll bet their wicked tongues have raised blisters on the hide of the deceased himself!

— I wouldn’t stake my life on it, Dolores asserted.

Wrapped both in her shawl and in the gloom that was turning favourable again, Gertrudis eyed the Three Crones, whose yellowed fingers passed the rosary beads one by one.

— Hmm! she squawked at length. High time they started pushing up daisies!

— Them? laughed Dolores, revealing her ravaged gums. Tough old coots! They’ll see us all dead’n buried.

The three Sisters-in-Law looked at each another, nose to nose, eyeball penetrating eyeball, mutually exhaling fetid breath into one another’s face. And they smiled beatifically as they inhaled that delectable atmosphere of death. Harpies guided by their great olfactory acuity, they were immediately on the spot whenever anyone entered his death throes. Fluttering, still invisible, around the dying person, they would gather his last look, final gesture, and ultimate drop of sweat. Then they would promptly materialize in the afflicted home to savour that tumultuous first moment, the shock in the clenched faces that haven’t yet yielded to weeping. And then — oh joy! — the immense night of the wake, the long vigil in the semidarkness beside the inert thing at once there and no longer there in this world; the thick odours of mortuary flowers and melting wax; and that vast silence of the predawn hours, broken once in a while by the terrible groan of someone who has fallen asleep, reawakened, then remembers.

Priestesses of an inflexible liturgy, the Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law passed a critical eye over the details of the improvised mortuary chapel — the thickness of the casket, the size of the candelabras, the price of the flowers.

— Four tacky little boards, said Leonor, pointing at the coffin.

— The handles are used, Gertrudis added. You can’t pull the wool over my eyes. I know those thieving undertakers.

— Weeds! complained Dolores as she looked around at the flower bouquets placed here and there.

All at once they stopped talking and pricked up their ears, anxious to catch the slightest sound in the grief-stricken house. By and by, not picking up anything new, they sipped at the dregs of liqueur remaining in their glasses.

— Homemade anisette, Leonor said, not hiding her displeasure.

— Cheap! Gertrudis agreed, licking her lips.

But Dolores beckoned the other two shawled heads and whispered something in their ears.

— What? whistled Gertrudis and Leonor, incredulous.

— Only two horses for the funeral coach, Dolores reaffirmed out loud.

Now that was scandalous. Priestesses of an inflexible liturgy, the Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law were not about to accept such niggardliness lying down. They had arranged that their dead husbands travel in coaches drawn by six jet-black horses. And they’d lodged them in massive oak caskets, with solid lead covers and finely wrought bronze handles. So what if they’d gone into debt up to their necks? Fine and dandy! After all, you only die once, and the poor fellow couldn’t take anything else to the grave with him. And besides, there were the neighbours to think about! How grand it was when the funeral coach took off, pulled by six foaming horses whose iron-shod hooves struck sparks from the cobblestones! And the coachmen in their fine top hats, rigid as statues as they drove! Next came the line of varnished coupés, the entire spectacle displayed before a multitude slack-jawed in awe and reverence! They could still hear the sweet sounds of the neighbours singing their praises. Each of them had the photographs of the cortège, framed in real English frames, hanging in their bedrooms as souvenirs of those glorious days. Things ought to be done properly, or not at all. But the dearly departed Juan Robles didn’t deserve the disdain shown him by his children. No matter what his faults, at least he’d left them the house mortgage-free.

The Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law agreed, nodding their heads in unison to underscore their disapproval. Then, recalling illustrious burials they’d attended in the past, they felt a marvellous exaltation carrying them away to the point of inebriation until Gertrudis recalled with nostalgia the Gringo Mastrovicenzo’s funeral.

— My good Lord! Dolores exclaimed. The way the Gringo’s chapel was all lit up, it looked like a church altar! Stained glass, gorgeous candelabras, expensive flowers, and the Gringo layin’ there pleased as punch in his catafalque. The box alone must’ve cost an arm and a leg.

— Remember the drinks? recalled Gertrudis, ecstatic.

— Nothing but the best, said Leonor. And served up in crystal to die for.

— The Gringo must’ve been rolling in it, Gertrudis observed.

— Him? laughed Dolores. He owned half of Villa Urquiza.3 And to think he arrived in Buenos Aires with only the shirt on his back!

— Yes, yes, said Leonor. Some are born under a lucky star, others ’re born star-struck.

But when Gertrudis extolled the supper they served at midnight in the Gringo Mastrovicenzo’s big dining room, Dolores owned up to a certain doubt about whether it was appropriate to celebrate banquets like that right beside a cadaver. Gertrudis set her straight:

— Listen, sister, she said sententiously. Dead folks are beyond all needs, they’re free from the miseries of this world. But, upon my word, those of us left behind in this vale of tears have a duty to keep on living till our time comes.

Gertrudis, abominable harpy! The real truth was that other people’s deaths aroused in you a voracious hunger, a gloating joy that you’re still here and living at full gallop, inhaling stinks and aromas through nostrils quivering with glee, moving triumphant beside the inert and vanquished. Loathsome Erinyes! I’ve followed you through cemeteries; I’ve seen the rhythm of your steps, the mad mercurial lilt of your dance, though you hide it beneath your eighteen skirts of mourning.

— Till our time comes, repeated Dolores plaintively.

— Our time, echoed Leonor.

Hypocritical Dolores, abominable Gertrudis, toothless Leonor! In reality, they didn’t believe in their own deaths — heavens, not that! Instead, they would slip into a sort of stagnant eternity staged in the form of a wake.

Gertrudis was about to push her line of argument further, when someone began to wail in the next room. So heart-rending was the lament that even the Crones stopped praying for a moment to exchange a significant gaze. The Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law sharpened their ears.

— It’s Márgara, whispered Dolores after a bit. She’s having another fit.

— Must be about the fifth one, Gertrudis groused malevolently.

— Pure histrionics, said Leonor.

The three listened again, for a hoarse voice could now be heard in the adjoining room.

— Not Doña Tecla? asked Dolores apprehensively.

— Who else? said Gertrudis. The old witch wouldn’t have missed this for the world.

— Shhh! warned Leonor, fearful.

Dolores and Gertrudis heeded her invitation to prudence.

— She’s latched onto Márgara like a bedbug, Dolores observed in a low voice.

— It’s her own fault, murmured Gertrudis. Who the heck sent her out to the old crone’s shack? What was she doing there, anyways?

— I don’t know, Dolores insinuated. Probably looking for some herb or potion. If you know what I mean. She was dying to get married, don’t you know?

— Hmm! assented Gertrudis with some reserve. I wouldn’t stake my life on it.

But Leonor knew the score, and she announced in a wisp of a voice:

— Márgara went to Doña Tecla’s shack for a cure to get her old man off the booze.

— Tell that to my tea kettle! exclaimed Gertrudis, patting herself on the behind.

— She told me so herself, Leonor insisted. She was supposed to put it in his wine, some disgusting thing or other that came from a mouse. Márgara couldn’t go through with it.

Dolores and Gertrudis displayed withering skepticism.

— So how come the old crone won her over? asked Dolores. Everybody knows they’re thick as thieves now.

— Doña Tecla is curing Márgara, said Leonor, hesitant now. Her chest pains…

— Tell that to my tea kettle! Gertrudis exclaimed again.

— And what a treatment! Dolores observed. Cutting open a live pigeon and applying it to her breast like a poultice, imagine that!

— And that’s not all, Leonor hinted.

— What else? asked Dolores and Gertrudis, feigning indifference.

— The crone had three toads fetched. She told Márgara to spit in their mouths, then hang them from the fig tree. If they died after three nights, she’d be cured.

— Did they die? inquired Gertrudis, her interest piqued.

But Leonor had no chance to answer: the groans from the other room intensified abruptly, becoming long and deep like the bellowing of a calf having its throat cut. Immediately, urgent voices resounded and hurried footsteps clattered. The Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law knew right away that Márgara had embarked on her great scene. A delicious shiver ran down their spines. Then they stood up in unison and, more thoroughly swaddled than ever in their grieving shawls, they made for the door. It opened noiselessly before them. The three old women turned their wonderfully identical faces to watch the sisters-in-law leave. Laid out full length in his coffin, the deceased Juan Robles journeyed on.

At first, the greedy eyes of the Three Necrophile Sisters registered only a scene of confusion dimly illuminated by a bedside lamp, its purple shade blocking more light than it diffused. Toward the margins of the tableau, the semi-darkness left faces and gestures indistinct; closer to the lamp, however, the drama’s central figures were vigorously etched by the indigo light. There, on a dishevelled cot, Márgara was struggling in the arms of the Neighbour Lady in Red and the Neighbour Lady in Blue, while Doña Tecla, phlegmatic, rubbed the girl’s temples with a handkerchief soaked in vinegar. Burly were the arms of the fat ladies in Red and in Blue, but Márgara was resisting furiously, a snarl of snaky curls lashing about her Medusa-like head. As she thrashed around, her face moved in and out of the violet light, revealing enormous pupils and chattering white teeth.

It was the horror of death, for she’d just glimpsed its abyss. It was the perplexity of finding herself at the dramatic centre of all those people’s attention. It was her amazement at her own incredible pain, as well as an inchoate pride at being the object of so many solicitous regards, so many soothing murmurs, so many kind hands reaching out to her. It was all that, and more: an obscure desire to live up to the greatness of that unique moment, to act it out in the fullness of gestures, to offer herself entirely as spectacle.

When Márgara caught sight of the Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law, she reached out to them with open arms, instantly provoking a sense of general expectancy. The Three Sisters-in-Law understood their cue to enter the stage. Priestesses of an inflexible liturgy, they made their way to the cot and occupied the place respectfully vacated for them by the ladies in Red and in Blue.

— Aunty, aunty! sobbed Márgara as Gertrudis hugged her.

— There, there, Gertrudis’s voice purred affectionately. Calm down, my child, calm down.

Dolores and Leonor dabbed their eyes with a hanky. A buzz of excitement rippled through the circle of onlookers hanging back among the shadows as they lapped up every last detail of the scene.

— They are the aunts, intoned the chorus.

— The aunts?

— That’s right, the aunts.

— What aunts?

— Aunts.

The chorus fell silent, for Márgara was once again braiding the thread of her psalmodic lament.

— Poor old man! she chanted quietly. How come he left us, aunty? How come? And what a way to go! Suffering right up till the end. What did he do in this world that God had to punish him so? Poor dear man, poor dear!

— Patience, Márgara, murmured the Neighbour Lady in Red.

But Márgara didn’t even hear her.

— All night long he was moaning in misery, she chanted. I’ll never be able to forget it. Never! Those cries of distress will be in my ears forever and ever!

She beat her ears with both fists and shook the snakes of her Gorgonian head. The Three Sisters-in-Law again made use of their grieving hankies; meanwhile, the chorus rustled in the shadows, not speaking, but now tense as a bowstring. The Neighbour Lady in Red caressed Márgara’s hair and insisted:

— Patience, Márgara. You’ll find peace eventually. This too shall pass. It’s all a matter of time.

Márgara gave her a ferocious look, as though mortally offended by the suggestion that her pain might not be eternal.

— Never! she protested after a bit. Obviously, lady, you’ve never had to suffer like me!

— But my child! exclaimed the Lady in Red. I’ve done my share of grieving, too; I know what it’s like. Don’t kid yourself, Márgara. You’ll get over it.

— No, I won’t! shouted Márgara, totally obstinate.

— Yes, you will! screeched the Neighbour Lady in Red. She was getting right ticked off now. Did the stupid little twit think she was only one in the world to ever have somebody die on her? And if it was a question of tallying up the deaths in one’s family, why, the Neighbour Lady in Red was ready to lay a whole cemetery’s worth on the table.

Márgara, however, began to kick and thrash like crazy. The chorus made noises of protest.

— Don’t contradict her.

— Let her get it out of her system.

— The one in Red is handling this wrong.

— No, she’s right, she’s talking reason.

— The girl’s in no state to hear reason right now!

— That’s right! Of course!

Márgara didn’t kick and thrash for long. In the purple lamplight, her tense face began to relax until she seemed subdued and thoughtful. Suddenly, an irrepressible smile came to her lips. Ooh, aah! The neighbour ladies smiled in amazement, and the chorus smiled in the shadows. Ooh, aah! What was this? Márgara, smiling and sobbing, told them: just before he died, the great Robles, referring to the young doctor in attendance who happened to be in the other room, had winked at Márgara and said: “Looks like that lad finds you attractive. Make the most of it, sweetie!”

In the telling, Márgara chortled playfully. The neighbour ladies laughed somewhat louder, and chorus was invaded by sympathetic hilarity.

— That Don Juan!

— One heck of a criollo!

— No way! Joking around like that on his deathbed — what a rascal!

— Isn’t that Juan all over!

The chorus got more excited. There was more laughing and talking — ah, good old Juan! Still giggling, Márgara turned to her three necrophile aunts and saw their faces of stone. They hadn’t laughed. With a violent start, Márgara woke up to reality and took to moaning and groaning more pathetically than ever. Doña Tecla, phlegmatic, began again to rub her temples with her handkerchief; the ladies in Red and Blue moved away from the bed; and the chorus lurking in the shadows fell abruptly silent. The lowing trailed off little by little as Márgara entered a deepening torpor, her Gorgonian head swaying back and forth like a pendulum until, with a final roll, it came to rest on the pillows. There was a vast silence, pierced only by the loud tick-tock of the alarm clock on the bedside table. All the figures were motionless; a drizzle of something like ash or tedium seemed to blur the contours of the tableau. Then all of a sudden a belligerent clamour broke out in the other room; the two neighbour ladies exchanged a look of intelligence.

— The kids, muttered the one in Red.

— The little devils! assented the one in Blue.

The women made for the door with maternal haste. Flinging it open, they irrupted into a tumultuous theatre of war.

The room was in total disarray. Furniture and knick-knacks from the other rooms had been stored in here, scattered and stacked any which way. The only stick of furniture still in its usual position was a double bed pushed up against a wall. Four chubby babies, bundled up to the neck, had been laid across it, and they were sleeping blissfully. The neighbour ladies’ maternal gaze did not rest long on the idyllic bed, however. Their eyes quickly swerved to the middle of the room where Pancho and Manuel, two of God’s little angels, were pummelling each other with pillows. The champions shrieked in triumph at each blow given, and shouted an imprecation at every blow received. Absorbed in the fight, they didn’t notice that their arena of single combat had been invaded by mothers. But when the two women advanced menacingly toward them, floor shaking under their massive legs, the heroes, visibly discomfited, dropped their feathery weapons and beat a hasty retreat. Blindly, Pancho ran straight into the arms of the Neighbour Lady in Red, and two ringing slaps, one on each cheek, were the epilogue to his epic story.

— Go outside with your father! the one in Red shouted at him, pointing with her thick index finger toward the door to the patio.

At the same time, with greater skill or better fortune, Manuel had escaped into the labyrinth of piled-up stuff. Safely entrenched between a folding metal cot and a large trunk, he peered out at the woman in Blue.

— Come out of there, bandit! she cried, brandishing a slipper.

“Sure, one of these days,” Manuel thought to himself, eyeing the slipper with an eloquent expression.

The Neighbour Lady in Blue was about to storm the trenches, when one of the babies started crying at the top of its lungs.

— Poor little angel! she exclaimed and flew instead to the bed. She took the caterwauling babe into her arms and planted a gargantuan kiss on each cheek.

— They woke you up, didn’t they, sweetheart. There, there. It was that bandit, that scoundrel Manuel!

But the sweetheart, in no mood for chitchat, just turned up the volume on his wailing. In response, the woman in Blue deftly unbuttoned her blouse, laid bare a breast brimming over in plenitude, and executed the most ancient gesture in the world as she offered it to the squalling mouth. The baby clamped fiercely onto the purple nipple, let go for a moment to gaze at his mother with a beatific smile, then tucked in again, his little eyes half closing. Ensconced in his famous trench, the bandit Manuel saw the storm was blowing over.

Pancho, his cheeks burning and brow furrowed, had gone outside to ruminate over the humiliation of the two smacks he’d so insultingly received in front of his rival. His imagination was brewing up ominous plans of revenge that might adequately chastise the intolerable abuse of maternal privilege. This time, he thought, she’d gone too far. Truth was, Pancho was vacillating between two equally seductive projects: either run away from home, or poison himself with a box of matches. The first design tempted with its promise of adventures beyond even Salgari’s^4 wildest dreams. The second plan, however, was irresistibly fascinating for its wealth of dramatic effects. With bitter delight he savoured in advance the remorse that would weigh on his family when he, Pancho Ramírez, was no longer in this tempest-tossed world of slaps-in-the-face and was lying in state in his little white coffin. His primary school classmates would come to the funeral, maybe carrying the flag and everything. By this point in his reverie, the two smacks and the recent dishonour were forgotten, and Pancho fell into a weepy tenderness inspired instead by his own premature death. Thus musing, Pancho headed for the group of men outside drinking mate. He gingerly went up to his father, nervous that he might have to explain why he was out here among the men.

Fortunately, Don José Ramírez was holding forth just then, and when Don José was talking (which was all the time), the sky could come tumbling down around him and he wouldn’t miss a beat. The men of the neighbourhood were sitting beneath the autumnal grapevine, conversing alongside the rectangle of light projected onto the patio tiles from the chapel of rest. Through withered leaves of the vine, a few stars twinkled. Don José, quite the gentleman in his straw chair, was sitting opposite Zanetti, the bilious bill collector. To the right of Don José was the antique profile of Reynoso, who sat with a tin kettle and a mate gourd at his bunion’d feet. Indifferent to the tertulia, the Young Neighbour listened distractedly and fidgeted interminably with his little hat — the kind toffs wear, Pancho thought, as he tried to remember where he’d seen that guy before.

— Just imagine, said Don José in a jocular tone, warming to the story he was in midst of telling. There they all are at the table — the two guys from Corrientes, my brother Goyo, and the Brazilian — dealing cards to beat the band, totally wrapped up in a cut-throat game of truco. And under the same roof, right beside Goyo, the corpse of the “little angel” is layin’ there among his four candles and already smellin’ bad, poor little guy…

— Hmm, hmm, growled Zanetti, making a slurping noise with the bombilla.

— In the other shack, Don José went on, there’s a few couples dancing away to the accordion. And the guy with the squeeze box, the gals, the ranch hands, they’re all pissed to the gills.

— Absolute barbarity! the collector muttered between his teeth, as he handed the mate back to Reynoso.

The old man took it pensively, adjusted the bombilla in the gourd, then refilled it.

— That’s what they used to believe, he argued without looking at Zanetti. A kid dies? A little angel is on his way to heaven! Cause for celebration.

— Superstition, grumbled Zanetti. Lack of culture.

— Maybe, murmured old man Reynoso, slowly sucking at the bombilla.

Don José, getting visibly impatient, raised his hand.

— Well, now comes the good part, he announced jovially. Like I was saying, the guys were playing hard. The Brazilian, he was losing a fortune, and fuming every time Goyo took a trick. Because Goyo was a real card sharp — he needed an ace, he got one, even if he had to pull it out of his sleeve. Maybe the Brazilian started to suspect something fishy, I don’t know. But anyways, all of sudden he pulls out a huge revolver and points it at Goyo: Eu meto bala en vocé!, I’ll put a bullet in you! Holy jumpin’. Goyo, he’s unarmed, so guess what he does. He grabs the “little angel” by the feet and starts little-angeling the Brazilian with several good whacks.

— Goodness! commented Reynoso, hiding a smile behind his tobacco-stained mustache.

— You think I’m making this up? Don José asked him, laughing already.

— No, no, said Reynoso. So, whose kid was the “little angel”?

— I’m getting to that. Hearing all the hubbub, an old crone comes hobbling in, grabs the “little angel” from Goyo, and — pff, pff, pff, pff! — blows out the four candles. “Any more horse-play,” the old coot scolds, “and the wake’s over.”

Choking with laughter, Don José leaned back to rest his shiny bald head against the wall, and remained there for a while facing the sky. Then, still laughing, he looked around at the others and saw two serious faces. Zanetti, bitter as ever, and a pensive Reynoso were both facing the door of the chapel. Don José caught the sorrowful significance of their look, and his hilarity dried up immediately. Putting on a solemn face, he lowered his brow as though weighed down by gloomy thoughts. Still fingering his derby, the Young Neighbour glanced now and again at the street door, clearly anxious to leave. Pancho hadn’t taken his eyes off him for a minute, and now he finally recognized him. He was the dude who flirted with the dark-haired girl from the warehouse; more than once Pancho had shouted at him: “Leave that bone alone, doggie!” The mystery solved, Pancho snuggled up against his father’s chair and yawned deep and long. All in all, a wake wasn’t near as much fun as the boys made it out to be.

The collector Zanetti was getting ready to speak. In his infinite resentment, Zanetti had come to divide Humanity (with a capital “H”) into two irreconcilable camps. On one side of the battle line stood he, Antonio Zanetti, with his endlessly aching feet and the rancour he’d accumulated trying to collect abstract sums of money from certain people as slippery as eels. On the other side was the World (with a capital “W”). And a sinister conspiracy organized against Zanetti, it was: a clew of travesties, iniquities, and aberrations that Zanetti promised to fix if only he were allowed to be president for twenty-four hours. Men and women, beasts, and inanimate objects all had it in for the collector. He was certain, for example, that when he was going home at night with his feet in a sorry state, the cobblestones intentionally stood on end with the express purpose of exacerbating his martyrdom. But once he was home and his tortured feet were soaking in a basin of warm water, the collector Zanetti let himself taste glory as he dreamed up elaborate fantasies of revenge against Society, World, and cobblestones. He’d show them who Zanetti was! And no, he didn’t lack for courage! During the Semana Trágica of 1919,5 the collector Zanetti, well hidden in the chicken coop out back, had fired all six bullets from his revolver into the air. Ever since that memorable occasion, his self-image had been contradictory: the collector both admired and feared himself.

Fortunately, Zanetti’s current cogitations had nothing aggressive about them. Right now his mind was ploughing richer earth. At first, he was revolted by the imbecilic Don José’s brutish story; it illustrated once again all the ignorance, obscurantism, and superstition the collector insistently opposed with one of his lapidary dictums: “More schools, fewer priests.” Next, and quite understandably, the storyteller’s obstreperous hilarity had just about made his blood boil and rush to his head, for all thoughtless laughter grated on his ears like a slap across the face of Humanity itself. And the collector Zanetti, in a voice from the beyond, was wont to ask those cachinnating barbarians: Does Humanity have the right to laugh? Finally, the collector’s philosophical soul ascended to the plane of generalizations: he thought about the wake, indeed about all wakes, and about the routine of men “whose feet are still fettered and pinned by absurd prejudice.” This last phrase wasn’t actually his own; he’d got it from La Brecha,6 a morning paper he read religiously, not only during his daily foot-soak, but also — more discreetly — during the concluding operation of his digestive tract. In short, it was no wonder that by this time Zanetti was trembling like a generous fruit tree beneath its embarrassment of riches.

— Vanity! he scolded at last, shaking his head from side to side.

Don José was taking a pull on the latest round of mate, which Reynoso had just brewed up bitter-style, unsweetened. He glanced at Zanetti in mild surprise.

— What’d you say? he asked.

— That, over there! said the collector pointing at the mortuary chamber.

— A-hah! Don José replied cautiously.

Old man Reynoso sighed.

— Yes, yes, he murmured. Poor old Juan.

But Zanetti stared hard at him.

— I’m not talking about the dead, he grumbled. What do I care about dead men? I’m talking about the living. There’s the cadaver, starting to rot already, and what do the living do? Tart it up with rags and lights and flowers. What for? Just to satisfy their own vanity. Dead men!

Don José ventured a half smile.

— It’s custom, he said. I wouldn’t get my britches in a twist over it.

— Custom, you say! objected Zanetti. I’ll show you customs! (It was the collector Zanetti’s standing promise that he would ban all traditional customs if ever he was given the presidency of the Argentine Republic for twenty-four hours.)

— But that’s how things are, my friend, laughed Don José. You too will be adorned and saluted when you go off in your funeral coach, just like you adorned and saluted the ones who left this world before you.

Zanetti didn’t conceal the anger these words provoked.

— I don’t take off my hat for funeral coaches! he growled. It’s just bourgeois prejudice! (The collector Zanetti never took off his hat in front of churches or funeral coaches, but he did so unctuously before conventillos, hospitals, and penitentiaries. A bitter enemy of all superstition, Zanetti spilled salt on purpose, broke mirrors, beat black cats, and ate meat on Good Friday.)

— Fine! rejoined Don José, quite amused. But when you’ve become a stiff yourself, they’re gonna fix you all up nice with lights and flowers. And you’ll have nothing to say about it.

For the first time that night, a smile lit up the sour face of the collector Zanetti.

— They’re going to be out of luck! he said with perverse joy.

— How’s that?

— I’ve already made my will, laughed Zanetti. I’m leaving my body to the Society for the Incineration of Cadavers. Oh no, they’re not going get the better of me. I’ve got it all arranged: a van with no cross or flowers or anything. Straight to the crematorium!

Don José and Reynoso stared at him slack-jawed, and Zanetti enjoyed his future triumph in those two living effigies of astonishment. Yep, it was a brilliant move, a direct poke in the jaw to priests, undertakers, the municipality, florists, gravediggers, marble masons, and all the shysters who worked the death racket. Don José, however, quickly recovered his joviality.

— Can’t say I admire your taste, he told the collector. Burning a person like he was an old piece of junk…

— Hmm! assented Reynoso, pensive.

— So what? argued Zanetti. It’s more economical. And more hygienic! (The collector Zanetti didn’t bathe for months on end, but when it came to his corpse he was scrupulously conscious of social hygiene.)7

— Have you ever seen a corpse burn? Don José asked him. They say when it’s in the oven, it stands up and shakes its arms and legs.

— The last dance! said Zanetti, who had never danced in his life.

— Bah! concluded Don José. Give me the good old earth and the birds singing.

Reynoso passed him a mate.

— Good old earth, he echoed sententiously.

The three men fell silent, perhaps following their internal train of thought. With admirable discretion, the Young Neighbour had got to his feet to have a look at the row of geraniums that just happened to end at the door to the street. He was moving further and further away, one geranium at a time, studying the details of flowers and leaves with a highly suspect intensity of interest. Leaning against his dad’s chair, Pancho was nodding between wakefulness and sleep. Zanetti had blown off steam now, and Don José showed no sign of breaking his silence. Reynoso, however, was in the grip of ancient and venerable memories; he kept on sighing and looking over at the chapel. There was something he wanted to say, but didn’t, vacillating between reserve and an emotion welling up inside him.

— Were you very good friends? Don José finally asked him with extraordinary delicacy.

— Almost brothers, answered Reynoso. We were buddies as young bucks. I was best man at his wedding, and I’m godfather to Márgara. Think of it!

— Yes, yes, Don José encouraged him.

— And look at him now, poor guy! concluded the old man with a sigh.

— Everybody’s gotta go some time, Don José said sententiously. Sooner or later…

— That’s right, said Reynoso. But there’s certain things… Aw, what the hell!

The old man passed a hand across his brow, as if wanting to erase some strange notion. But he could see the question forming in Don José’s affable eyes and he took the plunge:

— Have you seen the deceased?

— Yes, answered Don José. You’d think he was asleep.

— Did you see the suit they dressed him in? insisted Reynoso in a low voice.

Don José looked at him a bit anxiously.

— Yes, he said. A dark suit. What about it?

— It’s the suit he got married in, Reynoso declared. Thirty-two years ago, on a night like this, I helped him into it myself, before we left for the church. The very same suit!

— Hmm! agreed Don José. Now I get it. Well, if you stop to think what a man’s life is…

— Life! Zanetti growled bitterly.

— Bah, life’s a dream, Don José concluded.

Adrift on the gentle current of memory, Reynoso smiled, more at his reminiscences, however, than at his pensive partners in conversation.

— I can still see him! he said. Out on the patio, people calling for him: “The groom, the groom!” And me, trying to get that goddam stiff collar to fit him! Old Juan, he could hardly move in those trousers, he was so used to his baggy gaucho pants.

— Good man on a horse, murmured Don José pensively.

— Who, Juan? Reynoso considered. He was every inch a horseman.

He stroked his mustache with a sunbaked hand.

— Yep, he said. A night just like tonight, must be thirty-two years gone by…

Ah, what a night it was! Guitar, violin, and flute… To the inner rhythmn of a lost mazurka, now recovered in memory, old man Reynoso is replaying the scene: the grand patio with its carpet and tent, and the wedding procession opulent as an Independence Day celebration on the Twenty-Fifth of May, no expenses spared. The two coupés arrive from the church, amid a swarm of kids shrieking “Godfather! Penniless godfather!” He, Reynoso, responds to the ritual challenge by throwing handfuls of pennies; sprays of tinkling metal hit the cobblestones, and the kids swarm after them, snatching coins from beneath the horses’ hooves. Later, the dance begins — guitar, violin, and flute — “Square dance! Choose your partners!” The groom takes the bride, the best man and future godfather takes the godmother, and the young people pair up laughing, hand in hand, eyes looking into eyes. Bravo! The old folks look on from the sidelines and raise glasses filled to the brim. The kids buzz avidly around the tray loaded with a tall tower of sugar, as well as two figurines of barley sugar, a bride and a groom. The musicians are playing like demons — guitar, violin, and flute. Midnight strikes! Yes, the bride must be spirited away! Discreetly. Who by? Reynoso! While Juan waits outside on the street, standing beside a rented horse-and-buggy, Reynoso gives the signal to the musicians, and they play “Waltz Over the Waves”:

Waves that break and die

plaintive at my feet…8

Watch! Reynoso whirls, his guiding arm around the bride’s waist. He makes his way among the spinning couples, crosses the entire patio, and sneaks her into the vestibule. Nobody has seen the subterfuge. Reynoso returns triumphant: “The newlyweds have left!” he shouts. “Oh, no!” protest the dancers. “You sly old fox, Reynoso.” Guitar, violin, and flute! Old man Reynoso, carried away, wants to cling to the hallucinatory images. But Zanetti’s voice breaks the spell, and old man Reynoso awakens with a start to find himself once more beside the rectangle of light projected onto the tiled patio from Juan’s funeral chapel.

— Death, Zanetti has said. Same thing for everyone. It’s the only justice there is in this world!

A single tear rolls down Reynoso’s cheek.

— That’s right, he agrees. No way around it.

Don José hands him the empty mate. Reynoso goes to refill it, but there’s no water left.

— Son of a beehive! exclaims the old man. We drank the kettle dry.

— Yep, Don José adds. Just like out on the range.

— I’m going to see if there’s more in the kitchen, says Reynoso.

Kettle in hand, he slowly ambles away.

— Lovely old guy, murmurs Don José turning toward the collector, who is lost in thought.

Zanetti says nothing, so Don José for a long while caresses the head of his little Pancho, the boy now wandering the outskirts of dreamland. From the geraniums over to the street door, there’s not a soul in sight. The Young Neighbour has flown the coop.

Reynoso could have gone in and out of the illustrious kitchen a hundred times, and the denizens of that Olympus would scarcely have noticed his venerable humanity. It was a narrow space built of wood and zinc, equipped with a two-burner, cast-iron stove. Lying in harmonious arrangement on a pine table covered by a red oilcloth were a heel of sausage still impaled on a fork, one bottle of caña quemada and another of anisette, a grimy coffee pot, and few squalid cups.

Though the mise-en-scène was humble, the actors were of magnificent stature. The whole criollo Parnassus was gathered there. (Eminent figures one and all, they were waiting patiently in the wings, in unjust anonymity, for the Homer who might plunge them into the delicious scandal of glory.) Juan José Robles, scratching the ears of the puppy dog called Balín, headed up the group of criollista divinities. On his left, the taita Flores, majestically seated upon an empty kerosene box, was the centre of attention; his audience was coaxing a story, episode by episode, out of the taita’s unfathomable modesty. To the right of Juan José was the melancholy effigy of the pesado Rivera, the heavy who served both as Flores’s bodyguard and as occasional cup-bearer at this feast; his generous hand flew to the bottle at the slighest indication that any of the heroes was going dry. Facing the three eminent figures just named, sat three engrossed souls: those of the pipsqueak Bernini, Del Solar, and Pereda. Reverentially hanging on the taita’s every word, the audience of three never took their eyes off him, except to exchange a look of appreciation each time Flores revealed a new facet of his intricate personality. The research project those scholars had been working on was no small beer. It’s well known that criollo bravery, once personified in the sublime gaucho Martín Fierro, had evolved into the semi-rural heroism of a Juan Moreira,9 to conclude in the urban bellicosity of the glorious lineage of malevos who flourished in Buenos Aires in the years just before and after the turn of the twentieth century. Now, according to Del Solar and his scholarly buddies, the taita Flores was the last in the line of classical malevos, a living document generously offering itself to be read hic et nunc. No wonder, then, that the criollista bards plied the taita with questions as if he were the Delphic Apollo in rope-soled sandals. No doubt about it, a subtle sense of smell would have picked up an aroma of legend wafting in the kitchen, over and above the one emanating from the garlic sausage.

But, alas! Not all was fervor and reverence in that Olympus: the naysayers, the mockers, the eternal agnostics constituted a third contingent, which included Adam Buenosayres, the astrologer Schultz, Samuel Tesler, and Franky Amundsen. An insolent mob, they couldn’t ask but had to continually shout for the bottle. When their poisonous tongues weren’t rustling like sibilant scorpions, they would explode into offensive laughter and interrupt the storyteller, disconcerting the three studious listeners, who sensed that catastrophe was imminent.

The taita Flores, aware of the ambience of veneration surrounding him, stopped talking yet again to turn a long face toward the group of mockers. Pereda attempted to save the situation:

— And were there a lot of people? he asked.

— A lil’ old hoe-down on the patio, Flores answered. The Froilán women-folk used to organize dances with a coupla kilos of mate and a demijohn of whatever was around.

— And how ’bout the Froilán broad, a good-looker or what? asked Bernini in his best underworld accent.

The taita lowered his eyes and spat out a splinter of the toothpick he’d been gnawing.

— She had the right stuff, he said at last. She had tango in her blood. When she really got into it, she used to cut figure eights that had the dance-floor sweatin’ sawdust.

— Wow! Pereda was ecstatic.

— And did they hit on her much in the ’hood? Del Solar threw out the barbed question.

The taita’s smile mixed menace and swagger.

— Maybe, he said. I didn’t see nuthin.

— You kiddin’ me? Rivera growled in adulation. Nobody came sniffing around the taita Flores’s nest.

— Sure, sure, Del Solar quickly admitted, seeing a malignant gleam in the taita’s eye.

For a long while, Juan José Robles had been stroking the ears of the puppy dog Balín, but now he broke his silence.

— What about the tirifilo Nievas, the pretty-boy? he drawled.

Flores’s face clouded over, and vexation glinted in his gaze, as if the name made his blood simmer with an old grudge.

— I was getting to that, snarled the taita. Yeah, Pretty-Boy Nievas.

— So, who was the tirifilo? asked Del Solar.

— Son of the police chief, Flores answered. A no-account twit. The punk had a taste for slumming it. He’d picked up a rep as a tough guy, just because two or three times, in brawls in Palermo, he’d had fisticuffs with his old man’s White Spittoons.

Del Solar and Pereda exchanged an eloquent look. The famous Son of the Police Chief! So the legend was true!

— Who were the White Spittoons? Bernini interrupted emotionally.

— Police officers, Rivera clarified. In those days they wore white helmets.

Del Solar had a few points to clear up.

— Wait a minute! he said. How did Pretty-Boy Nievas used to dress?

The taita was quiet as he seemed to search his memory.

— Yep, he said at last. Narrow grey trousers with black bands down the seams. And his sports jacket was a shit-standing-upper…

— What? Bernini burst out.

— It was a style of jacket kinda on the short side, Rivera explained. So, as a joke, we called it…

— Yes, yes, Del Solar interrupted impatiently. What else did the tirifilo wear?

— High-heeled ankle boots, a cheap scarf around his neck, and a beaver hat on his mop.

Del Solar and Pereda looked at each other again, feverish with the same enthusiasm. The description was accurate!

— Very good, Flores, my friend! Del Solar approved. So what went down with you and the pretty-boy?

— Nuthin, Flores answered. The lad took a notion to get fresh with my gal, according to what I heard. I asked her about it, in case she’d given him any encouragement. You know how skirts can be.

— Hmm! agreed Bernini, sounding like a man who’d been burned.

— But the gal was on the up-and-up, added Flores. So I waited for my chance.

— Where’d you mix it up with the tirifilo? asked Del Solar, giving his words a tough edge.

The taita hung back, tired and modest.

— It’s not worth telling, he said at last. He was a silly little compadrito.

— Tell us, Flores, Rivera asked him.

— Don’t play hard-to-get, said Juan José, quite absorbed in watching Balín try to bite his tail.

After considerable begging, the taita Flores gave in. He frowned, cleared his throat two or three times, and shot a sidelong glance at the group of mockers, who really were starting to get up his nose.

— Okay, he said. The fight took place at the dance the Froilán girls put on. People were dancing up a storm on the patio, and everything was fine ’til Pretty-Boy and his gang showed up. They’re all half sloshed, and the tirifilo barges in like he owns the place and shouts: “Clear the decks!” The music stops, the women’re all a-flutter, and the Froilán girls look at me scared.

— They knew what was coming! exclaimed Rivera.

— And did you go for him on the spot? asked Del Solar, drunk with courage.

The taita smiled placidly.

— I knew Pretty-Boy real good, he answered. And, of course, I cut him some slack. So the dance just started up again. As soon as they started playing “El Choclo,”10 I see the tirifilo trying to get my gal to dance, and I see, too, that she’s resisting. So, sitting right where I was, without getting up, I shout: “Listen, kiddo, that woman don’t dance!” The music stopped again, the couples separated. The tirifilo, he gets his dander up and shouts back: “We’ll see about that!”

— The kid had balls, Bernini ventured.

— All mouth, no action, like the chajá, muttered Rivera.

— And what did you do? asked Del Solar, looking the taita in the eyes.

— I got up real slow, Flores responded. I gave the pretty-boy the onceover from head to foot. Then I says, “Have it your way, then. My game is calling me!” and I start crossing the room. The women start squealing and the men are all worked up. But then the tirifilo pulls out a heater…

— A heater? exclaims Pereda, scandalized.

— He was real tough with a gun in his hand, assented the taita sadly. So he’s pointing the heater at me and he shouts, “One more step and I’ll shoot!”

— And you? asked Del Solar, knitting his brow.

— Me, I slip out my blade and walk towards the pretty-boy, drilling him through with my eyes. “Go ahead and shoot,” I says. “But don’t miss! Because if you go and miss, my blade here says you’re chopped liver!”

— He missed, I can just see it!

— Nope. Couldn’t even shoot, said Flores sorrowfully. As soon as my words were out, the tirifilo turned white as a sheet, and the revolver started shaking in his hand. I took it away, so he wouldn’t hurt himself.

— A pretty-boy! scoffed Del Solar.

— A silly little malevo, the taita declared indulgently. Did the women ever laugh!

The group fell silent in adulation. The three scholars stared at Flores as if they’d just discovered who he was.11 The lines hardened around the pesado Rivera’s mouth. The taita bowed his head as though overburdened by laurels. Only Juan José Robles seemed indifferent to the emotion of the moment, absorbed as he was in the antics of the puppy dog Balín, who was now playfully biting his shoe. But just then a brutish guffaw erupted from the circle of mockers; the criollistas came plummeting down from the heights of heroic inspiration and in unison turned to look angrily at the trouble-makers.

— Now they’ve got me mad! growled the taita, screwing up his mug threateningly.

Del Solar, on tenterhooks, tried to calm him down.

— Don’t pay any attention to them, he said. They’re completely shitfaced.

— This ain’t no speakeasy, insisted Flores. They’ve got me pissed off with all their laughing.

The pesado Rivera piped up in turn.

— Shhh! he ordered the mockers. You’re at a funeral wake!

At that point something outrageous happened. Franky Amundsen, obviously the ringleader of the dissident faction in the kitchen, turned to the pesado Rivera, held out his hand imperiously, and, eyes a-glint, slurred a thick-tongued order:

— Pash ’e bottle, pard’!

Utterly flummoxed by the sheer audacity of it, the pesado mechanically handed him the bottle and came to his senses only when Franky handed it back to him, after having generously refreshed his friends’ glasses. In a sublime gesture, the pesado filled his own glass and sent it down the hatch, perhaps wishing to drown the speck of rage already fermenting in his kidneys. That was arguably the moment when Rivera began to incubate in his mind the brilliant manoeuvre with the shoe, an act that was subsequently to put an end to the hostilities.

With the storm rumbling on the horizon, it’s time we took a look at the heterodox group in the kitchen, if only to get a faint idea as to what those inebriated intellectuals were getting up to, drunk as they were on something more than glory. What was the reason for the laughter? Could they, as innocent victims of the illustrious bottle, have been forgetting the norms of intellectual decorum? No, they were not the sort of men who hang their virtue in a noose from the sarmentous tree of Dionysus! On the contrary, in that sector there were a few men whose intelligence reached its zenith only after they’d achieved a goodly blood-alcohol coefficient. Such, for example, was Franky Amundsen, descendant of those Vikings who in bygone times used to drink themselves blotto with absolute dignity under the northern lights. So, too, Samuel Tesler, scion in a direct blood line of the wine grower Noah. And thus as well Adam Buenosayres, whose genealogical tree could well have been a grapevine, bearing in mind the crew of insatiable drinkers on both sides of his family who had preceded him in the sublime art of raising a glass. No less scholarly than their counterparts, these heresiarchs likewise observed, sorted out, and analyzed the stuff of life that chance put in their path. However, the observations they made about the storytelling taita Juan José Robles and the pesado Rivera were characterized by a scientific rigour and a philosophical universality that it would have been pointless to expect from the romantic emotion of the three criollista scholars.

The case of Juan José Robles, it may safely be affirmed, was not at all difficult. This individual displayed the most salient traits of the vegetative soul; hence, following a motion by the academician Buenosayres, Juan Robles was placed ipso facto in the Vegetable Realm. The taita Flores would have been similarly classified, had the opinion of Amundsen prevailed. Fortunately, however, other fellows of the Academy had seen the taita manifest certain characteristics of the sensitive soul: to wit, the senses of sight, hearing, smell, and taste, as well as anger; these signs having been duly noted, Flores was catalogued forthwith under the Animal Realm. True, Amundsen did not give in easily; he stubbornly attributed to the taita a sort of inferior animality, going so far as to suspect he was equipped with a scaley dermis and a vestigial air bladder. The Academy received this argument with a formidable guffaw, and poor Amundsen held his tongue for the time being.

The debate about the pesado Rivera, though, was of quite a different order. The researchers coincided, with rare unanimity, in granting him the fullness of the sensitive soul, crowning him with the status of animaldom, and declaring him to be essentially brutum. Nevertheless, this bare-bones classification was considered insufficient, and further precision was deemed necessary. Accordingly, a list of pertinent questions was drawn up. Could Rivera distinguish the range of sensations between intense heat and intense cold? Was he able to differentiate among the colours, or was he totally colour blind? Were his eyes multifaceted like those of the fly, or simple like those of the opossum? Did he emit phosphorescence at night? Did he have a full olfactory range? Did he usually find his way back to his lair using his sense of smell? Did he piss against walls with one leg raised? How subtle was his sense of hearing? Did he register any other tastes besides those of booze, mate, and tobacco? Was his body covered in fur, feathers, or a carapace? Did he shed his skin annually? Then, upon recalling that memory, instinct, and imagination all formed part of animal nature, the academicians formulated the following questions. Did Rivera remember the place where he ate and slept? Did his memory retain insults, pleasures, and punishments? Was he in rut at a certain time of the year? Did he bark at the moon in the night? Did he have premonitions of death, risk, and storms? Did he have erotic dreams and dreams of the hunt?

Such questions were posed and dealt with on the spot, and the intellectual pleasure produced by this analytical exercise was quite often expressed in the form of noisy hilarity. But the astrologer Schultz’s silence had been weighing heavily on the Academy and finally he manifested his disdain for the individual under discussion. After heaping abuse upon the paleo-taitas present among them, he mysteriously announced the reign of the Neotaita in the near future. Pressed by the academician Amundsen to declare whether the Neotaita could be distinguished in any way from the Neocriollo, Schultz responded by saying that the Neotaita would be an aspect of the Neocriollo. The former would be characterized by his enormously developed kidneys, the organ of Mars, for purposes of war. Unfortunately, this attempt to orient the debate in a metaphysical direction didn’t get very far. The Academy fell back on the terrain of pure biology when Franky Amundsen solemnly proposed a study be carried out on the pesado Rivera. Franky’s research plan was vast; it included longitudinal and transversal cross-sections of the pesado, urine and blood analyses, Wassermann reaction, measurements of dilational coefficient, material tensile strength and specific gravity, as well as X-rays and an autopsy.

Wildly enthusiastic, the academician Buenosayres not only supported the Amundsen project, but also proposed, in a sudden flash of insight, that Rivera be studied as if he were a country. This new perspective infinitely widened the scope of the investigation. They would need to submit the pesado Rivera to mensurations and triangulations, geological and meteorological studies, dams, marine surveys, frontier demarcations, explorations of his forests and mountain ranges. Then the academician Tesler, carried away by the utilitarianism characteristic of his race, suggested the advisability of adding to their study of the pesado a series of diagrams and statistical tables, with particular reference to his annual production of fingernails, body hair, and dandruff; the voltage of his motor energy; his normal output of guano, textiles, and crude oils; the extent of his petroleum deposits; his hotsprings, coral reefs, and fish stocks, etcetera etcetera. For the academician Tesler recognized that such data were indispensable for any rational industrialization of the pesado Rivera. It was at this point in the discussion that the academics let fly the universal guffaw that had set everyone’s nerves on edge over on the other side of the kitchen.

The pesado’s silence was aggressive; the taita Flores looked menacing. Luis Pereda and Bernini looked at each other and readily admitted the smell of a fight was in the air. Del Solar, however, took advantage of the lull to speak to Flores.

— Drunk to the marrow of their bones, he whispered to him, laughing and indicating the academicians with the corner of his eye.

— Hmm! the taita agreed with a half-smile.

The three scholars sighed with relief, and Del Solar used the favourable turn of events to get the taita back into the mood of tradition.

— You knew the good times, he said. You should see the malevos nowadays!

— I’ve seen them, sneered the taita, curling his lip.

— Ever had a fight with those young punks? asked Bernini.

— Fight? Flores said with acid humour. They crap themselves at the sight of the sheath, never mind a knife!

— Just what I thought! exclaimed the pipsqueak admiringly.

The taita perked up a bit and started to tell another story, as though lazily milking the cow of his memory:

— There was that time, in Saavedra…

He was interrupted when María Justa Robles burst into the kitchen. She looked deeply concerned as she hurried to her brother.

— She’s come, she whispered in his ear. She wants to talk to you.

— Who? Juan José drawled.

— La Beba.

The hated name provoked nary a twitch in his face, nor glint in his eye.

— Aha, he murmured. Fine and dandy.

He gave Balín, still gnawing at his shoe, a gentle kick, and the puppy scurried off yelping to hide in the box the taita was sitting upon; safe inside, the puppy continued to mewl. Juan José then did something that amazed the heterodox academicians: against all expectation, the vegetal specimen got to his feet, very slowly, seemingly afraid of falling apart. With no hint of emotion in his greenish, mossy face, he hazarded one, two, three steps toward the kitchen door. Four pairs of eyes watched in consternation as he made his incredible exit. María Justa, looking worried, followed him out.

Conflicting feelings assailed Juan José Robles as he left the kitchen. Hatred and tenderness, severity and mercy were duking it out in his unfathomable malevo heart as he thought about that lawless sister who was coming back, as always, to the smell of a corpse. The tumult in his soul brimmed over at last when he spied her standing at the street door. La Beba was waiting for him, stock still at the threshold, her eyes painfully wide open. Juan José slackened his pace, wanting to get his own head straight before facing the woman. But his slow gait looked to Babe Robles like the extremely deliberate and ominous advance of a judge.

There she stood in front of the big old family home. It looked inaccessible to her, closed, like a fist about to fall. Her heels felt scorched by the doorstep, as if the marble were made of live embers. Doors and windows flew open, it seemed to her, like mouths spewing curses. The neighbours on the patio and a few anonymous faces lurking in ambush studied her with surprise and hostility. Juan José, flanked by María Justa, seemed to become eternal on the long road to the door. La Beba tried to escape the opprobrium of so many gazes by raising hers aloft, only to see the sky stare down at her with a thousand hard eyes.

Bell, little bell,

laugh, laugh, don’t cry.12

Your story was fit for the lyrics of a tango, it blossomed in the intricate arpeggios of the bandoneón, became legendary in the plangent voices of malevos howling their melancholy to the fiery sunsets in the barrio Villa Ortúzar! Yesterday, your fifteen springtimes were a floral bouquet, your short little skirt and your sunlit braids set off wild conflagrations in the neighbourhood’s sensibility; coach drivers sighed for you as they headed evening-ward, a carnation in their ear and a brawl in their heart. Yesterday, at dances on the patio, at the hour when night seems to spring directly from the body of a guitar, the twinkle in your eye and the swing of your hips slowly unsheathed passion, lust, ferocity — daggers quick to jump at a challenge. Yesterday, your image lightened the dead hours of lumberyards, and haunted the silence of phantasmal general stores, when a hand of truco would suddenly die on the table, impaled by a listless ace of spades.13

It was the mad passion for Downtown, for the City at night when she sings her dangerous siren song! The neighbourhood you abandoned was like a desert. Two good souls there put away your fine cotton dresses and buried your childlike laugh at the foot of a fig tree that still weeps. What became of your life then, Cascabel, Cascabelito? You blindly swirled around cursèd lights that quickly burned your wings, in the sordid cabaret that at midnight stumbles like a drunk to the strains of a squeezebox and violins blacker than grief. Cascabel, Cascabelito! Now you are a chiffon flower (brilliant, yes, but without sap), an adornment for a day of luxury in the useless existence of magnates. Now, in the late afternoon of Florida Street, with your provocative gait, your satin rustle, the wake of your perfume, you make teenage boys tremble in anguish and you dig a painful spur into the morose secret of lonely men.

Tomorrow, when your springtime collapses like the architecture of a flower, when all eyes turn away from you and no one smiles, when happy nights turn their back on you and music kicks you out of its crazy domain, then will you go back to the suburb, on an afternoon smelling like stagnant water, and your steps echoing down the street will awaken memories, stir up ghosts. And when at last the rain descends from your eyes, a girl’s voice from some patio will sing:

Bell, little bell,

laugh, laugh, don’t cry.

Juan José came to a halt in front of La Beba and stood staring at her, perplexed, still trying to resolve his inner conflict. As thoughtful as ever, María Justa Robles had overtaken him, and her charitable arm was already around the waist of her guilty sister. The neighbourhood men on the patio watched the silent scene with bated breath, fearful of its outcome. Truth was, Juan José Robles, indecisive before the woman waiting with downcast eyes, didn’t know whether to clobber her one, just like that, or show her the door and send her back into the night she’d emerged from. But when he saw her so humiliated, so broken down and alone, his suburban heart began to melt like frost under the sun. And so when La Beba dared to look him in the face, Juan José Robles gave in and held out his hand with a simplicity that must surely have had the angels sobbing.14

— Come on in, then, he said softly. The old man’s over there.

A flash of the sublime shook the three neighbourhood men on the patio.

— Good, Ramírez approved. No matter what they say, that Juan José is a real man.

— The poor dear! murmured old man Reynoso.

— It’s not her fault, rebuked Zanetti. I blame Society!

Supported by brother and sister, La Beba walked into the funeral chamber. The first thing she saw was Doña Carmen’s wizened face. She was beside the casket with the rosary in her hand, extending the bridge of her kind smile.

— Doña Carmen! she sobbed, running to the old woman.

Doña Carmen received her with open arms and planted a firm kiss on her teary face.

— Yes, yes, my child, she soothed her. There there, my child, there there.

Next, the old woman took her by the hand and led her to the head of the coffin. Once there, La Beba stood still as a statue. She could not, would not, tear her eyes away from the face that had been extinguished forever. A thousand memories, both pleasant and shameful, tumbled through her mind, pushing and shoving and fighting with one another. At a given moment, her conscience quailed in panic before her sheer nakedness, and La Beba felt a sound, half cry, half sob, rising from her heart into her throat. But she choked it back by biting on her handkerchief, lest she importune the others with a fit of grief that for her was illicit. Not daring to console her sister in words, María Justa caressed her shoulders. Juan José looked away, perhaps to avoid betraying his own emotions. Meanwhile, Doña Carmen had rejoined her two friends.

— Poor soul! she said, indicating La Beba.

— Her repentance is sincere, Doña Martina admitted drily.

— What? grunted Doña Carmen, indignant at that obvious attempt to bargain her down. A heart of gold, Doña Martina, a heart of gold!

She was just getting launched on an eloquent panegyric to La Beba, when a sound from the other room cut her off in mid-sentence, tinged María Justa’s face with worry, and furrowed Juan José’s brow.

— Márgara! whispered Doña Carmen into the attentive ear of Doña Martina.

News of La Beba’s return and her presence in the funeral chamber had leaked into the other room, where the chorus, from the shadows, was watching every detail of Márgara’s portentous grief: sibilant threats, exhortations to clemency, rancorous proverbs and wise aphorisms, all boiled and bubbled in the patter of the chorus. Putting together bits and pieces from their buzz, Márgara had caught wind of something and suddenly sat bolt upright.

— Is she back? she asked the two neighbour ladies, staring at them with haggard eyes.

The Ladies in Red and in Blue dared not deny it, and lowered their brows under the terrible gaze. Their gesture told Márgara everything, and she started tearing at her hair.

— I don’t want her here! she screamed furiously.

— Calm down, calm down, suggested Doña Tecla.

But Márgara shook her tragic Gorgonian head.

— She killed my father! she yelled. I don’t want her here!

The figure of Juan José suddenly cut into the scene. Grimacing in anger, he turned to Márgara.

— Be quiet! he ordered. What’s all the shouting about!

Márgara’s breath went cold in her throat. Her mouth fell open and her eyes widened in fear, and she stared for a long moment at her brother. Then she fell back onto the bed, her Medusa curls slithering for an instant on the pillows. Juan José glanced around challengingly at the chorus of onlookers; their clamour toned down to a hum and then petered out altogether. At length, satisfied that order was restored, he turned his back on the scene, crossed the funeral chamber, and went out to the patio.

He exited with his eternal vegetative air, eyes on the ground, feet dragging. Suddenly he stopped. There, on the patio tiles, stood a pair of boots. Juan José looked at their patent leather and their sheepskin uppers, then noticed the bell-bottomed trouser cuffs. His eyes followed a trouser leg up to a short black jacket, then explored further to find a white neckerchief and a face overshadowed by the brim of a grey hat ringed in a black ribbon of mourning. The ghost of a smile began to appear on Juan José’s lips: there before him was the very effigy of the malevo Di Pasquo.

— My sympathies, grunted Di Pasquo, holding out a hand straight as a dagger-thrust.

— Thanks, responded Juan José, impassive.

Seeing that Di Pasquo wasn’t sure which way the wind was blowing, Juan José added:

— Go on in, friend. The men folk’re in the kitchen.

How to convey the excitement, the shivers of pleasure, but also the fresh anxieties that swept through the kitchen when Juan José came back in with the solemn figure of the malevo Di Pasquo in tow? In the first flush of exultation, the criollista scholars Del Solar and Pereda were delighted by the new arrival, anticipating rich observations with respect to the Italic influence on the final generation of malevos. But they quickly recognized the danger of an excessively violent clash between Di Pasquo and the taita Flores. For it was no longer merely a run-in between two antagonistic characters, but a confrontation of two different schools!

Moreover, it wasn’t exactly an opportune moment. The taita Flores had just swallowed his anger, barely, but not so the pesado Rivera. With every new explosion of hilarity from the heresiarchs, Rivera’s tense silence grew ever more ominous. And it’s fair to say the dissidents showed no sign of reining in their recklessness. Quite the contrary, for they’d taken control of the bottle, thanks to a moment’s distraction on the part of the pesado, and were now multiplying their toasts and outrageous gestures. One among them, however, was no longer laughing. Samuel Tesler (seeing the mists part before him and the open road ahead) must have been ruminating on some obscure scheme, judging by the double line that forked down his brow. With good reason did Pereda and Del Solar fear the storm clouds gathering in the kitchen! But they didn’t realize just how near the tempest was now.

The first indication came when the malevo Di Pasquo, after a general greeting to those in the room, went over to Flores, who stood waiting for him, silent and wary.

— Evenin’, said the malevo, extending his hand to the taita.

— Evenin’, replied Flores, reciprocating the gesture.

Their hands joined cautiously. The pipsqueak Bernini winked at Del Solar and whispered enthusiastically:

— The meeting of two great forces!

— Hmm! mumbled Del Solar, contemplating the two locked hands.

A commotion from the heterodox group made him turn his head. He saw Franky Amundsen pointing his index finger at the malevo Di Pasquo.

— Get a load o’ the get-up! cried Franky, amazed and amused.

— Whoz’t? asked Adam boozily.

— It’s the ítalomalevo! announced Franky. A cross between the payador Gabino Ezeiza^15 and la Traviata!

Another tremendous squall of hilarity followed this announcement. Del Solar had been monitoring the situation closely, and he sensed the glimmer of surprise in the malevo’s face. Quickly, he took Pereda by the arm and ordered:

— Slip over there and tell those bloody fools to shut up!

Pereda obediently went over and berated the dissidents:

— Behave yourselves, barbarians! Let’s see if you can shut your traps! Or do you want to get your arses kicked?

The heresiarchs maintained a disdainful silence and went back to watching the manoeuvres of the enemy. At this point, the scene was arranged as follows. Di Pasquo, very serious, had just sat down next to Flores, an icy barrier apparently separating the two. Juan José was trying to open a bottle, a task apparently beyond his current abilities. Bernini, Pereda, and Del Solar had regrouped and were walking on eggs. Rivera, for his part, looked almost lifeless, so thick was his carapace of sullen silence. Turning now to the dissidents, we find that not one of them was stirring, yet all looked expectant. And this, as Del Solar realized in alarm, was even more frightening than the ruckus they’d been kicking up. Franky Amundsen, Adam Buenosayres, and the astrologer Schultz were all three staring squarely at the enemy, their heads up, their lips curled, their eyes glinting fiercely. Only Samuel’s head was bowed, deep in some cogitation that looked mighty suspicious.

All eyes and ears were now trained on Flores and Di Pasquo, and they understood they were expected to perform. They took sidelong glances at one another, but under so much pressure to say something, neither taita nor malevo could do it, fearing a wrong word might slip out.

— They’re scared to death of each other! Adam laughed into Franky’s ear.

— Shh! Franky admonished. Wanna bet they kiss and hold hands?

He said no more, for Di Pasquo was taking the initiative. Amid an absolute silence, and without looking at the taita, Di Pasquo formulated the following question:

— So what’re you up to, my friend Flores?

Nine pairs of ears waited anxiously for Flores’s response. They waited not in vain; the taita, more solemn than ever, gave this sublime answer:

— As you see, my friend. Vegetating.

Triple and unitary, massive and unstoppable, was the guffaw with which Adam, Schultz, and Franky celebrated Flores’s reply. The taita went rigid; Di Pasquo was confused. Del Solar and Pereda were aghast, Bernini dismayed. Juan José sat motionless with the defiant bottle between his thighs. The storm of laughter had not yet died away, when Samuel Tesler, shoving his chair back, stood up and raised a menacing fist.

— Enough of this farce, already! he roared. Vaudeville malevos, papiermâché taitas, take a look at a real man! If you wanna fight, I’m ready any time!

If only he had never said it! The challenge appeared to rouse Flores from his sluggishness. He slowly got up, as if impelled by a fatal necessity, and headed toward Tesler, his right hand hidden at his waist.

— Don’t do it, Flores! implored the malevo.

— It had to be! the taita rasped, sadly embarking upon the warpath.

Juan José and Di Pasquo tried to hold Flores back, Samuel paled, and the dissidents took cover behind the table. Just when the fight seemed inevitable, however, the unexpected intervened. Rivera, who had been quietly hanging back, got to his feet, slow and dignified, silent and grave, and with a single gesture literally transfixed the combatants. Stock still in surprise they stood, one and all, as the pesado Rivera, without a peep, executed the following manoeuvre. He took a few steps and, positioning himself in front of the defiant Israelite, he stopped, crossed his right leg over his left thigh, took off his shoe, lifted it in the air and brought it down conscientiously, parsimoniously, coldly on top of Tesler’s head. Putting his shoe back on, he turned on his heels and resumed not only his seat but also his meditative attitude.

Scarcely believing their eyes, everyone looked at Samuel, waiting for the inevitable reaction from the author of so defiant a challenge. But lo and behold! Our philosopher had gone into a state of ecstasy, and stayed like that for over a minute. Finally, he plopped himself down on a chair, buried his face in his hands, and started to laugh outrageously. His laughter, uncanny, inexplicable, choked by hiccups and belches, was for all that irresistibly contagious, and it wasn’t long before Trojans and Tyrians alike were infected. That was when Juan José tapped Del Solar on the shoulder.

— Beat it while you can, he grunted in his ear. Lucky for you they took it as a joke. If you stay any longer, I can’t answer for what happens.

Back-slapping, posthumous laughter, and sweet goodbyes filled the air. Del Solar was at his wits’ end as he tried to pry Samuel Tesler out of the kitchen, because the philosopher, wet-eyed and slurring his words, was swearing eternal friendship to the pesado. Bernini had less trouble in convincing Franky to go, since he’d already said goodbye to Flores, after demanding his autograph, which the taita had signed with ceremony. Schultz, for his part, meekly followed Pereda out of the house; the astrologer had got hold of the malevo Di Pasquo’s birthdate and promised to send his horoscope by return mail.

Adam Buenosayres had already gone out to the patio, with no help at all, and had groped his way into the dark backyard of the house. The voices he’d just heard, the gestures, forms and colours, all galloped madly through his mind.

— Absurd night! he laughed in his soul. O night of mine!

He passed near the fig tree, paused for a moment to peer into the shadows, and heard the dog Falucho growl in his doghouse.

— Not here, murmured Adam, perplexed.

He took another ten steps and glimpsed, on his right, a shape unclear to the sense of sight, but not to the sense of smell.

— The henhouse.

He followed its wire fence until he came to a reedbed beside the wall, its black lances pointing to the sky. There he unbuttoned his fly and urinated for a long while. While his bladder was draining, he looked up to the zenith where a few stars peeped out from behind scudding clouds. As invariably happened, the rapture of his eyes was answered by a sudden upsurge in his soul. He felt the grosser element of his inebriation fall away, giving way to a foggy, melancholic awakening of his conscience.

— Absurd night! he repeated, anxiously this time.

He turned on his heels and, buttoning up, started to make his way back. When he got to the fig tree, he noticed an amorphous bulk hanging on a string from a branch. Touching it warily, he felt a latent, cold viscosity.

— Live toads, he murmured. Witchcraft?

Three identical toads came to mind, hanging from the willow tree at the family home in Maipú: three live toads that swung in the wind for three days and three nights, as a twenty-year-old woman lay dying in the garden, her yellow fingers clutching a romantic novel.

— That’s enough! Where’re the others?

Adam Buenosayres crossed the patio, paused at the threshold of the funeral chamber, and peered inside. In the left corner, the three Crones, amazingly similar, were asleep, fingers still clutching their rosaries of black beads. In the other corner, a woman in mourning huddled into herself as though fearing she had no right to be there. In the middle of the room, by the light of the candelabras, the deceased Juan Robles lay in his wedding suit, a lump of mud slowly crumbling to dust.

Adam ran to the street door, crossed the threshold, and heard voices shouting to him from the corner.

HERE LIES JUAN ROBLES,

MUD-STOMPER.

THE CELESTIAL STOMPER

IS STOMPING HIM

BENEATH THE INVISIBLE HOOVES

OF HIS HORSE.

BOOK FOUR

Chapter 1

In the open doorway of his restaurant, Ciro Rossini — the great Ciro! — stood in deep melancholy, his eyes wandering as he spun the yarn of his autumnal thoughts. Having scrutinized the midnight sky and noticed in the east a threatening squadron of shit-coloured clouds, the proprietor of Ciro’s Gazebo said to himself in alarm:

Wind from the east,

rains like a beast. 1

As though the wind wished to corroborate Ciro’s private reflexion, a treacherous gust suddenly shook the manes of the trees along the street, tearing from them a whirlwind of coppery leaves that floated in the air before fluttering to the ground like dead wings.

— Diavolo! murmured Ciro Rossini, brushing two or three dead leaves from his hair, blackened by La Carmela lotion.

But Ciro’s funk was given visible form when his eyes took in the empty gazebo. God in Heaven, how deserted and sad it looked! Just yesterday it had been the scene of so much summer fun. Ciro looked at the rustic booths, now silent as tombs, which only a short time before had been brimful of words and laughter. An interminable sigh deflated his amateur baritone’s thorax. His gaze next passed over the infinity of empty tables filling the outdoor patio, and came to rest at last on the bandstand, where a covered piano, a shrouded bass drum, and three violins in their coffins anounced the death of music. Then, the great Ciro, the sad Ciro, shook his head from side to side, recalling the sonorous multitude that had gathered there, night after night, under more clement skies. Where were they now, the compadritos in white neckerchiefs, the thirsty gals, the folks from the barrio in their gaily coloured summer shirts, the hefty women who laughed aloud their love for the sizzling grill? Ah! They were gone with the wind, the same wind now sweeping leaves along Triunvirato Street.

Only five lost souls were there, still keeping the faith, and Ciro Rossini regarded them with a certain tenderness. They were the payador Tissone, Prince Charming, and the three standup comics of The Bohemians — five taciturn ghosts who hovered listlessly around the bandstand, amid the jumble of guitars and bandoneons.2

— Poor guys! reflected Ciro. Tomorrow they’ll be working the greasy spoons for the price of coffee.

He turned his eyes away from all that desolation, and with tragic mien gave his Carmela-blackened hair a shake. No doubt about it, autumn was definitely here, and the days of the Gazebo were numbered. But what was behind Ciro’s funereal tone? Was it the lament of Avarice gone broke, wailing because the cash register’s cheery ring would soon be silenced? No, per Bacco! Ciro Rossini, by Bacchus, the great Ciro was free of such base passions! And those who’d been been granted the incomparable pleasure of hearing him sing the arias “Una lacrima furtiva” or “Celeste Aida” would recognize that cruel destiny alone had robbed of glory a soul so sublimely inspired. What Ciro was lamenting in the depths of this autumn night was the twilight of joy. For Ciro Rossini, owner and entertainment manager of Ciro’s Gazebo, was at heart a festive genius; he worked on human joy as on a work of art. Had he been born in the halcyon days of ancient Greece, he would have organized the entourage of Dionysus or the dances of Core, the resurrected maiden.

But the great Ciro did not dwell long on his autumnal elegy, for just as he was checking the night sky’s symptoms a second time, he felt two arms wrap around his neck and something like an enormous broad-brimmed hat almost smothering him. Amazed in the extreme, Ciro Rossini returned the embrace of the unknown person. When he finally broke free and saw the other’s face, he exclaimed with delight:

— Carissimo!

In the unknown traveller deposited by midnight at his threshold, he recognized his friend Adam Buenosayres. The younger man now became solemn as he turned to the group of men behind him. Pointing to Ciro, he announced:

— Ciro Rossini, a great soul!

Adam Buenosayres turned back to Ciro, who was looking at him reverently, and introduced his companions in this way:

— Señor Schultz, astrologer. Señor Amundsen, globe trotter.3 Señor Tesler, Dionysian philosopher. Señor Pereda, criollosopher and grammarian. Señor Bernini, moralist, polygraph, and boxer.

Each of the strangers in turn held out his arms to Ciro and embraced him warmly. And the great Ciro, though detecting on their breath the evidence of well-known elixirs of the spirit, did not fail to appreciate their sweet and cordial effusions, and likewise took each and every one of the men just named to his breast. Puffing for breath, he exclaimed:

— Giovinezza! Giovinezza! 4

They were the same travellers who earlier that night had stared into the face of terror and death. A beat-up Lacroze streetcar, every one of its screws squealing, had just brought them from the remote regions of Saavedra. They’d got off at the corner of Triunvirato and Gurruchaga, and then at the suggestion of Adam Buenosayres had come to Ciro’s Gazebo, where they stood now waiting at the entrance, their eyes still haunted by nocturnal abominations. All were there except their leader, Del Solar. (Unhappy with the conduct of the heterodox faction in a certain famous kitchen, he’d parted company.) Ciro Rossini, perceiving the invisible sign of Art on their brows, inquired at last:

— All artists?

— All of us, answered Adam, beaming proudly at Ciro.

The great Ciro trembled like a noble steed of combat at the sound of the cornet, and raised his eyes heavenward:

— Art! he sighed. Art!

His rapture lasted only an instant. Returning to reality, he affectionately upbraided the group:

— Santa Madonna! he cried. Why are you standing there like that? Avanti, avanti!

His cry was a signal. Tumultuous and happy, following Ciro’s lead, the visitors irrupted into the Gazebo. Everything seemed to come alive again, even the empty booths and the weeping willow at the back, which gave its yellow locks a shake. Visibly surprised by the invasion, the five taciturn ghosts, as well as the decadent waiter setting their table by the bandstand, turned to stare in astonishment at the strangers, until Ciro, leading the troop, accosted them.

— My artists, he declaimed, introducing the five ghosts.

An irresistible wave of cordiality swept the visitors along: Adam, Pereda, and Schultz embraced the three members of The Bohemians, who couldn’t get over their surprise. Samuel Tesler, flush with bravery after his recent heroic experience, pumped the hand of the payador Tissone. Franky, in turn, threw his arms around Prince Charming, who, sullen yet dignified, didn’t seem too keen on Franky’s tender effusions.

— Popular art! Adam Buenosayres exclaimed weepily, still patting his Bohemian on the back.

— Criollo minstrel verse, thundered Pereda, not letting go of his Bohemian either. And Del Solar is missing out, the bloody fool!

Worried and suspicious, the trio of Bohemians exchanged furtive looks. Were these jokers having them on? And, Prince Charming, after Franky’s bearhug, sensed Bernini approaching and bridled:

— Hey! he snarled. Watch what you’re doing!

But the great Ciro, his rapture notwithstanding, was not a man to forget his duty. He turned to his friend Buenosayres.

— Bravissimo! he applauded. Bravissimo! Where shall I set your table?

— What! Adam answered severely, and he indicated the five ghosts. Popular art and intellectual art have just met in an embrace. We shall eat here, at the table of these gentlemen.

— Ecco! Ciro approved, without consulting the ghosts, who were already resigned.

Ciro turned and shook the decadent waiter following him:

— Subito! he cried. Put two tables together.

Then he counted up the commensals:

— Eleven places. Benissimo!

— Bad number for a banquet, Schultz complained.

— True, admitted Adam with concern. Two too many for the number of Muses.

The astrologer’s objection, apparently a trivial matter, nevertheless gave rise to a serious conflict that divided them into three factions. Schultz was obstinately refusing to sit at a table where the number of commensals exceeded the sum of the Muses. Franky Amundsen and the pipsqueak Bernini, in their own flamboyant style, said they shat, double-shat, and triple-shat on Pythagoras and every last one of his disciples. The third party included Adam Buenosayres, conciliatory; the five ghosts, gawking and slack-jawed; and Ciro Rossini, who had assumed an air of deep intelligence. Two motions were proposed to settle the dispute. Franky Amundsen’s idea, loudly rejected by the others, was that they draw straws to determine two sacrificial victims, who would be roasted on Ciro’s grill and served up to the remaining nine commensals. Adam had better luck when he suggested inviting Ciro Rossini to the table so they’d make a total of twelve, a harmonious number and, by his lights, highly significant. Schultz accepted this proposal, considering twelve to be the number of plenitude and citing as examples the twelve signs of the zodiac and the twelve deities of Mount Olympus. Harmony was promptly restored when Ciro accepted the invitation (not without protesting his absolute unworthiness for such a fabulous distinction), and they all took their seats around the table.

It wasn’t at all difficult to select the delicacies they were to wolf down. The majority of the guests opted, with a certain over-enthusiasm, for a gigantic mixed parrillada: grilled braided chitlins, large intestine, cow’s udder, bull’s testicles, sausages à la criollo, and ribs, all to be abundantly washed down with a little Vino de la Costa, whose praises Franky sang to the skies.5 The astrologer Schultz, however, speaking for the minority, disdainfully rejected that menu worthy of Kaffirs, saying he’d be satisfied just by examining the victims’ entrails to get a read on whether or not the gods favoured the banquet. He actually got up, just like that, to head for Ciro’s kitchen before Adam Buenosayres took him by the shoulders and managed to dissuade him. That being accomplished, Adam was overcome by a fervid fit of Latinity; he turned to the great Ciro to ask if he could find two or three bottles of a certain Sicilian wine and a few of those almond-stuffed figs he’d tasted there on more than a few occasions. His national amour propre flattered, Ciro Rossini answered in the affirmative and gave the order to the dozing waiter. Ciro’s words filled Adam Buenosayres’s heart with Virgilian music; likewise, the hearts of Schultz and Pereda, who’d taken a sudden fancy to the cibus pastoris, the meal of shepherds just proposed by Adam.

Everything eventually arrived. The smell of steaming entrails rose from the rustic table up to Olympus and tickled the benevolent nostrils of the gods. The criollo wine, as well as the Sicilian, flowed in tandem, from bottle to glass and from glass to brain. For five minutes, there was the sound of busy sets of chompers, and the sight of greasy snouts gradually lighting up with satisfaction, especially the three faces of The Bohemians (greenish from nightlife), the payador Tissone’s visage (beatific and modest), and the features of Prince Charming, though he hadn’t relinquished his truculence and contempt.

At length there was a respite among the commensals. That was when Adam, his right hand holding his wineglass and his left a fistful of figs, addressed the payador in a friendly way.

— So you must be the famous payador Tissone? he asked.

The payador smiled, whether out of modest glory or glorious modesty, no one knew.

— Look, he replied. I don’t know about famous…

— Don’t put yourself down! Adam censured. Tell me, what can you sing?

— My gaucho repertoire.

— Hmm. Do you play guitar?

— What a question! said Tissone, gesturing toward his guitar case.

Samuel Tesler, who ever since a whack by a certain shoe was not shy about displaying his fondness for the popular muses, accosted the payador.

— I suppose, he said, that you know the art of the payada.

Tissone looked at him as if thinking to himself, “This guy’s wet behind the ears.” At last he answered, sly and cheerful at the same time:

— Guess what. It’s my specialty!

— That’s bad, grunted Adam Buenosayres. Bad news.

— How come? said Tissone.

Adam pointed at Franky Amundsen.

— Because, he replied showing his concern, that fellow you see over there is the noted payador Amundsen. The “Blond Bull of Saavedra,” they call him. The two of you might have a run-in.

— So what if we do? squawked Tissone, getting upset.

At this point Franky screwed up his face, stuck out his chest, and laid a cold look on Tissone.

— Don’t go gettin’ yer hackles up on me, he intoned in a tough-guy drawl. I just wanna warn ya upfront the kinda guy I am: if I come up short on the guee-tar, I’m real long on the knife. A word to the wise.

At those menacing words, the payador Tissone hung his head, the three Bohemians looked at one another in alarm, and a wave of uneasiness swept over the vast circle of the commensals.

— No fights, warned Ciro Rossini, turning his noble profile toward the surly profile of the payador Amundsen.

— No worry, drawled Franky. I don’t go around eating people raw.

— Me neither, the payador Tissone piped up in an access of courage.

The convivium was still under some strain, and Luis Pereda relieved it when he turned to the two payadores and invited them to lay aside their personal vanity for the sake of tradition, for their native art and for Argentina. Profoundly moved, the payador Amundsen held out a cordial hand to his antagonist, and when the payador Tissone shook it vigorously, a round of applause put paid to the incident. However, the banquet fully recovered its joy only when Ciro Rossini, teary-eyed, suggested a general toast to the advent of concord, to Ciro’s Gazebo, and to bel canto. No one refused to participate in a toast so ardently proposed, and wine once again moistened those magnificent throats. Then Luis Pereda, author and architect of the peace, observed the payador Tissone with ineffable tenderness.

— A real, honest-to-goodness criollo! he cried at last. Tissone, a name redolent of clover and prairie grass!

— No, no! protested Ciro. It’s Italian, a good Italian name.

The payador agreed good-naturedly.

— Yes, he admitted. My old man came from Italy.

— Impossible! thundered Pereda, riveting him with disconcerted eyes. And even if it were true, you were born on the pampa, you grew up soaked to the balls in tradition. You can’t deny it, Tissone old pard’!

— Look, rejoined a confused Tissone. I was born right here in Buenos Aires, in La Paternal, and I’ve lived my whole life in the barrio, may I drop dead if I lie!

— Aha! Adam Buenosayres reproached him. So you’re trying to tell us you don’t know how to mount a bucking bronco, or tether a horse to a post with the proper knot, or toss a lasso over a set of horns, or wrestle a young bull to the ground?

It was obvious from Tissone’s perturbation that he’d never practised any of those criollo disciplines. Luis Pereda could read the payador like an open book. He brought his fist down on the table and looked meaningfully around the whole table.

— Gentlemen! he exclaimed. What a great country is ours! What character! What strength in its tradition! This man, Italian by blood and native of La Paternal, never having left his neighbourhood, never having seen the pampa or its ways, one fine day picks up a guitar and becomes a payador! Gentlemen, that’s greatness!

— Truly monumental, affirmed Adam Buenosayres, completely serious.

Pereda’s enthusiasm was contagious, and soon the commensals were weaving the most intricate web of conversation. Everyone had praises to sing, an example to recount. The pipsqueak Bernini was attempting to initiate the trio of Bohemians into a certain doctrine concerning a mysterious Spirit of the Land. But they weren’t paying much attention, because at the same time Samuel Tesler was trying to tell them about his own case — that he was Semitic in origin (though from a priestly family), had been born in the fabulous Bessarabia, but that every time he looked in the mirror he saw in his physiognomy the doggon’d’st likeness to the mythical Santos Vega. For his part, Ciro Rossini, flattered by the attention the astrologer and Pereda were paying him, launched into a ferocious diatribe against those gringos who liked to badmouth so generous a country as ours. He illustrated his dissertation by chronicling his countless bellicose interventions against foul-mouthed gallegos on Lacroze streetcar platforms. But alas! There was one among the commensals who did not join in the general fervor, remaining instead entrenched in a silent sarcasm clearly manifested in the glint of his eye and the curl of his lip. Prince Charming was that man, and for a while now, Adam Buenosayres had been studying him with curiosity. Taking advantage of a pause in the conversation, Adam questioned him in a loud voice:

— And you, Prince. Do you, too, cultivate the national tradition?

Prince Charming didn’t try to disguise his displeasure at being the object of everyone’s attention.

— Look ’t, he burst out at last. The past is a joke. Means nothing to me, get it?

— Oh, him! murmured Ciro Rossini. A pain in the neck.

— What does he do? Adam asked seriously.

— Poetry, groaned Ciro. He recites it in the gazebo.

With furrowed brow, Prince Charming ran his fingers through his exuberant mane, signalling that he had more to say.

— The present is what interests me, he added. I’m a poet of the contemporary.

— In what genre? asked Samuel.

— Don’t talk nonsense! answered the Prince. My art is at the service of the masses.

— The numbskull! Franky whispered into Adam’s ear. Then Franky said for all to hear:

— I know his type. In Saavedra the ground is lousy with them. This gentleman is one of those types who go around upsetting everyone, using any silly excuse to clamour for their right to play the “lyre.” And when they get their paws on that anachronistic instrument, they claim they “pluck” it for the sake of punishing the tyrants. Good Lord! Where have they seen a tyrant nowadays?

Nevertheless, Adam, the researcher, gratified Prince Charming with a smile.

— Fine, he said. Could you give us a sample of your art?

— Hmm! grunted the Prince, almost flattered. Well, I’ve got my ten-liners, like “Night in July”; it came out in The Soul That Sings.6 I talk about a down-and-outer, freezing to death outside a luxurious mansion, while the bourgeois pigs are inside squandering pots of money on an orgy.

— Bravo! exclaimed Adam. That’s talking truth, Prince, very accurate. But look, art doesn’t aim for the truth for its quality of being true but for its beauty.

— Allow me to disagree, the Prince shot back. I don’t go in for grammar and stuff like that. You’ve got to speak to the public in ordinary language, give ’em the straight goods.

Adam turned to Ciro Rossini and asked:

— Does the public put up with it?

— Corno! answered Ciro. The Prince just has to open his mouth and they all start chatting among themselves. Ecco!

— Bunch of bourgeois! grumbled the Prince, magnificent in his disdain.

— And yet, Pereda confronted Ciro, you have the Prince on contract here. There must be a reason.

— Cripes! Ciro admitted. When the Prince gets talking about hunger and privation, he depicts it with such verità that everybody in the audience gets ravenous. The grill can’t keep up with the demand.

Loud laughter from the commensals greeted Ciro’s explanation. He laughed too, somewhat surprised at his success. The laughter got even louder when Prince Charming, with an air of offended majesty, turned his back on the assembly and showed off his remarkable profile, whose two salient features were a chin receding between the dual wings of a floppy necktie, and a professional mop of long hair raining down over a grimy wing-collar. The trio of comedians hadn’t been left behind; their greenish faces beamed with malicious delight.

— Bah! Adam Buenosayres said, pointing his finger at the trio. I prefer the humorists, at least they’re serious people.

— Per Bacco! Ciro said in praise. They’re really worth their keep. You should hear the howlers they come out with. Do they ever make people laugh!

— Laughter! Prince Charming denounced bitterly. The laughter of clowns!

— Yikes! said one of The Bohemians. I think we’re on now!

— Do you sing or recite? Adam asked.

— Sing.

— What?

— Nonsense. Senseless gibberish.

— For example? insisted Adam.

It didn’t take much begging. Coordinating their timing with a mutual glance, The Bohemians barked out the following ditty:

The pampa has the ombú

and marrow bone has the stew.

Shake the Venetian blind

’cause here comes Clementine.

Five times eight is forty

birdy in bread that’s shorty.

Who shooed you off the branch?

You’re gone from the rosebush.7

— Lord thundering jeepers! bawled Franky on hearing that monstrosity. It’s a wonder they haven’t been shot yet!

— It’s pure Dada! exclaimed a delighted Pereda.

Adam Buenosayres had listened to the drivel with perfect sang-froid, and now he spoke:

— That isn’t nonsense. Bah! It’s too logical to be nonsense. Truth be told, chemically pure nonsense doesn’t exist. It’s impossible.

The three Bohemians gaped at him in utter surprise.

— Listen, insisted Adam. If I say, for example, The laxative jacket of melancholy tossed a sea-green guffaw in front of the luxuriously decorated navel, my sentence is invincibly logical, in spite of everything.

— No, no! protested a few voices.

Adam sent a glassfull of Latin wine down the hatch.

— Let’s consider, he expounded. Might I not metaphorically give melancholy the form of a jacket, since many others have given it the form of a veil or tulle or some sort of cloak? And since melancholy can work to purge the soul, what’s so strange about calling it a “laxative”? Moreover, using the trope of personification, I can easily assign to melancholy a human act such as a guffaw, which implies the laughter of melancholy is in fact its death, its swan song. And as for luxuriously decorated navels, a literal reading would be quite realistic.

Adam’s thesis was received in consternation by The Bohemians and by Tissone. Prince Charming’s disdain grew more acute. Ciro was labouring in arduous cogitations. Schultz endorsed it unconditionally, while Luis Pereda and Franky Amundsen had serious doubts.

— Hmm, said Franky, rummaging in his head. Let’s see. The exquisite anchorite stuck an adolescent button to the three-storied plain… No, too logical!

Then Luis Pereda tried his luck.

— The loud-pedalled sneeze is not unworthy of the soluble clothes-closet with the false teeth… Nope, that doesn’t do it either.

— Ergo, concluded Adam, nonsense is not of this world.

— Why not? Bernini inquired gravely.

— Try naming for me any two things that have nothing to do with each other, then juxtapose them through some link we know to be impossible in reality. First off, in the two names, the intellect perceives two real forms quite familiar to it. Then comes the astonishment of seeing them associated through a link they don’t have in the real world. But intelligence is not merely a second-hand store, chock-a-block with apprehended forms; it’s a laboratory that works on those forms, puts them into different relationships, and in a way frees them from the limits within which they live, restoring to them at least a shadow of the unity binding them in the Divine Intellect. That’s why our intelligence, after acknowledging the absurdity of such an arbitrary linkage on the literal level, will soon find some reason or correspondence on the allegorical, symbolic, moral, or anagogical level… 8

— Outrageous! griped Franky, covering his ears.

— Hence, Schultz explained, the only absolute nonsense is the belief that human intelligence is capable of absolute nonsense. Bah! Absolute nonsense belongs to the order of the angelic.

Franky Amundsen looked piteously at the payador Tissone, his rival lost in thought.

— Tissone, old pard’ he said. Them’s mighty deep waters for a Christian soul to navigate all by his lonesome.

— That’s right, that’s right, Tissone agreed, looking back at the payador Amundsen with the same sad expression.

But Adam Buenosayres was beaming with an inspiration that was irrepressible, even if fermented and bottled on Italic soil, and he was not about to let up. Again he spoke to the commensals:

— Just look, gentlemen. By formulating a thesis on nonsense, we’ve been led to poetics. Playing with forms, removing them from their natural limitations and giving them, by miraculous fiat, another destiny: that is poetry.

— Let’s have an example, demanded Franky.

— Per Bacco, Ciro supported him. An example!

Adam reflected for a moment.

— If you compare a bird with a zither, he said at last, the zither breaks with its natural limits and in a way begins to share the essence of the bird, and the bird the essence of the zither. Look: if it isn’t absolute nonsense, poetry gets close to nonsense.

— He’s trying to justify his ridiculous metaphors! shouted Franky.

The pipsqueak Bernini laughed, the trio laughed, the payador Tissone laughed. And all of a sudden Adam recalled similar laughter, in Saavedra, issuing from the mouths of fresh young girls, while Lucio Negri recited in a mocking voice:

And love, happier

than a child’s funeral.9

However, the painful memory didn’t last. In spite of the storm rising among the commensals, Adam insisted:

— The poet is forced to work with forms already given, and therefore he’s not an absolute creator. His true creation…

But his discourse was drowned out by the din of forks tapping on glasses, irate expostulations, laughter, and whistles. Franky Amundsen and the pipsqueak Bernini led the insurrection, and Adam angrily rebuked them.

— Listen to me, you animals! he shouted.

— No, no, the rebels chorused.

It was no use. Discord reigned within every breast. Adam saw how things stood. He picked up two bottles in one hand, the platter of figs in the other, and walked away from the table, shouting behind him:

— Come with me, those who’ve got the right stuff!

Thus was produced a schism within that harmonious group. Luis Pereda, the astrologer Schultz, and Ciro Rossini all stood up and followed Adam Buenosayres to a round table ten paces away, beneath the yellow willow. Samuel Tesler, who in other circumstances would likely have gone with them, stayed put among the rebels, immersed — ay! — in a Bacchic ecstasy from which he wouldn’t emerge for the rest of the night. Franky Amundsen and his horde, for their part, closed ranks as the undisputed lords of the table.

The reader, in turn, will now have to choose between the two camps, either staying at the square table of the madmen or going to the round table of the wise. At the first table, harsh wine now flows again, and naked guitars abandon their cases. Now they shout for the payador Tissone; and strumming, he begins to sing:

On the bronco of love

I tried riding one day,

in the belief it would

only be skittish.10

At the round table — graced by the two bottles, the platter of figs, and the single glass they’d salvaged when they fled — are seated the astrologer Schultz, Adam Buenosayres, Luis Pereda, and Ciro Rossini. The astrologer has just filled the glass, first scattering a few drops in honour of Hermes the Initiate, and now he empties it at one slug. He refills the glass and ritually invites, from left to right, each and every one of his fellow banqueters to drink. The pious libation concluded, the dialogue begins under the willow tree, whose golden branches shiver in the night wind and brush the foreheads of the interlocutors.11

PEREDA

(He addresses the metaphysical bard of Villa Crespo, Adam Buenosayres, who appears to be deep in contemplation.)

If, as you were just saying, the poet is obliged to work with natural forms — rose, bird, woman — his posture is not that of a creator but rather of an imitator.

ADAM

(Fidgeting with a willow branch.)

There are several distinctions to be made here. It is necessary to consider the poet in relation to: (1) the material he works with; (2) his mode of operation; and (3) the result of his operation; that it to say, the work of poetry. If it’s all right with you, we’ll follow that order.

(Schultz and Pereda agree. The great Ciro adopts a solemn air.)

PEREDA

I was referring to the first relationship.

ADAM

As for the first relationship, I’ve already said that because he works with given forms the poet is not an absolute creator.

SCHULTZ

(Rearing up.)

Absolute creation means creating out of nothingness. Only the Divine Artificer can create absolutely.

ADAM

That’s what I meant.

PEREDA

So the poet is an “imitator of natura,” as the old boy taught.

CIRO

What old boy?

PEREDA

Aristotle.

ADAM

(Sarcastically.)

That’s right. But the word natura didn’t mean the same thing for the old boy as it does for Luis Pereda and other ingenuous naturalists.

PEREDA

(Testily.)

Cut the philosophical swaggering!

ADAM

For old Aristotle, the natura of the bird is not the same as the flesh-and-blood bird, as is believed nowadays, but rather the “essence” of the bird, its creative number, the abstract universal cipher perceivable only through intellection, which acts on matter and constructs an individual, concrete, sensible bird.

SCHULTZ

Something like the Platonic “idea”?

ADAM

That’s right. But it descends into this world to join with matter and to fecundate it. That creative number is what the ancients call the “substantial form,” and that’s the form that art imitates.

PEREDA

(Feisty.)

That’s just speculating with phantasmic entities. I don’t understand a thing.

CIRO

(Perplexed.)

Corno!

ADAM

(To Pereda.)

So is it my fault that your professors in Geneva turned you into a pint-sized agnostic?12

PEREDA

Cut the philosophical bullying! Imitating a bird, or the form of a bird, amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?

ADAM

No, it’s not the same thing. The bird is a compound of matter and form. Inasmuch as it is material, it is subject to all the limitations of individual things, their contingencies, corruption, and death. Form, on the other hand, is free of material by virtue of the abstractive work of the intellect; in the mind, form enjoys an eternal and lasting existence. That’s why, when the artist imitates the bird in its form, he creates not a bird, but the bird, with a tiny grain of the marvellous plenitude the bird has in the Divine Intelligence.

(Schultz approves with the insolent smile of the initiated. An unredeemed agnostic, Luis Pereda growls softly. Ciro Rossini, deep in thought, scratches his head. There is a pause. Adam takes advantage of it to refresh his gullet with Sicilian wine. Deep-rooted laughter is heard in the other sector — unruly voices, snippets of guitar.)

SCHULTZ

And so?

ADAM

(He rubs the sides of the bottle, as though seeking inspiration.)

So, the title of “imitator” is appropriate for the poet, in respect of the material he works with; that is, in respect of the forms or ontological numbers that God, not the poet, has invented. But the title is even more appropriate as regards his modus operandi and creative expression. Every artist is an imitator of the Divine Word which created the universe, and the poet is the most faithful of its imitators since, like the Word, he creates by “naming.”

(He lowers he voice, hesitant and seemingly pregnant with mystery.)

Now, the consequences of such an affirmation are incalculable and awesome. Because if the poet’s creative mode is analogous to the creative mode of the Word, then the poet, by studying himself at the moment of creation, can achieve the most accurate of cosmogonies.

PEREDA

(Embarrassed, he addresses Schultz in a low voice.)

Should we take the bottle away from him?

SCHULTZ

(Imposing silence.)

Shhh! It’s just getting interesting.

ADAM

(Hesitating now, wondering whether or not he should divulge something confidential.)

Well then, I have looked deep into myself! I’m going to reveal the secret of poetic inspiration and expiration. (Enigmatic.) Nothing more than that! Those capable of making the analogical leap, let them make it. I wash my hands of it! (Stammering.) And… if it weren’t for the wine… not even this much! (He snaps his thumbnail against his teeth.)

PEREDA

Good for the Sicilian wine! (He fills the glass and passes it to Adam, who accepts with great dignity.)

SCHULTZ

Wine symbolizes all that is initiatic. That’s why…

ADAM

(Interrupts with majesty.)

I’ll speak, but on one condition: you must keep it secret.

PEREDA

(Raises his arm toward the zenith.)

I swear!

(Schultz gives his word of honour, and Ciro Rossini declares himself silent as a tomb.)

ADAM

(Solemn.)

Let’s examine the first phase: poetic inspiration. (Great expectancy.) At a given moment, either because he receives a puff of divine breath or because, faced with created beauty, he feels stirring within himself a fond reminiscence of infinite beauty, the poet finds himself inundated by a musical wave, totally, to the point of plenitude, similar to the way air fills the lungs in the movement of breathing.

SCHULTZ

Is it really a musical wave?

ADAM

I say “musical” by analogy. It is a harmonious plenitude, truly ineffable, superior to all music.

PEREDA

(Victim of confused Genevan memories.)

I seem to remember that Schiller — was it Schiller? — defined the poetic state as something like “a vaguely musical disposition.”

ADAM

(Infinitely modest.)

Schiller was not a metaphysician. I go further than Schiller. I would say that all possible forms of music resonate in the harmonious plenitude acquired by the poet during his inspiration. They all resonate, though no particular one of them yet, in a kind of strange unity that makes all possible songs one and makes each song into all possible music. They are all there in a certain musical “present” of music in which one song does not exclude the other in the dimension of time, because all of them make a single ineffable song…

PEREDA

(Complaining.)

That’s chaos!

ADAM

(Looks at him in surprise and distrust.)

Who told you? Yes, that just what it is: chaos. Just as in primordial Chaos, before creation, all things were present, without differentiation or strife, so are all songs together in the musical chaos of poetic inspiration.

PEREDA

(Visibly confused.)

Now it turns out that I’m a metaphysician by fluke!

SCHULTZ

(Mysterious.)

Bet you don’t know the etymological meaning of the word “Chaos.”

ADAM

What does it mean?

SCHULTZ

The void of the yawn.

ADAM

What’s that to me?

SCHULTZ

(Authoritarian.)

Come now, yawn, all of you!

(Adam, Pereda, and Ciro, intimidated, try out an imitation yawn.)

ADAM

(Happily astonished.)

Remarkable! The yawn is a profound inspiration!

SCHULTZ

(Triumphant, but not triumphalist.)

That’s what I wanted to demonstrate.

ADAM

Amazing, Schultz! And now I remember that when poetic inspiration comes to me, a very deep physical inspiration comes with it.

SCHULTZ

And what else?

ADAM

Let’s see. (Imitates another yawn.) The eyelids close partially, as when one is falling asleep.

SCHULTZ

Just so. Chaos is the concentration and the sleep of all things that do not yet want to become manifest. And after that?

ADAM

(Somber.)

Next comes the second phase, the poetic exhalation — the great fall!

PEREDA

Why a fall?

CIRO

(Polemical.)

Diavolo, yes! How come?

ADAM

Listen. The poet, as I’ve said, is enjoying an inspiration in which he savours all the plenitude of music. Suddenly, an intimate movement — necessity or duty — induces him irresistibly to manifest or express that ineffable musical chaos in a particular way. And then, among the infinite possibilities inherent in that chaos, he chooses one and gives it form, thereby excluding the other possibilities and descending from inspiration to creation, from the infinite to the finite, from immobility to happening. Thus will be born a poem, then another one, twenty, a hundred. And thus the poet’s fall into multiplicity: through his multiple songs, he will strive in vain to manifest that musical unity; and through finite means, the infinite — that infinity he carries within during inspiration. This is the first fall!

PEREDA

What? Are there more?

ADAM

There are two falls. The poet, as you’ve seen, falls first of all when he chooses for his song one among the infinity of possible forms. But this is still a creation ad intra, an internal creation, endowed with all the amplitude of the spiritual and immaterial. Then comes the creation ad extra, and the form chosen by the artist in the intimacy of his soul exteriorizes to become incarnate in a material, in language, which in turn imposes new limits. This other moment of poetic creation I call the “second fall.”

PEREDA

(Grumbling.)

Yes, the last bit is clear.

CIRO

(Who still hasn’t got it.)

Clear as acqua!

SCHULTZ

(Cunning.)

Hmm! Are you talking about a fall in the sense of “sin”?

ADAM

No. I mean a descent imposed on the artist by creative necessity. A descent without which he would not exactly be a creator, but rather a contemplative.

SCHULTZ

(Going for broke.)

But you just spoke of a kind of correspondence between the creation of an artificer and divine creation. Watch out! Must one then suppose that in God there is a similar necessity and a similar descent?

ADAM

(Suddenly confused and hesitant.)

God… is the motionless beginning, the principle of immobility. He neither descends nor ascends. He is the Omniperfect, free of necessity. (Anxious, he goes back to fidgeting with the branch.)

SCHULTZ

And so?

PEREDA

(Imperious.)

Exactly! And so?

CIRO

(Exalted.)

Cristo! That’s what I say!

ADAM

He is an infinite, eternal, and simple perfection. He knows himself for all eternity and manifests himself in his inner Word, which, as an intimate expression of divinity, participates in the divine essence and is one with God. This being so, what possible need could he have to manifest himself later through exterior creatures?

SCHULTZ

Nevertheless, he has manifested himself.

ADAM

There’s nothing for it but to admit a free act of his will. He created because he wanted to, when and how he chose. An act of love, the theologians call it.

SCHULTZ

The poet, on the other hand, creates out of necessity. Isn’t that it?

ADAM

His, too, is an act of love, but not free.

SCHULTZ

A forced act of love?

PEREDA

Bah!

CIRO

Diavolo!

ADAM

Here’s how I see it. Every creature has received some perfection and must communicate it in some way to lesser creatures. It’s the economic law of charity. If I were to explain the mechanism of the angel…

PEREDA

(Scandalized.)

Hey! Only Schultz can talk about angels.

CIRO

Angels. Cripes!

SCHULTZ

(Severe.)

This is no joking matter!

ADAM

… you would see in the angel two distinct movements. One is circular; the angel revolves around the eternal light to become fully illuminated. The other movement is downward; the angel communicates a part of that light to the next angel below in the hierarchy. Since there are three hierarchies of angels, the first and highest communicates to the second, the second to the third, and the third to humankind. And since there are hierarchies among humans, each receives and gives (or ought to give) in proportion to what is received. Now, the poet receives something at the moment of inspiration and must communicate this to those who have received nothing. His is a loving act. But, as in the case of the rest of the creatures who offer something, the poet is only an instrument of the First Love.

PEREDA

(Skeptical.)

Hmm! And if the poet were to work only out of ambition?

ADAM

Ambition for what? Generally he reaps more thorns than flowers in this world!

PEREDA

Let’s say the ambition for glory.

ADAM

Maybe. Dante speaks of the glory his work will earn him. And he talks about it so seriously, one can guess it isn’t a human prize but a divine reward he hopes for.

PEREDA

Reward for what?

ADAM

(He hesitates, then suddenly blurts out.)

Let’s say for his “fidelity” as an imitator of the Word and as an agent of First Love.

SCHULTZ

Are you sure the poet’s fidelity is so great?

ADAM

The true poet will sacrifice all for his vocation. (Dramatic.) Listen well: even his soul!

SCHULTZ

(Point blank.)

Would you write if there was no one left on earth to read you?

PEREDA

Bravo, Schultz!

CIRO

Ecco! Ecco!

ADAM

(At the height of exultation.)

Look, Schultz. Imagine a rosebush on the verge of producing a rose, and just then the angel’s trumpet announces the end of the world. Would the rosebush stop?

SCHULTZ

(Surprised.)

I don’t think so.

ADAM

(Sublime.)

Thus is the poet!

(There is an eloquent silence. Ciro Rossini, who has been savouring those grand words without understanding them, shows symptoms of suffering a fit of lyricism, for he is feverishly assailing his hair dyed with La Carmela. Very worried, Luis Pereda turns his attention to the other group, where the three Bohemians are now singing and gesticulating amid a hurricane of Homeric laughter. The astrologer Schultz is a statue.)

PEREDA

Baudelaire had the same excessive idea. Didn’t he say that God reserves a place among his angels for the poet?

ADAM

(Somber.)

I wouldn’t count on it.

PEREDA

And yet, you were just saying…

ADAM

(Now locked in an internal struggle that later will cause him to break down. The drums of the night are beating in his soul, but they are still far away.)

I’m referring to something else. The poet is an imitator of the Word in the order of Creation, but not in the order of Redemption.

SCHULTZ

(Fixing him with cold eyes.)

What do you mean?

ADAM

(The nocturnal drums are beating louder and louder in his soul.)

I mean, if it’s easy for me to imitate the Word in the order of Creation, it’s difficult to do it in the order of Redemption. (Stammering, increasingly distressed.) On that level, only the saint perfectly imitates the Word. Do you know what a saint is? Read the life of Saint Rose of Lima, for example. Something terrible, monstrous, repugnant…13

PEREDA

(Getting worried.)

Che! Che!

CIRO

Cripes!

SCHULTZ

I’ve suspected something was up. For some time now.

ADAM

(Doesn’t hear them. Continues talking as if to himself.)

It’s absurd! One is swimming along in murky waters, and suddenly one realizes one has swallowed an invisible hook. Do you understand? (The drums beat in a deafening crescendo.) One resists, thrashes around, tries to cling to the bottom. It’s no use! The invisible Fisherman is tugging from up above! (The drums have beaten themselves out. Adam Buenosayres lets his head fall forward on the table, noisily toppling the only glass.)

CIRO

(Frightened, addresses Pereda.)

Santa Madonna! What’s wrong with him?

PEREDA

(Picking up the fallen glass.)

He’s pissed as a newt!

(With extraordinary gentleness, Ciro Rossini pats Adam on the shoulders. The bard of Villa Crespo, responding to this wordless solicitude, lifts his head and executes the following motions: he puts his right hand into his pocket and pulls out the Blue-Bound Notebook, then quickly puts it back as though in alarm; he reaches into the other pocket, pulls out a faded handkerchief, and dabs his eyes with it; he puts the handkerchief back in his pocket and accepts a glass of wine that Luis Pereda holds out to him in the attitude of the Good Samaritan; finally he smiles, shy and embarrassed.)

ADAM

Absurd night! (Sighing.) It’s nothing.

CIRO

Ecco! That’s the spirit.

PEREDA

Brother, I thought you were having an attack.

ADAM

It’s over now. (Recovering.) Let’s go on to the third point.

SCHULTZ

The work of art?

ADAM

That’s right, the work of art. (Still sighing.) Do you know what a “homologue” is?

(Schultz prepares to answer, but loud voices coming from the other sector cut him off.)

BERNINI

(Shouting at the top of his lungs from the other table.)

Hey, you guys! Come here, all of you!

PEREDA

(Shouts back.)

What’s up?

BERNINI

They’re gonna have it out!

PEREDA

Who?

BERNINI

The payador Tissone and Franky!

The incident had occurred when The Bohemians had finished their number. In the silence following the applause, the payador Amundsen, eyes sparkling, fiendishly challenged the payador Tissone. Tissone blanched under the pressure of everyone staring at him and waiting for his response. A wave of courage rushed through him, and he cried in a sublime tone:

— I’m called to my game!

The conditions of the contest were set out forthwith. The payador Amundsen was to put a difficult question to the payador Tissone, who then had to answer to the best of his ability. Tissone would accompany himself on his own guitar, whereas the payador Amundsen, whose fingers weren’t in shape that night, would be accompanied by one of the three Bohemians. Those listening were duly constituted into a Jury that would decide who was the champion. No betting was allowed; as Franky pointed out with dignity, this was no cockfight or boxing match; it was a first-class criollo competition.

When Luis Pereda, Ciro Rossini, the astrologer Schultz, and Adam Buenosayres arrived at the arena, the tableau laid out before their gaze was impressive. The two contenders sat face to face, serious and dignified as befitted the occasion. The payador Amundsen, his finger on his temple, was listening very attentively as his accompanist rehearsed the few bars of music to which Amundsen was to set words when it was his turn to sing. He was flanked by the pipsqueak Bernini and a second Bohemian, the two patting him on the back and cheering him on with words of unconditional devotion. Samuel Tesler, Prince Charming, and the third Bohemian were with the payador Tissone, who sat holding his guitar, oblivious to everything, even Samuel Tesler’s supposedly confidential offer to place his wisdom at the payador’s disposal, if Franky’s question — hollered Samuel thick-tongued — got him into a tight spot.

Stalling for time, Franky Amundsen, the centre of everyone’s expectation, turned to the payador Tissone and said:

— Don’t crap out on me, pard.

— Don’t you fret none, Tissone drawled back, with a stolidity revealing of his mettle.

There were a few more seconds of silence. All of a sudden, Franky’s face lit up and an ineffable smile dawned on his lips.

— Here goes! he said.

His guitarist strummed furiously, and Franky addressed the following ditty to his opponent:

My countryman Don Tissone,

if you really know what’s right,

then tell me, your humble servant:

Why does the seagull shit white?14

The listeners exclaimed in amazement and exchanged knowing looks, for Franky’s question was a tough one probing the most arcane depths of nature. The payador Tissone looked profoundly shaken.

— That’s one killer question! said Bernini.

— It’d stump the devil himself, opined one of the Bohemians.

But the payador Tissone quickly shook off his paralysis, settled the guitar on his thigh, and with lithe fingers played a long warm-up. Finally, he opened his mouth; everyone held their breath in suspense. Alas! Not a peep issued from his lips! The listeners exchanged looks. His forehead shiny with sweat, Tissone played his lead-in again, got to where the song starts, and opened his mouth. And again, silence. A dull murmur stirred among the contest’s witnesses. They were about to count him out. Franky was smiling, already certain of his victory. Samuel hung his head as though insufferably humiliated. But wait! Once more, the payador Tissone has thrashed out his introductory riffs; in desperation he looks straight at Franky Amundsen and sings his answer:

White shits the seagull-seagull,

like the payador said so true

because, sure ’nuff, it don’t know

how to shit in no other hue.15

The ghost errant of Santos Vega! Musical shade of the gaucho Martín Fierro! Southern troubadours, glorious souls of yesteryear, whose bones today lie beneath the pampa, mother of guitar-toting centaurs! I have seen you come down to succour the payador Tissone and crown him with victory; and I have seen how the payador’s brow lowered beneath the weight of so many laurel leaves. The listeners went wild in adulation. Franky Amundsen ardently embraced Tissone, crying out the enormity of his defeat. As the others took turns hugging the winner, Samuel Tesler publicly forswore the erudite science he’d professed heretofore and announced that henceforth he would heed only the voices of the gnomic wisdom infused in humble folk by decree of the lofty and very occult Tetragrammaton.

That moment marked the apogee of the banquet and signalled the beginning of the end. The great Ciro understood this, first when he noticed the commensals lapsing into silent lassitude, and again as he watched the funereal waiter take away the leftovers from the feast (greasy plates, gaunt bottles, glasses grimy with fingerprints), and yet again when the musicians packed up their instruments. At last, everyone stood up. Goodbye was now in the air, and Ciro Rossini grew gloomy once more.

— Diavolo!

They took their leave at the big front door of the gazebo, the blustery wind whipping the trees out in the street. The first to go, heading westward, was Prince Charming, cold and cranky, perhaps ruminating a long diatribe against magnates. The three Bohemians said their goodbyes as they took off running to catch a Lacroze streetcar tottering in the direction of La Chacarita. Lastly, the payador Tissone weighed anchor; many fond eyes followed him as the night swallowed him up, guitar and all.

— Poor guys! commented Ciro. The gazebo’s over for them.

But the great Ciro’s melancholy reached its extreme when he felt Adam Buenosayres’s hands take his own. Moved to the depths of his being, he embraced the poet of Villa Crespo, then the rest of his party, clinging to each man like a shipwrecked sailor to a plank.

— Giovinezza! he wept. Addio, addio!

The group finally tore itself away from the emotional goodbye scene and set off staggering down the street. At the corner of Triunvirato and Gurruchaga, they stopped, not knowing where to go next. The autumn night offered herself naked and full of dark possibilities; the mad wind seemed to bid them join a witches’ sabbath; everything was inciting them to furtive, guilty acts. As his companions were deliberating, Adam heard the bells of San Bernardo ring two-thirty in the morning; up on the bell tower, the yellow clock looked like a dead man’s face. Time to go home? Then Samuel Tesler, his steps unsteady since leaving the gazebo, whispered a few secretive words into Franky Amundsen’s ear.

— Libidinous Israelite! exclaimed Franky, covering his ears as though scandalized.

— It’s the Terrestrial Venus! Samuel insinuated in a persuasive tone. The demonic or popular Venus!

— What are you guys getting up to over there? asked Luis Pereda.

Franky pointed an accusing finger at Tesler.

— It’s the philosopher, he said. He wants to throw all decency overboard.

Nevertheless, he publicly revealed Samuel’s designs, and since no one found them outrageous, the pipsqueak Bernini gave the marching order.

— To Canning Street! he ordered mysteriously.

Still hesitant, Adam Buenosayres looked again at the phantasmagorical clock of San Bernardo. Then he looked down Gurruchaga, the empty street that led homeward. He thought of the work waiting for him in his torture chamber, under the cursèd lamp and the stupidly familiar objects. A shiver of terror sent him back to the drunken party, the ship of fools on which he’d come sailing:

— Absurd night! he cried yet again in his soul. Night of mine!

He set off with the rest of them, as though in flight from himself.

Chapter 2

Step right up, gentlemen! Come and see the ancient monster, the beast of a thousand shapes and none, whose poverty is equalled by her sumptuousness, dressed in all the world’s finery, the most bedizened among the naked, the most naked of the bedizened, nothingness tricked out as Iris, the shadow of a mystery! Before your dazzled eyes She may appear as something firm and strong: fortress or barbican, bastion or battlement, rock or metal. But look out! Nothing is as frail as She, nothing crumbles as easily as her gaudy edifice of spume. Or perhaps you believe that She is fragile, and her very fragility invites you to make lyrical comparisons. But watch out! For you will find nothing so resistant to violence and punishment, nothing so strong as She when it comes to the rigour of battle. To be sure, you will see her surround herself in mystery, disguise herself as an enigma, and wrap herself entirely in tulle, wishing to be impenetrable to your gaze. But wise up! In her very eagerness to appear mysterious, it’s easy to see that no creature is more devoid of mystery. And now, gentlemen, come see the ancient deity, the one of a thousand barbarous names, the never-profaned goddess! Come right in, gentlemen! Shhh!

Someone on the other side had just turned the door handle. The eleven characters in the vestibule suddenly stopped talking and fixed their eyes on the closed door. Doña Venus herself, snoozing atop her stool, opened her right eye to take a look:

— See what a girl is Jova! she whined without enthusiasm. Look what a girl!

The door, however, did not open. The men in the vestibule relaxed their vigilance. But first they heard tinkling laughter in the room behind the door, a warm trill as old as the world.

— Will that woman never come out? protested the philosopher Tesler, grimacing like an obscene gargoyle.

Franky gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder.

— Calm down, beast! he said. You’ll get your ration of meat.

The vestibule was narrow; the eleven characters (as well as Doña Venus and her lapdog Lulu, curled up beside her) filled it completely. They sat in the following order. On the left, against the blood-coloured wall, several contradictory figures sat on a bench directly facing the anteroom whose door handle had just turned: the Syrian Merchant, the Galician Conductor, the Italian Gasfitter, and the Mature Gentleman. At the back, against a wrought-iron-and-glass partition separating the vestibule from the patio, were seated Luis Pereda, the pipsqueak Bernini, Franky Amundsen, and the philosopher Tesler, all of whom were able to keep an eye on two doors. One of these led to the room adjoining the anteroom; to one side of this door sat Doña Venus, sleeping with one eye ajar. The other was the frosted-glass inner door that allowed ingress from the street, once its security chain had been stealthily slid open. Between the glass partition and the bloody wall, a nook opened out; that was where Adam Buenosayres, the astrologer Schultz, and the Taciturn Young Man were sitting in Vienna chairs. Light from an electric bulb smeared the walls, glared off the window panes in the partition, and cruelly illuminated those twelve human faces, revealing them with the brutality of a mug shot. Aside from the expectancy prevailing in the vestibule and the mysteries apparently being celebrated in the hermetic room and anteroom, there were no other signs of life in the rambling old house, as though silence and night were its only tenants.

Among the eleven personages who had glanced at the door, only the Taciturn Young Man was still staring at the door handle, seemingly abstracted from his surroundings. His extravagantly slicked-back hair, his ceremonious necktie, his gleaming patent leather shoes, the razor-sharp crease of his trousers, everything in his attire appeared to conform to a liturgical order. Adam Buenosayres, who had been studying him with interest, whispered these observations into the ear of the astrologer.

— His nuptial suit, Schultz responded in a low voice.

— What? Adam was astonished. Do you really think so?

— If I’m not mistaken, said Schultz, that boy will be the next to pay homage to the beast.

— It’s his turn, Adam admitted. But the bit about the suit is impossible. It would be monstrous.

— Study him closely, replied Schultz, glancing furtively at the Taciturn Young Man. For half an hour now that boy has been an architect.

— An architect?

— That’s right, insisted Schultz bitterly. And do you know what the architect is constructing now? A phantasm.

— An ideal construction?

— Listen carefully, assented Schultz. I haven’t seen the woman who is officiating behind that door; nor has he, in all likelihood. But believe me, when that lad goes in there, he will be wed to a phantasm.

Adam Buenosayres remained silent, and the image of Solveig Amundsen crossed his mind. “Yes, the fragile clay of a subtle architecture, or the raw material of a dream.” Instinctively, his hand went to the Blue-Bound Notebook, but he drew it back right away. “Not now, later! It will be an opulent wake. The poetic death of a phantasm.”

— Possibly, he answered at last, without looking at the astrologer.

— Pure metaphysics, Schultz corrected him severely.

The Mature Gentleman, meanwhile, had been devouring his newspaper. Now he raised a venerable white head, two chubby pink cheeks, and a nose straddled precariously by a pair of tortoiseshell spectacles. He was the only one among the men in the vestibule who looked absolutely natural, at ease, at home — all he was missing to be completely in character were his slippers and robe de chambre.

— Just as I thought! he exclaimed, jabbing a finger at a headline in his newpaper.

Everyone, except the sleeping Doña Venus and the dreaming Taciturn Young Man, turned to stare at the Mature Gentleman.

— The murder of the rancher Martínez? asked Franky.

— Kidnapping and murder, corrected the Mature Gentleman. I was right when I said the Mafia in Rosario was behind it.

— Bad people, opined the Syrian Merchant, smiling with Asian ferocity. His eyes glinted beneath the brim of his pearl-grey Stetson; a stiff collar and a red tie were nearly strangling him around the neck. His get-up was completed by a green Perramus coat^1 and shiny colt-leather boots, and the Merchant looked as though he couldn’t be more comfortable inside a torture machine. “His nuptial suit,” Adam Buenosayres thought uneasily.

Very excited now, the Mature Gentleman was playing detective, authoritatively brandishing his newspaper. All those flashy crimes, macabre headlines, photographs of cadavers in supine or lateral position lent a touch of heroic colour, yes, to his drab, insignificant existence.

— Think about it, he explained. The method of the crime is obvious: first the rancher disappears, the investigation yields nothing, the police are disoriented. Then the corpse turns up in a field, shot through the head! It’s as clear as day!

— What are you implying? Franky asked him in a severe tone.

— The Mafia! whispered the Mature Gentleman confidentially. And the police are in the dark!

Franky stared hard at him. Contemplating the Gentleman, Franky was torn by conflicting thoughts. He couldn’t decide whether to go and kiss the old man’s chubby cheeks or thump him one on his shiny pate. But finally he opted for a third plan: he knitted his brow and pulled a sombre face.

— Choose your words carefully! he threatened. Are you sure about what you’re saying?

Amid the general surprise, the Mature Gentleman paled visibly, overcome by a suspicion — could this young fellow be from the Secreta? He struggled for words under Franky’s ruthless stare. About to respond, he was interrupted by a monotonous, ghostly, incredible voice, issuing from a quarter no one would have suspected. How was it possible? For it was beyond doubt that Doña Venus was sleeping, with her two hundred pounds of fat well stacked upon her stool. Her eyelids closed, nothing budged in her mask of wrinkles and flaking rouge, and her head looked like plaster under a light that revelled in displaying her bizarre hair, parted down the middle into two bands, one snow-white and the other as black as the raven’s wing. Doña Venus was indeed sleeping! And yet, she was also saying something in a voice seemingly from another world.

At the sound of that voice, the lapdog Lulu woke up and lifted her head, her little eyes dripping rheum.

— It was a ranch-hand, Doña Venus mumbled in the manner of a medium. One of the hired hands at Los Horcones. The owner had fired him. Yes, yes. It was a revenge killing.

Everyone was left speechless by the verdict Doña Venus had pronounced from her stool like the oracle of Delphi from her ritual tripod. But the Mature Gentleman was not long in taking up the gauntlet.

— False hypothesis, he shot back. An old story.

Then he added, waving his newspaper at her:

— Have you read this?

He was answered by a euphonious snore; Doña Venus had sunk back into the depths of lethargy. Lulu followed her example, curling up on her cushion upholstered in ticking.

The Mature Gentleman then turned to Franky.

— And what do you think, sir? he queried, both wary and friendly (could the young fellow be from the Secreta?). Myself, I think the Mafia…

— Hmm! growled Franky in a reserved tone, feeling under his left armpit for an imaginary revolver.

That was when the Galician Conductor spoke up. A dour man wearing an oilskin cap, a leather jacket, and a red scarf, he was obviously fed up to the teeth.

— Those Italian mobsters, he groused. Cowardly murderers, that’s what they are!

— Bad people, repeated the Syrian Merchant.

The Galician Conductor looked askance at the Italian Gasfitter, who sat beside him listening placidly, wearing a blue overall with the monogram CPG stitched in red.2

— It’s that Mussolini’s fault, the Conductor cursed. He kicked them out of Italy, and now we’ve got them here! Just look what dictators can do.

Smiling and timid at the same time, the Gasfitter scratched his head.

— If they were mafiosos he did good, he argued, gesturing profusely. Seems like the dummy isn’t Mussolini, if you ask me.

— He should have kept them! shot back the Conductor, sour as vinegar.

— Seems like the dummy is the government that let them in, concluded the Italian Gasfitter. If you ask me.

The Galician Conductor had a formidable harangue on the tip of his tongue against dictators, the Mafia in Rosario, and the whole world. His bushy eyebrows were arching as he prepared for debate. Just then the famous door handle turned again. Twenty-two startled eyes took note. The Taciturn Young Man instinctively straightened his tie. And then the door opened — ah, only one leaf of the double door, and slowly! — while Doña Venus, without raising her eyelids, was mechanically singing her pitch:

— See what a girl is Jova!

A woman stood outlined in the doorframe. (Step right up, gentlemen! Come see the ancient monster!). Her nakedness had the violence of an insult, scarcely veiled by a maroon negligee enveloping her like a swath of bloody spume. Beneath her mop of hair (blond, brunette, red, who could say?) her lustreless face was a powdered block defined by two violet stains for eyes and a lipstick smile aimed at everyone and no one. Her body secreted a cloying odour of scented wood or rubber, mixed with smells of antiseptic soap and kerosene that wafted through the open doorway into the room.

The eleven characters stopped talking. One by one, she examined them all and none, she smiled at everybody and nobody, as she slowly pulled up her long indigo stockings. She smiled and spoke to everyone, the beast of a thousand forms and none.

— How ’bout it, boys? How ’bout it?

Doña Venus swayed atop her stool.

— You won’t find another girl like Jova, she purred between sighs.

— How ’bout it, boys? invited Jova.

Samuel Tesler was about to pounce on her like a lion, but Franky held him back.

— Settle down, he told him. Your number hasn’t come up yet.

Jova laughed. A hot and neutral laugh. Then she insisted, her eyes motioning toward the room partially visible behind her.

— So? How ’bout it, boys?

A deep unease settled among the eleven men in the vestibule. The Galician Conductor had a bleak expression on his face, the Syrian Merchant a cruel gleam in his eye. The Gasfitter hung his head like a recently beaten animal. The Mature Gentleman, indifferent, had gone back to his newspaper. Adam and Schultz, Pereda and Bernini, Samuel and Franky, conversed or pretended to, anxious to elude the circular gaze of Jova. In the midst of the ambient tension, the Taciturn Young Man got to his feet and walked stiltedly like a mechanical doll toward Jova. Still smiling at everyone and no one, Jova wrapped a bare arm around his neck and softly pulled him into the room. Behind them, the door began discreetly to close. But before disappearing completely, Jova turned her laughing head to look back at everybody and nobody, to smile for each man and no man — nothingness tricked out as Iris, the shadow of a mystery!

– “May woman be a passing season in your life,” declared Schultz sententiously in Adam’s ear. (The astrologer’s voice was thick and his head swimming but, as he noted with pride, the excitement in his coarse flesh and bones was not affecting the decorum of his astral body.)

— Amen! groaned Adam Buenosayres. (And he had told Irma her eyes were like two mornings together; maybe he’d even kissed her. Then he’d seemed to lose this world, only to recover it later, but colder, sadder, as though his soul in its descent had lost the gift of sight, the illuminating grace of things.)

Meanwhile, with the eclipse of Jova, the men in the vestibule were behaving normally again, except for the Syrian Merchant, apparently absorbed in some dream of sun-bronzed women. But a hard silence had been left in the room that no one dared interrupt. The only sounds were the occasional glug-glug of draining water inside the hermetic chamber, or minute insects tapping against the glass lamp, or Doña Venus’s breathing in her beatific sleep. That’s how matters stood, when out of the blue Samuel Tesler started hooting with laughter, shaking his expressive face back and forth:

– “How ’bout it, boys,” he laughed. Cripes, as old Ciro would say! This lenocinium is abstract.3 Compared to this joint, Pythagoras’s theorem is an orgy.

The Gasfitter, who was trying to light an uncooperative half-cigar, stopped in mid-gesture, indifferent to the match burning between thumb and index finger. The Mature Gentleman lowered his newspaper. The Galician Conductor raised his eyebrows. The Merchant, jolted out of his ecstasy, clapped two tiger’s eyes on the philosopher. Then Franky Amundsen looked benevolently around at the men in the vestibule, pleading their indulgence.

— A great mind! he said, caressing Samuel’s back as though trying to calm down a vexed animal. But he’s the unfortunate victim of alcohol, ataxia of the motor functions, and a case of the clap his grandparents picked up back in the time of the Pharoahs.

— Too bad! commiserated the Mature Gentleman. And so young!

— Young? protested Franky. He’s two thousand years old, if he’s a day!

He turned toward the philosopher and took his head in his heads with the intention of kissing him on the forehead, but pushed him away immediately, as if startled.

— Brrr! he exclaimed. He’s uglier than ever!

Truth be told, Samuel’s laughing face was a spectacle in itself. Looking at it, Adam Buenosayres was put in mind of those demons that in cathedrals smirk gleefully beneath the stone heel of a saint. But the philosopher’s laughter was short-lived. Unexpectedly, Samuel adopted a grave demeanour, stood up, and brought his index finger to his lips.

— Shhh! he said, pointing at the closed door. Silence!

He staggered over to the door. But Adam and Franky smartly caught up with him and practically dragged him back to his seat.

— I know her names! yelled Samuel, furiously squirming in Franky’s arms. She’s the whore of the Apocalypse, the most naked among the clothed. In my tribe she was called Lilith.

— You wouldn’t be confusing her with someone else, would you? Franky asked, without letting go of him.

At that point, the dormant Doña Venus began muttering a complaint seeming to come from afar.

— No rough-housing, she whispered. This is a proper establishment.

The characters in the vestibule exchanged glances, once again amazed by that prodigy of the talking head.

— Okay! growled Bernini. Is the woman sleeping or not?

— She sleeps in the saddle, like a cowboy, Pereda answered very calmly. She sleeps mounted on her stool.

So she did, in fact. Her words having restored order and reconstructed the broken silence, Doña Venus had fallen back into her purring torpor. But all of a sudden, at the sound of steps from inside the room, she blinked eyelids as wrinkled as walnut shells. The door of the room, which no one had yet seen open, swung on its hinges, and out came the Anonymous Lover. Not even looking at him, Doña Venus dropped from her pedestal with gelatinous fluidity, slid over to the main door, drew back the stealthy chain, and opened the frosted-glass street door. The Anonymous Lover, not bothering to pretend he wasn’t in full flight, made his discreetly phantasmal exit. Doña Venus closed the door behind him, secured the chain, planted herself in front of the men, and critically took stock of the situation.

When standing, Doña Venus displayed an almost perfectly spherical shape, the overflow of her flabby flesh raining down from breasts, abdomen, and buttocks. Her head, in contrast, had a certain refined quality of a rampant animal, embellished by the wonder of her half-white, half-black coiffure. As for her eyes, their long experience was obvious in the way she now studied each of those men who sat slowly ripening under the shrill light between blood-coloured walls. Even more obvious was that Doña Venus’s intelligent eyes had just chosen the Syrian Merchant. Sensing this, he feigned a yawn of indifference and got to his feet. Doña Venus smiled enigmatically and gestured toward the door left open by the Anonymous Lover. The Merchant obeyed the silent order and slipped into the room, closing the door behind him. From the vestibule, they could hear the key turn in the lock. Satisfied, Doña Venus bent over to stroke the belly of her little dog before climbing back aboard her stool to recover her equilibrium, beatitude, and slumber.

Franky Amundsen hadn’t missed a single detail of the scene. He turned to the philosopher of Villa Crespo:

— Most satisfying to observe how much the Terrestrial Venus has modernized her operation. Son of a gun! One on the scaffold and another waiting in the chapel. Now that’s production!

— Hmm! Samuel responded vaguely.

— The assembly line, Bernini said with a cynical air. The latest thing from míster Ford.

Franky nodded, serious and scientific, and solicited the audience’s attention with a gesture:

— Gentlemen! he began. Who would dare suggest that we are not progressing? Consider this prodigy of technique and be amazed! Mechanical love, in three movements. Speed, comfort, hygiene! Nota bene: at no point in the production process does the hand of man intervene.

— There’s no other girl like Jova! Doña Venus’s words came sputtering up from profound depths.

But Franky’s speech didn’t enjoy the success he was hoping for; on the contrary, it exercised the negative virtue of throwing a shadow across everyone’s face. Adam and Schultz were now lowering brows pregnant with melancholy ruminations. Samuel was stammering a sad, drunken soliloquy. The pipsqueak Bernini, indefatigable sociologist, meditated on the sexual problem resulting from a majority of avid men and a minority of inflexible women who found themselves in this mysterious alluvial land. Motionless and silent waited the Conductor and the Gasfitter, the latter moist and tranquil as a vegetable, the former concentrated and rough-edged as a rock. As for the Mature Gentleman, he had evidently not let go of the Martínez murder case; he looked cautiously up from his newspaper at Franky and then back down, as though thinking the young fellow dissimulated splendidly if indeed he was a detective.

After Franky had run his eyes over each and every one of the expressionless faces, he guessed what was going through the Mature Gentleman’s mind. And so, for the sake of breaking a silence that didn’t agree with his character, he turned to the Mature Gentleman and said:

— Let’s say it was the Mafia. How did you arrive at that hypothesis?

The Mature Gentleman drew himself up to his full stature (which wasn’t much):

— Gut feeling! he exclaimed, at once confused, triumphant, and modest.

— Bah! scoffed Pereda. The gentleman conducts his investigation like it’s a game of truco.

— The intuitive method, Franky declared in a protective tone.

— Not only that, said the Mature Gentleman, miffed by Pereda’s disdainful comment. The circumstances surrounding the crime clearly point to a Mafia job.

— The deductive method, Franky corrected himself. Yes, it’s a crime with a signature, as we say in the trade. No doubt about it. But tell me, how do you see the chain of events?

The Mature Gentleman adopted a circumspect air.

— Same as always, he said. The rancher receives an anonymous message: he has to go to a certain place at a certain time, under threat of death. When he shows up, they kidnap him. They want a huge sum of money, make him sign a cheque, or something along those lines. What happens in the end? The police get wind of it, and the mafiosos get scared and shoot the rancher, and…

— Nothing could be further from the truth! Franky interrupted. That’s where appearances are deceiving.

— What? asked the Mature Gentleman. Is there another theory?

Franky gave him a long look of unconcealed harshness.

— That’s just the point, he said. In the first place, sir, I don’t formulate theories. I, sir, work with magnifying glass in hand.

— And so? the Mature Gentleman asked again, disconcerted.

— The rancher, growled Franky, was murdered right in his bedroom. A shot from a pistol with a silencer.

Adam and Schultz, Pereda and Bernini exchanged furtive glances. The Mature Gentleman’s jaw was hanging open.

— Impossible! he cried at last. What about the corpse? They found it at an estate.

— Pure theatre, Franky explained. They got him dressed in the bedroom, and two men carried him out between them, as if he was drunk. A grey Hudson was waiting for them at the corner with the motor running.

— And the motive for the crime? objected the Mature Gentleman. What could they rob from a dead man?

Franky hesitated, as though deciding whether or not to divulge information that might breach professional confidentiality.

— Look, he finally decided. In the rancher’s bedroom there was a Chinese vase from the Sung dynasty. And the vase has disappeared!

— But the newspapers haven’t even mentioned it! complained the Mature Gentleman.

— And do you know what was inside the vase? concluded Franky, pregnant with mystery. The Eye of the Buddha — the famous emerald of the Maharaja!

The duo Pereda-Bernini burst out laughing, and the contagion passed to the duo Schultz-Buenosayres, then got a thunderous response from Franky himself, as well as an echo of solidarity from the Italian Gasfitter. But the Mature Gentleman wasn’t laughing; quite the contrary. Red with embarassment and anger, he was winding up to give this young whippersnapper a piece of his mind. And doubtless he would have done so, if at that very instant Doña Venus, drowsing on her tripod, hadn’t shown signs of agitation:

— Savages! she spluttered from dreamland. He was in the prime of youth. Death? It’s too good for those sons of bitches! I’d tie them up and turn them over to the young man’s mother and let her scratch their eyes out with her fingernails, or peel them raw, or burn them with matches, nice and slow…

— Holy smokes! murmured Franky. Who the heck could this woman be talking about?

— I think it’s the mafiosos from Rosario, ventured Pereda.

— An atrocity! said Doña Venus in hushed tones that trailed off until they died in silent depths. Killing them would be letting them off easy.

Her voice had been rising and falling like the tide, and it had ebbed again, so normality was re-established in the vestibule. But the astrologer had been very impressed by the ferocity channelled through the medium of Doña Venus.

— That woman has the soul of an executioner, he recognized. A primitive cruelty. Too bad she isn’t acquainted with Oriental torture techniques!

— Or those of the American Indians, Bernini one-upped him, not giving an inch in questions of folklore.

— Bah! Schultz rejoined.

— Are you familiar with them?

— No, but I can imagine what they’re like. Raw bestiality, right? Limited to the realm of the physical. In the East they torture on the spiritual or moral plane.

Bernini smiled condescendingly.

— Do you know about the camoatí torture?4

— And you, Schultz retorted. Ever heard of the torture of the Enamoured Odalisque?

Franky faced the two contenders:

— How about the Water Drop torture? he suggested mysteriously. Or the Quail Feather torture?

Between the blood-coloured walls, in the mucilaginous light of the vestibule, under the beetle-browed surveillance of the Conductor, before the benevolent eyes of the Gasfitter and the resentful pomposity of the Mature Gentleman, the depictions by the three specialists made their macabre rounds. The pipsqueak Bernini initiated the series: here is his Prisoner being hoisted up to the highest branches of a gigantic quebracho tree and left to hang there, right beside the round wasps’ nests. The Prisoner is stark naked, and the wasps, still calm, are buzzing around his ears and eyes, up his nose, between his lips. The thing is not to budge! Put up with it! The Prisoner tries to stifle all movement, knowing what kind of torment awaits him. But finally he can stand it no longer; he shudders, he convulses. The wasps go into a frenzy, they attack in swarms, sting him everywhere, and cover him with a thousand small, bloody wounds. Then it’s hours of fever and thirst; the Prisoner becomes delirious, laughs or weeps, chants a war cry or stammers a love song. The long night comes to an end. In the morning the vultures circle above a bit of tattered flesh dancing in the breeze at the treetop.

The listeners found Bernini’s description somewhat literary and were quite taken by it. But right away Schultz took his turn to speak. He sketched a more peaceful tableau and immediately won the sympathy of his audience: An Oriental chamber, sumptuous with carpets and incense-burners smoking with aromatic resins. The Prisoner is lying on an ottoman of incalculable worth. Surrounded by opulence, the Prisoner hesitates, doubts, fears. Suddenly the curtain of beads is pulled back, and — wait for it! — in comes the Odalisque, beautiful and agile as an Arabian gazelle. The Odalisque begins her work of seduction, and the Prisoner — ay! — gets caught up in the golden webs she spins. The amorous assaults multiply: the Prisoner believes he is up against one of Mohammed’s houris. Exhausted at last, he would like to sleep. But the Odalisque won’t let him, she extracts from the Prisoner every last drop of his ardour. He passes out, but the Odalisque insists. No response! The Prisoner is asleep. Then two gigantic Ethiopians enter the chamber; they whip the Prisoner with branches of stinging nettle and force him to drink aphrodisiac potions. On and on goes the torment between the Odalisque and the Prisoner, until finally he collapses in a heap among the carpets. The Prisoner dies of love.

Schultz’s story left his listeners in the vestibule incredulous, a condition the astrologer did his best to overcome with a few wise reflections on love and death. He tried, but did not succeed, because Franky Amundsen was burning with desire to add his two cents’ worth to the literary contest. Pondering the matter deeply, Franky hesitated between the Water Drop torture, which the ferocious Culquelubi inflicted on the ex-Knight Templar in Salgari’s The Philtre of the Caliphs, and the Quail Feather torture suffered by Tickner, Sexton Blake’s young assistant, in the terrifying story of The Blue Fear. Finally he decided on the latter: now the Prisoner is trussed up inside the torture chamber; his tormentor, a grinning Chinese, has just removed his shoes and socks (here, the audience began to smile). What does the Chinese torturer do next? He takes a quail feather and starts tickling the soles of the Prisoner’s feet (the audience’s smile widened). The Prisoner is laughing his head off, he weeps with laughter (frank hilarity among the audience), until finally the joke becomes intolerable. His ears are buzzing, his nerves exploding, and his laughter degenerates into howls and sobs. As a result of the torment, the Prisoner goes mad.

If Schultz’s depiction had provoked resistance, Franky’s unleashed a veritable deluge of objections. The pros and cons of laughter as a means of torture were carefully weighed, until Doña Venus, as comatose as ever, stirred atop her stool and emitted a verdict with no right of appeal:

— Three bullshit artists, she said. That’s what they are: three bullshit artists.

The severity of the judgment flummoxed the three polemicists. Adam Buenosayres and Luis Pereda started laughing. Meanwhile, something began to stir beneath the rock-hard shell within which hunkered the Galician Conductor:

— Torture! he snorted. If you want torture, go to the police. That’s what they know best: how to torture the folks they arrest, trying to force them to confess. And confess they do, whether they’re guilty or not

— Can you swear to that? Franky asked him in an agressive tone.

— Forget wasps and feathers, continued the Conductor, oblivious to Franky. The interrogations go on day and night; they don’t even let them sleep. They twist their victims’ big toe or (pardon my language) their testicles. They feed them anchovies and smoked herring, to get them thirsty, and then they deny them water.

— Barbarians! Doña Venus squawked peacefully.

But the Gasfitter smiled, beaming all over with benevolence.

— Whaddya want! he said. If they don’t lean on ’em, they won’t cough up the goods!

— What about the albas corpus appeal?5 objected the Conductor, his voice pure poison.

Franky started.

— What appeal? he cried, not believing his ears.

— Albas corpus, said the Conductor. That’s the legal way.

Franky turned to the group with consternation.

— Did I hear right? he wondered.

— It’s true what they say, commented Pereda. Every gallego is born with a copy of the Criminal Code in his hand.

Doña Venus turned her sleeping head from side to side:

— Yes, she said. They’re stupid brutes.

Everyone burst out laughing, and the Galician Conductor glowered menacingly. Fortunately, the pipsqueak Bernini, already famous for his powers of observation, explained that Doña Venus, drifting in and out of lethargy, had merely got her timing wrong, and that obviously her insult had not been for the conscientious natives of Galicia,6 but for the police torturers just alluded to by the Conductor himself; and that, crude though her language may have been, it testified to her incommensurable thirst for justice. That elementary interpretation of the facts restored peace to the vestibule, a peace all sensed had been under threat. The Galician Conductor put aside his remaining aggressiveness, and the rest of the party sighed with relief. Just then, the door handle turned again: yes, the door to the anteroom was opening to release the Taciturn Young Man, now rather wilted. No doubt about it, the den of love was heaving him, vomiting him out. The Taciturn Young Man tarried at the threshold and blinked once or twice, as if dazzled by the bloody light in the vestibule. His hat was pulled down over his eyes, and with an unsteady hand he was trying to straighten his dishevelled clothes.

— His nuptial suit, murmured Schultz in a desolate tone.

But the Young Man’s bedazzlement lasted only a moment. Without further delay, like the Anonymous Lover shortly before him, he bolted for the main door held open by Doña Venus and took off for the street, mistrustful and urgent.

— He’s fleeing, Schultz said to his companion Adam Buenosayres.

He was indeed going back into the same night whence he had arrived astride his magic broom. His was a return from a witches’ sabbath, skulking and precipitate, before the cock’s trumpet announced the day.

— An erotic collapse, groaned Adam (and he had told Irma her eyes were like two mornings together…).

The chain-lock once again in place, Doña Venus was standing (if such may be said of a sphere) and looking around among the men for someone to replace the ghost who’d just exited through the hallway. Her doubtful eyes fluctuated between the Italian Gasfitter and the Galician Conductor, as though studiously feeling out the maturity of each. She still hadn’t come to a decision when the anteroom door half-opened and Jova’s head appeared, smiling urbi et orbi.

— Boys! clucked the most naked among the bedizened.

Even the Mature Gentleman set eyes on that unexpected puppet’s head. Then Jova, responding to all gazes and none, stuck a mocking tongue out at everyone and no one (a sort of red mollusc between the two valves of her lips), and disappeared instantly, closing the solemn door behind her.

— What a girl is Jova! grumbled Doña Venus between sighs.

When she turned back to the men in the vestibule, her choice had been made. With a slight gesture she got the Galician Conductor to his feet and, with another motion, she pointed him toward the door of the anteroom. The Conductor, more distracted than ever, entered the lair in turn, taking with him the secret of his impenetrable soul. Afterward, Doña Venus walked across the vestibule to the patio and looked out at the sky.

— It’s clouding over, she said. Lousy weather.

She rotated heavily, like a sphere on its polar axis. She saw the Mature Gentleman getting to his feet and she watched as he methodically smoothed out the wrinkles in his suit, folded with great care the pages of his newspaper, tucked it under his arm, and drew back the chain on the door.

— Are you leaving? Doña Venus asked in a honeyed voice.

— It’s getting late, responded the Mature Gentleman.

He opened the main door familiarly, slipped into the hallway, and closed the door behind him. Doña Venus hadn’t taken her eyes off him. All graciousness, she explained:

— An old franelero, the peep-and-go-home type.

Lulu the lapdog growled as though voicing disapproval of the franelero’s desertion. Doña Venus, with difficulty, crouched down and stroked Lulu’s pink belly. Then she got settled again on her stool and, before closing her eyes, murmured:

— A bloody old franelero.

With that laconic epitaph, the story of the Mature Gentleman came to a close. The characters still waiting in the vestibule became aware of their increasing solitude. Indeed, of the brilliant conversationalists gathered round the stool, only the Gasfitter was still there, or at least half there, since for a while now his face had been expressing absence. Moreover, as soon as the woman and her dog closed their eyes, a disturbing silence descended upon the vestibule, broken only by the occasional neighbourhood rooster or the odd earlybird streetcar careening down Canning Street. A silence pregnant with sounds which, though still proper to the realm of night, announced dawn’s imminence: sounds that acquire a recriminatory accent in the ears of those who have abused the night. The new circumstances helped improve the tone among the men remaining there under the bloody light. And Samuel Tesler had the honour of steering the conversation in a nobler, altruistic direction. The philosopher was emerging from his abundantly fluvial drunkenness, not yet with a specific thought in mind, but moved rather by a kind of vague desperation that found an outlet in eloquent gesticulations and ominous groans.

— Where is it all going to end? he burst out at last, a single gesture of his hand taking in the vestibule, the building, perhaps the world.

A macabre chortle escaped his lips.

— Human dignity! he lamented. How nauseating!

— There are two forms of prostitution, Bernini intervened. Legal and clandestine. Here we have…

— Go to the Devil! cried Samuel Tesler. They’re just two scientific names for the same ignominy!

Schultz leaned over to a Buenosayres lost in thought.

— The Jew is showing his true colours, he whispered. Now we’re in for some moral whining.7

— Mea culpa, groaned a laconic Buenosayres.

But Bernini was warming to his theme.

— It may be ignominious, he said, but it’s a necessary ignominy. I’d like to know what would become of us without this ignominy!

The talking head of Doña Venus spun around to face the conversationalists.

— That’s mother of all questions, she croaked mechanically.

— Hmm, Adam observed. Is there such a thing as a necessary ignominy?

The pipsqueak Bernini stared at him in amazement. Then, in a truly overwhelming display of statistics, he spoke of the phalanx of foreign men who had brought with them not only their useful labour, but also their dangerous soledad, their solitude, and their soltería, their bachelorhood (and here Bernini underlined the common etymology of the Spanish words soledad and soltería).8 He painted the bleakest view of the dangers facing society due to that mob of single expatriate men. As the peroration of the impassioned sociologist unfolded, the abominable spectres of adultery, rape, and child molestation went filing by in martial order. But then he evoked those “safety valves” that certain retrograde minds had just now dismissed as ignominious; he sang the praises of those humble institutions, such as the very one in which they now found themselves, which anonymously fulfilled a mission as indispensable as it was secret. Instantly, the abominable figures of adultery, rape, and child molestation fled with their tails between their legs, and society under siege could breathe easy again.

One might have expected thunderous applause to greet the discourse of the sociologist Bernini. But it did not turn out that way. Adam Buenosayres condemned it from beginning to end. Samuel, the philosopher, unexpectedly relapsed into Dionysian mode and celebrated the end of the speech with a gush of laughter that elicited loud imitations in the vestibule. However, the talking head hadn’t yet given her verdict:

— That dwarf does have the gift of the gab, Doña Venus pronounced mellifluously. Given half a chance, he’d talk his way past the hangman.

The oracle’s words provoked a new round of hilarity, which the pipsqueak Bernini faced down with dignity. He decided to play his best card and go for broke: he spoke of untutored youths, of the aberrations in adolescents due to inadequate sex education; he spoke of the youthful Argentine Republic and of the sacred virility of her sons. Just when everyone saw a pall being cast over the august horizon of the homeland, Bernini let the sun shine once again by pulling out his famous “safety valves.” It must be owned that, when he mentioned them for the second time, the pipsqueak unleashed a hurricane of laughter so violent that it wrinkled the brow of Doña Venus and knocked the Gasfitter out of his ecstasy.

A matter of such vast ramifications could not, of course, leave Franky Amundsen indifferent. Once the laughter had calmed down, Franky very gravely enquired of the scholars surrounding him if Schultz’s neocriollo angels (the same ones who had brought us the legion of single men just mentioned by Bernini) had likewise guided to our shores the legion of adorable Jovas, Fannys, and Suzettes who one fine day had blithely set out on the Road to Buenos Aires. At Franky’s words, many eyes flashed with hostility. In vain did Doña Venus wake up to swear that Jova had no equal in this world. In vain did Schultz deplore the inglorious role that certain perverse imaginations attributed to his angels. For nothing could prevent Adam, Pereda, and Bernini from recalling the name of that perfidious Frenchman, Albert Londres, who with his equally perfidious slander had tried to besmirch Argentine honour.9

— Those caftens are all from Marseilles! thundered Pereda, swearing he’d seen loads of them in brothels, with their bowler hats, Mediterranean mustaches, and heavy gold chains.

— They’re Pollacks! cried Bernini just as vigorously.

— Romanians! Adam affirmed categorically.

The question still hadn’t been resolved when the pythoness of the vestibule stirred again on her stool, a sure sign she was about to deliver a great revelation. Given her indisputable authority on the subject, everyone listened with keen interest.

— They come in all kinds, like at the five-and-dime store, Doña Venus whispered at last.

Having delivered her final verdict, she promptly woke up and slid over to the main door to let out the Syrian Merchant who, fleeing, was as despondent as a beat-up fighting cock. The Italian Gasfitter, without waiting to be invited, walked dreamily over and let himself into the room just vacated by the Merchant. Doña Venus approved his move with a slight nod and went back to her stool.

The Gasfitter’s departure allowed our men in the vestibule to bask in an intimacy that gave greater freedom to their words and movements. Few sounds penetrated that silent space — the neighbourhood rooster multiplying his shrieks, as if maddened by the sense of dawn’s approach; a grocer’s cart rattling lazily down the street to the rhythmic clip-clop of horseshoes. It was the hour when nocturnal souls, overcome by remorse, grow swollen with generous intentions and pledge their word of honour to the future. In this atmosphere favourable to all redemptions, Adam Buenosayres launched the final theme: of course this ignominy wasn’t necessary, and it was only the total lack of colonizing spirit that was responsible for the concentration of three million people on the banks of the Río de la Plata, while fertile plains and sylvan valleys were left unpopulated. And so? Was all lost, then? No! Adam Buenosayres gathered up all those “men in solitude”10 mentioned by Bernini; he joined them in Christian matrimony with vigorous women; he said unto them, “Multiply and fill the earth”; he scattered them like seed from north to south, from east to west. And then, before the wonderstruck gaze of his listeners, a race of shepherds and ploughmen, innumerable as the sands of the sea, covered the Argentine pampas all the way down to Cape Horn. They built amazing cities, peopled the sea with ships and the sky with aircraft, sang epics as yet unheard, and thought up superb metaphysical systems.

The vision sent the characters of the vestibule into ecstasy. The philosopher Tesler averred that a grand pastoral freshness was washing over him. Faithful to himself, Schultz proposed a few ethnic combinations (Spanish men with Tartar women, Englishwomen with Chinese men, Italian men with Esquimo women) which would bring about the lineage destined, so he affirmed, to find its quintessence in the Neocriollo. Pereda gravely endorsed the vision, and even the pipsqueak Bernini, beneath his tough scientific shell, was almost-sort-of moved by it. Alas! Among those zealous settlers, only Franky Amundsen maintained a reserved and almost hostile attitude! When the others called him on this, he retreated into a silence full of reticence, but eventually agreed in principle to the general idea of settlement. After more supplications and hesitations, Franky ended up insinuating that he would join the legion of men and women convoked by Adam Buenosayres. Nevertheless, given that he was not a reckless lyrical type, but a man of action with his feet firmly on the ground, Franky Amundsen imposed a condition without which he reckoned they wouldn’t get anywhere.

— What condition? several voices asked him.

— That polygamy be re-established, Franky answered in a pious tone.

And he added euphorically:

— What the heck! The Republic needs a hundred million inhabitants, and we’ll provide them!

Franky’s motion was fervently endorsed by some, but provoked vague protests from others. Samuel Tesler leapt to his feet:

— Yes! he cried. Polygamy, like in the Old Testament!

Radiant, sublime, his mouth malignant and his eyes flashing, the philosopher of Villa Crespo initiated his final ballet. With one hand on his hip and the other fluttering in the air, he slowly pirouetted along the vestibule, at once grotesque and rhythmic, a dancing gargoyle.

— The phylogenetic dance! cried Franky, applauding furiously.

Doña Venus woke up with a start:

— No horse-play, she said. This is a decent establishment.

But Samuel Tesler had concluded the first figure of his dance and was launching into the second with a lively display of footwork that captivated the onlookers. So Doña Venus slid off her tripod like a ball of gelatine, stood up, and made for the philosopher:

— Shhh! she ordered him. That’s enough!

In vain! A furious maenad, a gargoyle gone crazy, Samuel began to dance circles around Doña Venus, enclosing her in an orbit of leaps, pirouettes, and contortions. Doña Venus, sphere of fat, began to rotate awkwardly on her own axis, trying to face the dancing demon who was circumscribing her ever more closely. Meanwhile, from her post on the cushion, Lulu kept up a steady stream of yapping as shrill as broken glass.

— Hoodlums! Doña Venus panted. Get out!

She lunged for the main door, jerked back the chain to open it, then turned to the assembled company who were already on their feet:

— Out! she shouted. Get out of here!

— It’s not such a big deal, Franky told her in a conciliatory tone.

He tried to stroke her round double chin. But Doña Venus deflected the hand that dared such impudence. And so Franky studied the woman in her entire volume. Finally deciding on the right spot, he smiled benevolently and gave her backside a resounding slap.

— Police! shrieked Doña Venus. Police!

She hiked up her skirt, exhibiting a repulsively fat thigh, then pulled from her stocking a metal whistle and started blowing on it for all she was worth. Little Lulu chimed in, croaking and wheezing as if in her death throes. And Jova, now out in the vestibule, added her cackle to the chorus as she asked in alarm: “What’s up? What’s going on?” It was time to make themselves scarce, and the men bolted down the hallway and out to the street. Schultz, Franky, Pereda, and Bernini took off to the right, toward Triunvirato Street. Adam ran after the philosopher of Villa Crespo, who had gone to the left and was running hell bent in headlong flight.

Chapter 3

He caught up with him only a hundred yards up the street, for the philosopher, after tearing full speed across the dangerously exposed intersection at Camargo Street, had finally stopped and was waiting in the deep shadows that the trees, under the glare of the lights, cast upon the sidewalk. Adam Buenosayres, in flight as well, found Samuel sitting on a doorstep, his gnomish legs ridiculously shrunken and his cyclopean thorax heaving and wheezing audibly.

— So? asked Samuel, as soon as he saw Adam arrive.

Adam Buenosayres, still panting, went to the curb, peered into the secret depths of the street, pricked up his ears, and listened for a long moment. Canning Street was still completely deserted; along its whole length, not the slightest sound disturbed the silence of the night.

— Nobody, he answered. Not a soul.

— What about the others? Samuel asked again.

— They disappeared.

At this unpleasant news, the philosopher began to declaim in a stentorian voice:

What’s become of my comrades

from the Cerrito and Ayacucho?1

But Adam, shaking him by the shoulders, cut off his recitation of Bartolomé Mitre’s famous poem:

— Don’t raise a ruckus in the neighbourhood! he said. We’re going back to Monte Egmont Street.

— Hmm! Samuel grunted skeptically. I wonder what time it is.

— Four in the morning.

The philosopher tried to get up. After considerable tribulation, he at last got to his feet, took two or three uncertain steps, wobbled dangerously, and grabbed hold of an iron railing to keep from falling.

— What’s the matter now? Adam asked in incipient alarm.

Samuel chortled indulgently:

— The street’s spinning. It’s drunk, the poor thing!

— You’re drunk as a skunk, Adam upbraided him, not hiding his displeasure.

— Who? shot back Tesler, as though mortally offended. Me, drunk?

He wrenched himself free of Adam Buenosayres, who was trying to hold him up. Haughtily straightening up his torso, he said:

— Look at me now!

He began to walk rigidly, tripped again, ran into a tree and embraced its trunk, laughing like a lunatic. But then a terrible nausea shook him from head to foot, and the laughter froze on his lips.

— Listen up! he said. I’m going to launch a manifesto.

Adam ran to help and held his forehead covered in a cold sweat. Evidently, the philosopher’s wild dance in the vestibule, immediately followed by his mad dash, had agitated the spirits so liberally imbibed that night, which were now roiling chaotically inside him. Seeing how things stood, Adam mentally calculated how far he would have to drag that Silenus: two and a half blocks to Warnes Street; three long blocks from Warnes to Monte Egmont; and one more block to number 303. Not counting the stairway, which promised to be quite a challenge. Meanwhile, Samuel, for all his anguished heaves and sweats, couldn’t chuck it up.

— It’s no use, he admitted at last, straightening up and wiping his sticky forehead with a handkerchief. I’d need the ivory finger of the Romans.

Seeing that he was coming around, Adam took him by the waist, and together they set off at a stumbling sort of gait, a compendium, Adam reflected, of all the local movements described by Aristotle. Breathing with relish the night air whose freshness hinted at the coming dawn, the philosopher was obviously recovering the natural harmony of his physical constitution.

His soul, on the other hand, was growing perturbed and showing signs of a stormy contrition. Sighing deeply and heavily, Samuel Tesler cursed the hour when his own weakness and the influence of disastrous friendships had led him to such extreme craziness. In a single glance, he took in his present indignity and, putting his head on Adam Buenosayres’s shoulder, he wept a long while for his misspent youth. He turned finally to the silent friend standing by him in his grief and, breathing an effluvium of alchohol and stomach acids into his face, treated him to an incoherent monologue that ended in a somewhat laboured justification of his sin. After all, if one considered the matter dispassionately and from a philosophical point of view (and his friend Buenosayres, to whose indisputable equanimity he was appealing, was an expert judge in such intellectual niceties), what did his nocturnal drunkenness and his final sarabande mean? What else, he asked, if not a Dionysian move of liberation, demanded of him by his oppressed soul? Moreover, his race was very familiar with those exalted states of liberty, for the theme of bondage and escape resonated all too strongly in their history.

— And, he asked between two burps, isn’t my race a symbol of both terrestrial incarceration and ultimate liberation in life eternal?

In front of Baalzephon, at dawn’s early hour, the hard-hearted King, he of the vulture’s head, wept and grieved beside the Red Sea. By the sea that vomited up his bright and colourful cavalry, by the blood-coloured sea, wept the King. All those bronze chariots, all those upright horsemen, all those good horses with flashing skin and fiery nostrils! As one launches a stone from a catapult, he had thrown them after the fleeing slaves, like a rabid dart had he thrown them. That is why the King in his purple finery was weeping, the King of avian profile: for he saw the slave traversing the watery abode, and the slave went hand in hand with his God, and it was the terrible God who rolls up and unrolls the sea like a papyrus scroll. And the King had watched as horse and horseman, arms and chariot wheels, all foundered. That is why the King wept, in front of Baalzephon, hard by the blood-coloured sea. And on the other shore the slaves cried out their freedom: I shall sing unto the Lord — said the slaves by the beard of their prophet — I shall sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea. And the prophet sang: The Lord shall reign for ever and ever.2 And the slaves repeated it in jubilation. But the prophet turned his eyes to the desert, and in that terrible solitude he sought for the way to the land of milk and honey.

— A theological race! Samuel proudly proclaimed.

— But terribly fallen, Adam objected.

The philosopher didn’t hear him. He was prevented by the rustic symphony of an early-morning cart with its squeaky wheels, the clop-clop of its little horse, its lamp mounted on the axle, its load of vegetables, its driver asleep at the reins.

— A just man! Samuel began to whimper, pointing at the sleeping man. Unbeknownst to himself, he fulfils the Pythagorean precept, arising before dawn…

— All right, all right, Adam interrupted him. More blubbering?

No, Samuel Tesler was not once more on the verge of tears. Something else was happening to him. Just as he’d recently gone from contrition to tears and from tears to metaphysical consolation, so too was his mutable heart slipping down the slope of a cloying tenderness. It had been prompted by the early-morning cart, which had put him in mind of Boaz,3 the sleeping man (back in the days when his race was bucolic!); by the sweetness of going home on the shores of the new day; and by the silent friend who walked with him, whose ineffable love story he alone knew and appreciated for its true worth. Hence, as both men walked along, Samuel tenderly squeezed the arm of Adam Buenosayres. Under cover of the silence enveloping them both, Samuel recalled the figure of a certain brat who was already good at putting on airs among the willowy women of Saavedra. And he said, in his soul, that only someone as naive as his friend Buenosayres could find in such a feeble creature the raw material of a Laura or a Beatrice. But his mental associations, moving until now in more or less calm neutrality, suddenly lurched toward displeasure and wrath when the image of Lucio Negri came to mind. He saw the quack doctor on the sky-blue divan, whispering into the ear of Solveig Amundsen, who listened to him with the air of an adolescent sphinx. A restrospective indignation pulled him up short:

— No! he blurted out and put a fraternal hand on Adam Buenosayres’s shoulder. If I were you, I’d put the boots to him.

— Who? asked Adam Buenosayres, completely in the dark, yet not at all surprised.

— He’s a damned beast! insisted Samuel. You should have seen him, strutting like a peacock in front of the brat.

— What brat? Adam asked again.

— Solveig.

“The sweet name profaned,” Adam said to himself. That was why gods and creatures concealed their true names: they jealously hid them from profanation and insult. And that’s why “the sweet name profaned” would never be read in his Blue-Bound Notebook.

— Fine, he grumbled. What’s it to me?

Samuel Tesler gave him a good shake:

— Brother! he cried. Love has to be defended!

Having said which, he drew himself up to his full stature, as though a helmet, a shield, and a lance were just being bestowed upon him so that he might defend love. Abruptly, without so much as a “here goes,” he danced away from his friend in a series of ornate hops. Flapping his arms in mimed flight, he shouted out the Latin conjugation:

— Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant!

Hop by hop, he made it to the corner of Canning and Warnes. There, under a streetlight, the philosopher of Villa Crespo produced a wallet of uncertain shape, leather-type, and age, and stuffed with grimy bits of paper; out of the wallet he fished a dog-eared card and began to contemplate it with a great show of reverent devotion. He was still gazing at it when Adam Buenosayres caught up with him. With an effort, the philosopher pried himself out of his ecstatic delight and handed the card to his friend.

— That’s her! he murmured in a sigh that seemed to well up from the depths of his soul.

Adam glanced at the card: it was a snapshot of Haydée Amundsen. She was wearing the requisite bathing suit, showing off her natural endowments, and appeared determined — oh, yes! — to face the waves rolling in from a sea of adulation and already lapping at her feet. As he looked at the photo of Haydée Amundsen, Adam wondered what act of theft, guile, or imprudent generosity had deposited the photo in the philosopher’s wallet. When he turned again to Samuel, he saw him hugging a paradise tree and kissing it with great tenderness.

— Are you crazy? he asked.

— I love and am loved, explained Samuel devoutly.

And seeing the photo still in Adam’s hand, Samuel snatched it away, pressed it against his breast, and finally replaced it among the mysteries of his wallet.

— Have you spoken to her formally? Adam asked in a grave tone.

Samuel didn’t answer. He remained silent as the two of them crossed the intersection of the two arteries of Villa Crespo. Then they turned onto Warnes Street in the direction of Monte Egmont. Only then did the philosopher speak up; evidently, his soul had clouded over.

— Speak to her, sure, he grumbled. But what could I offer her? That’s the problem!

— Love doesn’t seek gain, said Adam sententiously. Or at least it shouldn’t.

— With her? Samuel laughed bitterly.

He took his friend by the arm.

— In the first place, began Samuel, you’ll admit that, physically, I’m no Adonis.

— No, indeed! Adam agreed fervently.

— I’m not a monster either! squawked Samuel, smarting at Adam’s enthusiastic corroboration.

— Who said you were?

— Fine. What I mean is, I don’t have the kind of movie-star good looks I’d need to conquer as frivolous a heart as Haydée Amundsen’s.

— Not exactly high praise for the girl, Adam pointed out to him.

— Hmm! Samuel said acridly. I wasn’t born yesterday; I know what the score is.

— On the other hand, Adam suggested, physical beauty isn’t everything.

— I was coming to that, said Samuel. Let’s admit that I’m somewhat intelligent.

— True.

— Very intelligent!

— Absolutely!

— What the heck! cried the philosopher. In this country of mulattos, a guy like me is a genius!

Far from contradicting him, Adam Buenosayres warned that such an obvious truth need not be broadcast at full volume in the street. And so the philosopher lowered his voice.

— Yes, yes, he said. So where was I?

— You were talking about your enormous intelligence.

— That’s right. But what good does it do me? Haydée Amundsen couldn’t care less about intellectual matters. As I have found out to my delight.

— What? laughed Adam.

— A splendid animal de luxe! exclaimed Samuel, grinding his teeth. Then he added with venomous pleasure:

— Intellectual women, like that crazy Ethel, make me laugh my head off. An intellectual woman is against nature. Like a seal on a bicycle, or a gorilla demonstrating how to square the circle.

Adam laughed again, and the philosopher joined in with gusto.

— Am I right? he shouted. Do I reason well?

— Like a perfect piss-tank, Adam answered.

— I’m not pissed! protested Samuel. Right here and now I’ll do “the four” so you can see.

Stopping where he was, he balanced on one leg and prepared to cross it with the calf of his other leg to form the probatory numeral “4.” But Adam Buenosayres gave him neither time nor space to complete the manoeuvre and yanked him along.

— I believe you, he assured him. Let’s get back on topic.

— What conclusions did we come to? asked Samuel.

— I can see only one conclusion. Haydée Amundsen is impervious to both your physical charms and amazing intelligence. Dunque, all that’s left for you is the consolation of philosophy, like your buddy Boethius.

The philosopher gave a sinister little chuckle:

— There’s another possibility.

— What is it?

— The great temptation!

His voice grew harsh, as though filtered through a clenched jaw.

— There’s another way, he said. Dazzle her with wealth. Suppose I wrap a necklace of the finest pearls around her goddess-like neck. And dangle sparkling diamonds before her eyes, and emeralds, and rubies.

— Faust, mused Adam Buenosayres.

— Yes, Samuel admitted. But he forgot about the furs, the big fool. Haven’t you ever seen how women surrender unconditionally when they’re at the furrier’s shop, looking at ermines, martens, foxes, astrakhans? Jewels and furs: two instruments of domination. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but most of the world’s great jewellers and furriers are men of my race. And then there’s the automobile! It’s incredible how cars fascinate females so. Put a gorilla at the wheel of a Rolls-Royce, and women will see the Apollo of Belvedere.

By the time he finished this quasi-monologue, the initial harshness in Samuel’s voice had become vitriolic, his tone seeming to translate all his turbid imaginings, ancient resentments, and flaming despair. Adam couldn’t see his face, but he sensed the eloquence of its diabolical grimaces and how it moulded itself according to the infamy of each of the words he uttered. When he came to the end, Samuel squeezed his friend’s arm till it hurt:

— It’s all true, he announced in a fury. But what’s still needed is gold. Gold!

— Let go of my arm! Adam ordered.

— Gold! Gold! shouted Samuel. It picks the lock of the world!

He laughed perversely and continued:

— And why not? My race knows well the secret of gold. We manufacture it, we adore it. And why not?

The scars of the whip were still bleeding on your skin, and the mud of the Nile was still fresh on your feet. The manna sent from heaven melted in your mouth, and in your throat was the freshness of the prodigious fount. And you were already forgetting, hard-hearted man! Already you had made burnt offerings to the golden beast, and kissed its hooves cast in the metal of your women’s earrings and bracelets! (But the Just Man struggled on the mountain; he held back the arm of his Lord that was about to fall upon your shaven head.)4 And later you were among your brothers in the house of Naphtali, and you went weaving your obscene dance around the golden calves wrought by Jeroboam. (But the Just Man looked up to the ever clear sky, and descended at dawn, heading for Jerusalem.)5 And still later you were seen on the plain of Dura, in the province of Babylon, with your aquiline nose in the air and your ear attentive to the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, psaltery, dulcimer, and the entire musical ensemble. And when the signal sounded, you fell on your face, adoring the golden statue that Nebuchadnezzar had built. (But the three men sang in the fiery furnace: Fires of the Lord, praise the Lord!).6 And later still you were the sordid alchemist, vainly working with mercury, sulphur, and salt. (But Abraham the Jew made authentic gold, and saw in his athanor the fulfilment of the great work: the Green Lion and Lion’s Blood.)7 And nowadays you can be seen working to transmute blood and sweat into gold. And fulfilling the liturgy of gold, and enjoying the beatitudes of gold, and suffering the martyrdom of gold. (But announced is Philadelphia, city of brothers.)8

— That is the great temptation, concluded Tesler. To accumulate that yellow stuff!

— I don’t see how, Adam rejoined. Unless you sell your soul to the devil. And what devil would buy it from you?

The philosopher laughed disdainfully.

— Black magic, he said. Bah! It used to work when man knew himself to be the proprietor of a soul. But now we live in the time of the body.

— So what would be your plan? asked Adam.

— He who rules over bodies will rule over gold, Tesler responded prophetically.

— You’re wandering off topic.

— No, I’m not. I’m short three courses to fulfil my degree in Medicine. Only three! I take the three courses, and I become Doctor Samuel Tesler, clinician and surgeon.

— What’s the connection?

— It’s another key to gold.

Samuel took on an air of cold calculation.

— To be a doctor now, he said, means being able to rule over bodies in the age of the body.

And he added, with glacial brutality:

— The bourgeois slobs who amass gold will be parted from it by only two powers: those who defend it for them, and those who keep their viscera in good working order. That’s why we live in the era of lawyers and doctors.

He laughed cruelly:

— Let’s imagine a financial idol, inaccessible, all-powerful, revered, feared. Along comes Doctor Samuel Tesler, and the idol falls apart. Doctor Tesler makes the idol strip naked, prods and pinches him, sticks a cannula up his anal orifice or a catheter up his urethra, keeps him nervous about the state of putrefaction of his vital organs, plays on his hopes and fears, regulates how much he eats, sleeps, and fornicates. Thus does Doctor Tesler elegantly take control of the broken idol. Is it worth taking the three exams?

— Hmm! grumbled Adam Buenosayres, not convinced by the ease with which Samuel had just knocked down the idol.

— It’s like this, insisted the philosopher. Medicine, too, is an instrument of domination.

And he added with overweening pride:

— Not for nothing has my race abounded in great doctors.

— An imperialist race, Adam insinuated sarcastically.

— And one that conquers the enemy by attacking his weak spot.

— What weak spot?

— The sensuality of his oppressors.

Adam Buenosayres laughed in real amusement:

— For half an hour now, he said, you’ve been inventing dreams of gold and luxury. And all for Haydée Amundsen’s flesh, be it tough or tender!

— Tender! protested Samuel in ecstasy.

Right away he added in a penitential tone:

— I’m the black sheep. Samuel has deserted his tribe.

— Your tribe is no better, Adam rejoined. Your race is disgustingly sensual. You can’t deny it.

The philosopher’s long sigh sounded in the shadows.

— Yes, he admitted, it’s an oriental race. It still has a penchant for luxury. Don’t forget that it has bought and sold all the splendours of the world — precious metals and stones, fabrics, perfumes, slaves, women.

Here he paused, as if about to reveal something confidential.

— I myself, he said at last, despite my Franciscan life and philosophical initiations, can’t break free from the inclination. Of course, it’s an ancestral influence! Sometimes I find myself staring through a shop window, mesmerized by some luxurious trinket.

He interrupted himself again, then finally resolved to confess all:

— When the Chinaman at the drycleaner’s gave me that fantastic kimono, oh boy! — that night, after putting it on, I felt my epidermis would never again tolerate any material but silk. Then again, when Levy the hat manufacturer got married, there was French champagne at the reception. I’d never tried it before. And would you believe it? Once I’d tasted it, I knew without a doubt that from then on life would be unbearable without that wonderful wine. And women! I don’t know why, but I study them, measure them, mentally touch them, as if I had to buy and sell them at so much a pound!

He lapsed into an afflicted silence, and Adam Buenosayres patted him on the shoulder consolingly, even though he was still wondering whether the confession was a product of sincerity, drunkenness, or farce, a mode in which the philosopher so often moved.

— I believe you, he said. That’s why I laughed when you were talking about the sensuality of others.

— And doesn’t it exist? protested Samuel, who never admitted defeat and was already rising from his ashes.

— It exists, Adam admitted. We’re in the time of the body, as you were saying. A felicitous turn of phrase.

— Bah! said Samuel modestly. Those flashes of brilliance happen to me to all the time.

— It exists. And the people of your race have been fostering it very cleverly. Just ask the Elders of Zion!9

The philosopher laughed in the dark:

— Haven’t I been telling you?

— Yes, yes, Adam replied. But their own sensuality makes them fall into the snares they set for the sensuality of others. They invent idols for others, and end up adoring them themselves. Gold, for example, ought to be for them simply a means of domination. And they take it for end in itself!

— Who knows? objected the philosopher, touched to the quick.

— That’s why, concluded Adam, even if they attain certain positions, they’ll never achieve the domination they dream about.

— Who knows? Samuel muttered again. Who knows?

Side by side, the two of them embarked on the stretch of Warnes Street running from Vírgenes to Monte Egmont. From there, Adam had a clear view of the San Bernardo steeple, its clock burning in the night like the eye of a cyclops. Behind the steeple he sensed the presence of the stone figure whose broken hand was outstretched in a gesture of benediction. And, as so many times before, the mere evocation of that image caused him to feel a strange unease, a sense that someone was calling him from on high. That curtains of dense shadow were hanging between Adam and the voice that called him.

— And then, he said at last, there’s the theological reason.

— Which one? Samuel asked acridly.

— The curse of the Crucified One.

Samuel Tesler stopped short, as though he’d suddenly come upon the viscous mass of a reptile. Nevertheless, he dissimulated what he felt, a mixture of surprise, disgust, and fear. As he started to walk again, he laughed shakily.

— You can’t be serious, he said, suggesting that he found the theological argument very funny.

— The Other was the one who was speaking seriously, Adam answered. He predicted the ruin of Jerusalem and the dispersion of your race. Hasn’t it come true?

— It was a ploy on the part of the Roman Empire! thundered Samuel. A political ploy.

— The Empire fell twenty centuries ago, and the curse continues.

Samuel muttered something unintelligible.

— And how long is your famous curse going to last? he then asked, at once ironic, resentful, and conciliatory.

— Until the day when the Jews recognize en masse that they crucified their Messiah, answered Adam. And then…

But Samuel didn’t let him finish. Brandishing his fist in the dark, he shouted:

— He wasn’t the Messiah! He was a poor, sentimental madman!

— Apparently, Adam insisted, they had the Messiah in front of their noses and didn’t realize it.

It was futile. The philosopher was no longer listening. He shook his great head back and forth; he broke free from the grip of his friend and from the voice of his enemy. Deaf and blind, Samuel Tesler bellowed:

— He’s not the Messiah! Never!

And the Son of Perdition was already hanging from one arm of the fig tree. Seated at his tribunal, the man in the toga pointed at the man in the purple robe: I find no fault in him, he said as he turned to the multitude. And the multitude stirred restlessly like a tree in the wind: sharp profiles, hooked noses, beady eyes, black or red or white beards, voices like piccolos or horns, everything became agitated and confused amid a strong odour of fish stew. We would not have brought him before you if he were not guilty! shouted the multitude. And the Man in purple spoke not: a circlet of thorns dug into his brow; and blood trickled in big drops down his face, from forehead to honey-coloured beard and beyond, where it merged, purple on purple, with the royal cloak that in mockery had been wrapped round his ribs. The Man looked up at the sky, and the sky knew not whether to cloud over or come plummeting down with all its stars; for in that Man looking skyward, heaven, weeping, recognized the Lord Most High who set his vault upon firm pillars. And the Man turned his eyes to the earth, and the earth felt it was dying of anguish under the meekness of those eyes, for it saw in that Man the Wondrous Lord who had said: Let there be land, and there was dry land. But the multitude cried out (the horn cries, the piccolo cries): Crucify him! And the Son of Perdition was already hanging from an arm of the fig tree. Cold and grave, as though performing a rite ordained for all eternity, the man in the toga addressed the multitude: Shall I crucify your King? And the multitude laughed then (laughter of piccolo, laughter of horn): yellow teeth, ravaged gums, faces resembling birds, jackals, or pigs revealed themselves to the sun in their appalling nakedness. And the multitude cried out again: Crucify him! After which the man in the toga, grave and chill, ordered the sacrifice as if fulfilling a liturgy older than the angels. And the Son of Perdition was already hanging from an arm of the fig tree.10

— So, Adam asked, what idea do you people have of the Messiah?

— A triumphant king, Samuel responded proudly. Conqueror, not conquered!

— An earthly emperor, part soldier and part banker? Adam asked again.

— I’d be satisfied, the philosopher grumbled, if he revealed to us the mysteries of the Kabbalah.

An admixture of ire, pride, and fatigue was exuding from his entire being:

— Maybe I’m the Messiah, he said.11

And then added, desperately:

— I don’t give a damn! I’m sick of it all!

He booted a trash can out of his way. The container rattled over to the curb of the sidewalk.

— I don’t give a goddam! he said again. Anyway, I’m in my last incarnation.

He stopped short and looked attentively at the door of a house.

— Hey! he exclaimed gleefully. Hey!

The two passers-by had just arrived at what had once been the Balcarce mansion,12 now divided and subdivided into the hundred cells of a gigantic conventillo or tenement.

— What’s up? Adam asked warily.

— Here, Samuel dramatically pronounced as he pointed at the door, live the Three Graces of the barrio. Quite plumply incarnated, let me assure you.

— So what?

— I’m going to serenade them, laughed the philosopher, heading for the door.

Adam tried to hold him back:

— Don’t be a lout!

But Samuel was already at the threshold. Seizing the bronze door knocker, he banged it three times against the door. In the stillness of the night, the three knocks resounded terribly: the hundred dogs of the tenement all started to bark at once. Adam Buenosayres, filled with dread and anger, fled toward the corner of Warnes and Monte Egmont. He run was short, only thirty yards or so to the corner. Once there, he waited for the philosopher, who was close behind him, leaping and farting like a mule.

— You idiot! Adam admonished. We’re back in our own barrio!

— Barrio, schmarrio! swaggered Samuel, still panting.

He was looking around for another door to knock on, intent on repeating his feat. Realizing this, Adam took hold of his shoulders. But Samuel wrenched himself free.

— We’ll take a glass of caña at the gringo’s, he decided as he approached Don Nicola’s cantina. I’ve got a bestial thirst on.

— It’s closed, Adam objected, fervently wishing to be off.

— Either the gringo opens up for us, threatened Samuel, or I’ll tear the place down.

And right then and there he gave the sliding metal screen covering the doorway a ferocious kick. Then Adam lost his patience; he grabbed Samuel by one hand and twisted his wrist.

— Let me go! shouted Samuel, struggling like one of the furies.

But Adam kept on twisting his wrist, and Tesler finally gave up.

— Brother! he howled. Brother Adam!

— Are you going to behave yourself?

— Yes, but let go of my wrist.

— I don’t trust you, Adam answered without letting go.

He loosened his vice-like grip, however, and the two of them, guard and prisoner, set out on the last stretch of their journey. Forty steps later, Samuel tried to rebel again, though with extraordinary meekness:

— After all, he began to say, I’m a free creature.

— But momentarily without judgment, concluded Adam.

— Super flumina Babylonis, Tesler declaimed, sighing.13

Without saying anything more, he began to hum Bach’s Air on the G String. He had a beautiful bass voice, and Adam, in spite of himself, was won over by his prisoner’s song as he contemplated the cloudy sky overhead, the autumnal paradise trees, the storm insects swirling around the streetlights. They arrived at the house. With key in lock, Adam turned to Tesler.

— We must go up the stairs in silence, he said. Complete silence.

— Silent as the grave, Samuel gravely promised.

The stairwell was absolutely dark, and they had to feel their way up. Samuel went first; Adam, behind him, held his lower back to steady him. They were scarcely halfway up when Samuel, judging himself the very effigy of stealth, guffawed his satisfaction:

— How’s that, he asked in a thundering voice. Am I doing okay?

— Shhh! came Adam’s response from the shadows.

The last step brought them into the vestibule, which gave onto the rooms of each of the travellers. Adam entered Samuel’s room, Samuel trailing like a ghost, and switched on a dim little lamp. The philosopher then performed the following gestures: he blinked for an instant in the light like a dazzled owl, and let his sad eyes roam around the room, pausing on the books, the mournful blackboard, the disorderly table of his labours.

— What’s the use! he moaned at last, kicking over a column of greasy volumes.

Next, without the slighest preamble, he flew to the bed and sank into the heap of blankets, dressed just as he was, shoes and all. But Adam Buenosayres wouldn’t allow it. Dragging him out of bed, he stood Samuel up and removed his clothes and shoes, a difficult manoeuvre to which Samuel lent himself with much dignity. Adam got him into the famous kimono and only then let him go to bed.

— I’m thirsty, murmured the philosopher.14

Adam handed him a pitcher of water, which Samuel gulped down avidly, feverishly. Then he fell back upon the pillows. Seeing him now in a restful posture, Adam closed the window, drew the grimy curtain, turned out the light, and made to leave the room. At the doorway, Adam paused to listen: the philosopher was laughing softly, apparently stirring under the covers. Then he gave a long sigh:

— Noumena! he muttered, already between two worlds.15

Adam closed the door.

Philadelphia shall raise her domes and steeples beneath a sky beaming like the face of a child. As the rose among flowers, the goldfinch among birds, gold among metals, thus will reign Philadelphia, city of brothers, among the cities of this world. A pacific and joyous multitude will throng her streets: the blind man’s eyes will open to the light, the naysayer affirm what he formerly denied, the exile set foot on his native land, and the damned at last be free. In Philadelphia the bus conductors will offer a hand to women, help the elderly, stroke the cheeks of children. Men will not push and shove one another, nor leave the elevator door open, nor steal one another’s bottles of milk, nor turn up the radio full blast. The policemen will say, “Good day, sir! How do you do, sir?” And there will be neither detectives, nor moneylenders, nor pimps, nor prostitutes, nor bankers, nor slaughtermen. For Philadelphia will be the city of brothers, and will know the ways of heaven and earth, like the pink-throated doves that one day will nest in her tall towers, in her graceful minarets.

BOOK FIVE

Chapter 1

“Bringing him to such a sorry pass.” “That used to bring him to so sorry a pass.” “That to a pass so sorry…”

Adam Buenosayres awakes with that shred of sentence still hounding him like an imbecilic gadfly, as it has done all through his sleep. When his eyes open, he sees the figure of Irma by his side, her industrious hands coming and going over the breakfast tray.

— What time is it? he asks, infinitely discouraged.

— Ten-thirty, answers Irma.

“That to a pass so sorry…”

— Is it raining?

— Drizzling.

“And he’d told Irma her eyes were like two mornings together, or maybe even…” Enough! He sits up with a sudden urgency. His disoriented eyes pass over the empty room. Irma’s slipped away already? So much the better.

The first idea to become clear in his mind brings a taste of bile: at a given hour on that new day, he recalls, a series of ineluctable actions will have to be performed; his face will have to take its place within a fixed constellation of faces; and his voice will belong to a chorus of voices awaiting his own to rise in turn. Reflecting on this, he becomes aware that he can’t do it today, for in his will there is not a speck of life.

Mouth dry and bitter: yes, of course, last night’s binge. With the greatest economy of gestures, Adam Buenosayres sends a hand over to the tray, pours black coffee into the everyday mug, and slurps it down. Delicious. Then he puts on his old bathrobe, goes to the window, peers out. A foggy light, the same that fills his room, presses down upon the city, dampens rooftops, makes streets slick, and blurs horizons. It gives the impression of pulverized volcanic dust floating in the air and falling softly on everything. Adam studies the skeletal branches of the paradise trees, now leafless, though still clinging with greedy fingernails to the golden clumps of seed. Imagination. On a clothesline, across the street, hang two wet sheets and some grey underwear, whipping in the wind. And the wind also stirs the rich metallurgy of autumn among the dead leaves, carrying away heaps of gold and bronze. Yes, another metaphor! In the street, men and beasts challenge the fog and are soundlessly devoured by it, for, both inside and out, silence has spread like a tapestry. Good!

Pulling himself out of contemplation and the wild play of images, Adam goes over to his table, fills a broad-bowled pipe with tobacco, and lights up. Fleecy smoke rises to the ceiling: “Glory to the Great Manitou, for he has given humans the delight of oppavoc!” Then he goes back to the bed and gets horizontal: “Better it is to be seated than standing, recumbent than seated, dead than recumbent.” Cheery maxim!

Restored to his pleasant immobility (and immobility is a virtue of God, the unmoved mover), Adam Buenosayres recalls the episodes of the night before and his conduct in each of them. Evoking such a strange multiplicity of gestures, he is amazed. How many postures did he adopt, how many forms did his witching soul assume in the space of a single night! And among so many disguises, the true face of his soul… No! Adam resists giving in so soon to the pain of ideas: the light filling his room is too cozy, and the silence brought by the rain too beautiful. Light and silence, in pleasant brotherhood, made possible for him by an inchoate beatitude. Having denied intellect and will, he is left only with the play of memory. When the present no longer suggests anything to us and the future is colourless before our eyes, it is good to turn to the past; yes, to where it is so easy to reconstitute the beautiful, submerged islands of jubilance! A series of dead Adams rise up now from their tombs and say: Do you remember? The pipe, smoked on a nearly empty stomach, produces euphoria, twin of silence and light (“that’s why the dry leaf is sacred”). And the Adams gesticulate, there in the background, saying: Do you remember?

… And time was when the days began with your mother’s song:

Four white doves,

four blue ones,

four little red ones,

death gives to me.1

You passed through your days and nights as through a series of black and white rooms. The wolf-coloured pony was devilishly skittish; he would use a hitching post to tear off his bit and halter, then open the gate with his muzzle. And Casiano, the Pampa Indian, who with consummate skill could kill a partridge with a blow of the whip!2

Or the commotion of mad bells waking you at dawn: the pilgrimages of Maipú! It would still be early morning, but already the house was buzzing in anticipation of the fiesta. The men looked rather stiff in their Sunday clothes. The young aunts, in great excitement, unfurled bright fabrics, shook bottles of scent, whispered among themselves or suddenly blazed up in laughter. Cursing in sonorous Basque phrases, Uncle Francisco struggled with a recalcitrant boot. Later, Grandfather Sebastián would enter the church, plunge his gigantic hand wholly into the font, and pull it out dripping wet. You touched his gnarled fingers and, on your knees, you crossed yourself. Afterwards, the men took you to Olariaga’s general store. Outside, several handsome horses were tethered in a row along an immense hitchrack. Inside, by the counter, men exchanged loud greetings and detonated peals of laughter amid odours of Tarragona wine, saddles, medicines. All of a sudden, the student minstrel group, in the Spanish tradition, came in strumming guitars and plucking violins. Decked out in spangled suits, short pants, white socks, and feathered hats, they were escorted by a horde of boisterous kids. Your gaze, however, wouldn’t linger there, but on the three or four motionless figures who, glass in hand, stood smiling behind the group, apart from the fray. Like Grandfather Sebastián, those countrymen might have come from the time of Rosas, judging by their fleece-white beards and leathery faces more wrinkled than ancient paper. They still wore the black chiripá, colt-leather boots and obsolete spurs on their heels. In childish astonishment, you stared at them as though into the very face of adventure, for you associated them with the famous cattle-drives down Chubut way, with those legendary crossings among sand dunes and storms, with the epic exploits of the old cowboys, whose praises you’d heard sung so many times in smoke-filled kitchens by strangers who came and went, inexplicably, like the wind.3 Later, at noon, the roasts of meat, laid out over hot coals, were smoking beneath a rain of spiced brine. And then the dance got underway under the open sky, until the southern night fell upon musicians and dancers.

Now you find yourself on the road from Maipú to Las Armas, a line traced across the prairie from horizon to horizon. The last days of summer and the first of your adolescence. You’re astride a horse, riding behind a hundred red steers, enveloped in the dustcloud raised by four hundred hooves. You’ve been allowed to wear the black boots which, along with the vicuña poncho and the silver-tipped facón, constitute your sole inheritance from Grandfather Sebastián. To you, wearing those boots means you’re entering manhood. Mounted on his memorable buckskin horse, Uncle Francisco, on your right, is chewing black tobacco, Hija del Toro brand, which he always carried in his ostrich-throat tobacco pouch. Looking at him now in these peaceful conditions, you recall in imagination that stormy night when a drove of semi-wild horses broke up and scattered on him for the third time in a row: Uncle Francisco leapt from his horse to the ground, unsheathed his knife, and raised his eyes heavenward to challenge God himself, shouting: “Come on down here, if you’re man enough!” Leading the current cattle-drive are Justino and Casiano the Pampa, one riding to the right, the other to the left. Inside every man’s hat is a fresh-cut switch of white smartweed, because it is now nearly noon and the sun’s rays fall vertical like arrows from a maddened archer. Sure, sweat drips from your forehead, leaving a salt taste on your lips; the dust-cloud blinds your eyes and dries your nostrils; and your ears are deafened by the beasts’ bellowing and the yippee-yi-ay of the cowhands. But your heart is ringing like a little bell at a fiesta, and you wish no grander lot in life than to follow a road traced across the prairie from horizon to horizon, behind a hundred red steers burning like coals at noon.

Since when had the resplendent forms of creatures been speaking to you thus? Since when had they spoken to you in a language you didn’t yet clearly understand, but which gave you an inkling of the certitudes of beauty, truth, and goodness; and which brought tears to your eyes, and wakened on your tongue a painful longing to respond in the same language? To be sure, one morning, reading your schoolboy composition, Don Bruno had said in class: “Adam Buenosayres is a poet.” And the other kids stared hard at you, as if they didn’t know you. But, since when? Lord! A child who shies away from games and slinks off to a corner to weave a warp of musical words: “Oh, the rose, the sad rose, the emaciated rose!”

Now you are eighteen years old, back there, in the fields of Santa Marta, and you’re standing beside Liberato Farías, the horsebreaker. Beneath your feet, the earth is a great wheat-coloured circle. Overhead, the sky’s complexion is hyacinth — dome or flower, who knows? Liberato’s shock of straight hair is tied back with a coloured kerchief. Now he adjusts his spurs, happy and painstaking as a wrestler getting ready for another fight. Twenty paces ahead, biting the bit for the first time, with the lasso still around its neck and its nervous legs bound by the strap, the black colt stirs and frets, flashing like a drop of mercury. Almirón the foreman holds fast the colt’s muzzle using the handle of his whip. Uncle Francisco, without letting go of the lasso, keeps a careful eye on the animal’s rippling movement. Your admiring gaze passes from image to image, pausing now on the horsebreaker kneeling to put on his boots; now on the horse, a machine steaming with pent-up rage; now on the hyacinth-complexioned sky and the wheaten earth. Liberato has got to his feet. The tack slung over his shoulder, he walks phlegmatically over toward the waiting group. When he gets there, he checks that the components of the tack are all in order. Then he approaches the colt and runs his broad hand from neck to tail, much like the musician who, before playing his guitar, first touches the strings and gets the feel of them. The tack’s various components now slip over the animal: saddlecloth, horse blanket, saddle padding, the cinch drawn tight with nails and teeth, sheepskin saddle blanket, bellystrap. The colt, all this while hesitating between shock and anger, finally comes to a decision and tries to break free of its ties. The operation concluded, Liberato cautiously mounts, stepping ever so lightly on the stirrup, and settles himself on the skins. Only then does he wave off his padrinos with a friendly gesture, asking to be left alone for his single combat. Uncle Francisco unhobbles the colt and undoes the lasso. Almirón releases the animal’s muzzle. Both men summon their horses so as to accompany the horsebreaker, in accord with the laws of comradeship. The colt, however, is not yet moving, as if its hooves were nailed to the ground. So Liberato puts his whip in front of its eyes. The beast rears up and stands vertical for a moment, sits down abruptly on its hindquarters, regains its balance, spins violently to the left and then to the right — torn between taking flight and rolling on the ground with rider and all. Meanwhile, the horsebreaker tugs ferociously at the reins, forcing the horse’s neck one way and then the other. The bronco puts its muzzle down between its knees, thrusts its back up like a mountain, and finally begins to buck in earnest, struggling to throw the rider, who clings to the colt’s flanks with the double arc of his legs. Its arsenal of tricks and violence exhausted, the colt takes off in a mad career toward the horizon, helped by its rider, who slackens or tightens the reins. Your eyes followed him in that flight, and your ears heard the hooves beat upon the earth, resonant as a drum. And then you saw how rider and horse returned from the horizon, in harmony now. And how the horsebreaker, after dismounting and removing the skins from the horse, patted the animal on the head, as if to seal an unbreakable pact with it. You had approached the sweat-cloaked horse and you were looking at its dilated, noisily panting nostrils, its mouth filled with blood and spume, its eyes wet and flowing with hot drops that mimed human tears. When you carressed its sore mouth, your nose caught the colt’s vegetal breath, a sweet and pure breath of innocence. Afterward, you went with Liberato to the well, with its fresh scents of water and moss. Leaning back against the parapet, the horsebreaker had the judicious placidity of the combatant who has purified himself in another battle. As he gulped down his overflowing pitcher of water, you saw his blue eyes moisten with delight as they looked up to the zenith. Then you went off across the wheaten earth, beneath a hyacinth sky, your heart filled with praise and pondering the promise of a song you had yet to write.

And now you have just arrived in Buenos Aires, a stranger eager to observe the big city, bearing a message of freshness you still don’t know how to express, except through stammered exclamations:

In the red corymb of morning your

bumblebees buzz, Wonder.4

What strange wind (providence or chance) has gathered the phalanx of men to which you now belong, that sheaf of musical men come, like you, from different climates and diverse bloods? Some of them return from across the sea and bring enthusiastic missives from another world.5 Others have left their provinces, ambassadors of a particular land and its light. Still others arrive from the city itself, nervous and lively and nocturnal. And no sooner have all those voices gathered together than the battle is joined; they fight among themselves, brothers in their fervour, but already enemies in direction and in language. The very name of the phalanx, Santos Vega, has a symbolic value yet to be defined.6 Is it a matter of recovering a stolen music, a noble canticle being held captive? Yes. But music and canticle alike must emerge the richer for their imprisonment, if Juan Sin Ropa, the conqueror, has indeed triumphed under the sign of the universal. Do you remember the nights in the Royal Keller,7 the passionate arguments at the riverside, after which you would go home at dawn, your mind overexcited and eyes sleepless? You listen to the voices of friends in combat, but you do not speak yet, for silence and reserve are the stigmata one acquires on the prairie, where the human voice feels intimidated before the vastness of the earth and the gravitation of the sky. And when at last you manage to speak, you do so in an idiom that people find barbarous, in a throng of images they find confused. Your supporters shower praise: “A virgin poetics, without number or measure, like the great rivers of our country, like her plains and mountains.” And already, right from the start, there is clearly disagreement between your partisans and your soul. They don’t realize that when you build your poem as an incoherent string of images, you do so to overcome Time, its sad successiveness, so that all things may live a joyful present in your song. People are not aware that when you put two vastly different forms together in a single image, you want to defeat Space and distance, so that what is distant may be rejoined in the joyful unity of your poem. They don’t know this, and you dare not tell them, because silence and reserve are the stigmata one acquires on the prairie. You don’t dare tell them, because they may not have heard as children the admonishment of Time gnawing at the house and withering the sweet faces of family members; nor will they have wept at night in anguish, their gaze lost in the tremendous distance of the constellations above the pampas.

At last you realize how crazy your ambition is! Unhinged from its metaphysical yearning, your poetics is basically just a musical chaos; and that chaos is painful to you. Yes, a call to order, which no doubt comes from your blood.8 You will need to look for the code that can construct order. Contrary to what your supporters affirm, the creative cipher will not come from the earth, which itself has no code. You know well that the earth, far from giving, receives its measure from the human, because humankind is the true form of the earth. And it is in your blood that you will seek that measure, the one your grandparents brought from the other side of the ocean. You need to rediscover that measure, and to do so, you must see it incarnate in the works of your lineage, beyond the great waters. And so the elation of travel comes over your being.

You had crossed the sea, and your eyes, freshened by bitter waters and naval winds, had witnessed the mutation of the sky. A deep sense of absent constellations that no longer vault over the southern horizon, and the advent of new forms in the firmament, there in the frozen north, at nightfall. You were in a Galician port, and your solitude was already opening to embrace the forms and colours of another world. The winter day was barely dawning against an iron-grey horizon. Opposite, the three islands were like iron, too; and molten iron were the waves that crashed against the breakwater and set the ships dancing around their anchors. Above the boats, the seagulls wheeled, skimming the water’s surface or pecking at the surf, squalling like a single hunger broken into a thousand pieces. At your back, the city had not yet shaken off sleep, but along the seawall a few motionless figures stood waiting. Only their eyes showed any sign of life as they stared out over the still-dark sea. Then, walking along the seawall, you came upon a fishermen’s cove. Great, taciturn females were mending nets spread over a beach slick and shiny with fish scales. At the women’s side, drowsy children were baiting hooks with tuna liver. There, wind and sea sustained a turbulent dialogue; through its occasional pauses could be heard the terrestrial bugle of an early-rising rooster. Suddenly, the rigid figures, numb bodies, and stone faces came alive and started shouting in the direction of the sea; gruff voices from the water called back in the gloom. They were the harvesters of the sea, returning to the quay. Against the murky background of dawn, you could make out sharp prows, spare masts, and men who clung to the rigging and shouted a greeting or a lament. And, almost as if those men had caught the day on their lines and were towing it behind them, the light increased all around, and the earth lit up like a lamp. Then, before your eyes, rustic hands displayed the sea’s wealth, its splendid fruits: a universe of writhing tentacles, multi-coloured shells, mother-of-pearl and scales, inky pulp still bleeding and beating like the eviscerated entrails of the sea. And as in its prairie past, your soul at that moment could only voice praise: praise for so many pure forms, paean to the heroic life, encomium to the Maker who gives fruits. If those fruits are difficult to pluck, on an out-of-reach branch, it is by His design: the human hand that reaps them will also have harvested the beautiful and sorrowful flower of penitence.

Now you are in Cantabria, the land of your ancestors: it is the mountain where the Globe, celestial animal, recalls its own magnitude; the mountain that rises bare-headed, wraps its flanks in a cloak of earth, draws from the valley a tough elbow of granite and then sanctifies the stone in a cathedral.9 And it is the plot of soil, worked and polished like a jewel. And the wonder of water leaping out to the light and falling at the feet of golden oaks in winter. That landscape, whose nostalgic description you’d heard so many times from your grandparents on the prairie of Maipú, sketches before your eyes a familiar gesture as though of recognition and welcome: familiar are the faces forming a circle around the table, the big hands cutting bread for you and filling your tankard with new cider, the sonorous idiom and songs that, also in exile, rocked your childhood cradle in another world. And that’s it precisely: those voices and faces bring back a taste of infancy, a lost flavour that floods back in all its delight, something like the pleasure you still get from the deeply familiar odour of a plant, an old stick of furniture, a faded piece of cloth.

But the fervour in your blood will brook no delay, and you now cross the fields of Castille, its arable reds and pleasant greens. It is the same earth that saw a double prodigy in the march of its heroes and the levitation of its saints. In the shadow cast by that shepherd leaning on his crook, Salicio and Nemeroso might yet be intertwining their fluid voices as in Garcilaso’s poem.10 And among those green meadows, it would be no surprise to hear Don Quixote repeating his praise for the Golden Age.11 Wherever you open your eyes, you find the truth, the eternal number, and the just measure written in faithful stone, hard metal, or exalted wood. And, to be sure, when you learn the wisdom of the dead, your spirit does not quail in final elegies. Ah, how you long to perpetuate those voices, gather up those numbers, and give them another springtime, far from here, in your jubilant fields, beside your native river!

Wary trees were barely hazarding their first buds, and the light in the frayed willows by the river had a hint of green, when you and Camille first laid eyes on water the colour of weeping. It was the first day of May, and you were in Paris, among those subtle people in whose veins ran blood with a family resemblance to yours and who mirrored a region of your spirit. The dance at La Horde that night would celebrate the matins of springtime so, not surprisingly, you donned a shabby costume, along with Atanasio the Greek,12 Larbaud,13 Van Schilt, and Arredondo from Jujuy.14 The rented costumes retained a rancid odour of sweat from past festivities; a silence compacted from all the dead laughter seemed to fill the hollows of the masks, prostituted many times over. All in all, there was too much noise in everyone’s soul, yours and those of your friends, and when Van Schilt put a red beard on his pirate-like chin, Camille’s laughter tinkled a good while, along with sounds of surgical tape and rusty bells. Night, a parenthesis of madness! What knot had let go within your heart? The immense hall glittered beneath a hundred chandeliers; musicians inspired by ancient barbarity made brass instruments shout and woodwinds wail. A tribe of monkeys outrageously plastered in makeup then dragged you mid-room; you struggled, laughing, among arms and abdomens slick with oil; you gave and received blows to the face; one of your lips was already bleeding, and your fingers clutched shreds of artificial beards and wigs. Then, when the festivities celebrating your baptism of madness were over, you joined the monkey-inititates, and the notion of time evaporated in the dance hall. Hurrah! Foreheads heavy as fruit, alert minds, sleepless wills, and bruised memories broke riotously free of their prisons. Hurrah! Your being had overleapt its frontiers and foundered, a drunken ship on a chaotic sea of absurd forms, brutal nakedness, unspeakable gestures, colours that scraped eyeballs, and words that shattered eardrums. Now you wonder: what knot had let go in your heart? And you think: there was too much noise in our souls. The spell was broken at dawn, when you arrived with your companions at the Café du Dôme: just as the ocean withdraws and leaves the beach strewn with monstrous remains torn from its depths, so the ebb tide of night had deposited on the terrace the cold scraps of a drunken witches’ sabbath. At the threshold of the café, an organ-grinder smiled, glass in hand, an ancient and good-hearted inhabitant of dawn; an exultant chestnut tree on the boulevard was showing off its first leaves to the café terrace. And then Larbaud seized the hurdy-gurdy and began to turn its crank, the organ-grinder looking on benevolently; the ghosts of the Dôme, redeemed in that music, began to dance around the springtime chestnut tree. Later, you returned to your room, a posy of muguets in your lapel. Old Melanie was on her knees, slithering and scrubbing as usual, tiny amid her brooms. You made her stand up and, tearing the posy from your lapel, you made her a gift of those portentous little white flowers. When Melanie, reduced to tears, pressed them to her desiccate lips, you understood how a whole primaveral season can be gifted in a handful of lilies-of-the-valley.

Fragrant mornings in Sanary by the Latin sea! Monsieur Duparc, your fencing master, is already going down the rugged path among the fig trees: you’ve just had your morning lesson on a platform of greenery, beneath pines creaking in the wind like so many brigantine masts. Still with mask and foil, you contemplate from above the little universe of forms singing for the sun. To your left is the estate house; on the terrace, Badi, Morera, and Raquel are painting with eyes turned to the sea. Behind the building, hidden in the tangled vegetation, Butler^15 sets up his easel, already absorbed by a colour, the enigmatic green suggested by the olive groves. Further off, the round threshing floor can be seen. Madame Fine, the villa owner, is seated at its edge. She counts, chooses, and adores her narcissus bulbs. Around you, sunny hillsides, vineyards, and olive trees bathed in radiance extend to the horizon. In front lies the Bay of Sanary: purple-coloured sea, backdrop of mountains. Houses — white, sky-blue, pink — are perched along its shoreline like a flock of sleeping doves. You begin to feel a euphoria purer than wine, and something like the prelude to a song flutters in your being as you follow the path through the fig trees down to the sea. Beetles black and blue flee from between your feet. Pebbles roll, seashells crunch beneath your sandals. Snails draw their shiny trails across steep, mossy rock faces. High in the sky now, the sun arouses all vital juices, and a resinous fragrance descends, as do you, from earth to sea. And suddenly, a great indigo revelation among the cypresses: the Mediterranean. There, as usual, Yvonne is waiting for you. No bond exists between you and this subtle adolescent girl, only curiosity and amazement, the exchange between two strange worlds that meet by chance. You do not know how you appear in her eyes, in what measure or form; but in yours, this grave creature is no more than an object of contemplation, and your spirit is tranquil as you look at her now, as you might regard a palm tree shimmering in the noonday sun. She is stretched out on the sand, friend of the sun, blood-relative of the water; her nudity has that taut, contained aspect of the bud before it can be called a rose; the sun plays on the golden down that covers her; and as you look at her, a memory comes to mind — in the orchard in Maipú at siesta time, a colour of velvety quince. Yvonne’s eyes are green and childlike, eyes of a mountain falcon, like those of Queen Guinevere; but through the infancy of those eyes emerges a deep light, as though many buried eyes were yet peering out from them. The voice of your companion is sylvan and childlike, but it has a refined quality of delicately wrought music, as if through her voice myriad other voices, long dead, were still singing. She speaks to you of her château, in Avignon, and of a solitude established amid old smells, cold suits of armour, and the eternal gaze of portraits. Or she talks about her grandfather, the commodore, adrift in a dream of Asian springtimes, of which he retains withered memories and evergreen melancholy. You respond by evoking the pampas of your country, or by offering fragments of an inchoate song thrumming within you, which now becomes a hymn of praise for the glades of Provence, in whose shade you might have conversed with a centaur. Or your praise is for this sea, its murmur perhaps resonant of the ancient voices of Jason or Ulysses; the same sea where, on a bed of coral and sponge, still lies the cranium of old Palinurus, who one night fell asleep at the helm of Aenaeus’s ship. And as you talk on, Lieutenant Blanchard, almost a child, watches you from afar in silent desperation. Then you enter the sea, with Yvonne’s hand in yours, the warm surf roiling and curling round your knees, and you have the impression of making your way now, as in Maipú, through a hot, dense flock of lambs.

You might have prolonged that beautiful time and used the best of those summery hours to build an eternity. But the sun has entered Libra, and the grapevines are turning red with the approach of autumn. In the morning and afternoon, you and your friends have been picking grapes in Madame Fine’s vineyard. Bunches of dust-covered grapes have enriched wicker baskets, and now they’re in the winepress, awaiting their Dionysian transformation. At night there will be a rustic dance on the hill. Badi, Morera, and Butler are busy preparing the house, while Madame Fine methodically explores the nooks and crannies of her wine cellar. It is the eve of your departure, and in the appearance of things you seem to divine a gesture of farewell. Hours later, in the middle of the night, you guide the guests along the path to the house. Darkness, silence, and remoteness have moved Madame Aubert to tell a somber ghost story, and the imagination of your companions is already aroused when you all arrive at the hill. The big iron gate opens, creaking lugubriously… Well creaked, gate! One by one, the guests cross the threshold, their eyes adjusting uncertainly to the dark. Suddenly the women shriek: they’ve just bumped up against the dangling legs of a hanged man. Then they laugh, knocking down the two or three rag dolls that Badi has hung from the fig trees. And then a Bengal light sputters suddenly in the olive grove, hurts the eyes, flickers mercurially in the shadows, and illuminates the dance of two phantoms that cavort on the threshing floor, while someone, human or demon, howls among the still pines. When silence and darkness have been restored, all the lights of the house come on, and music breaks out. Madame Fine, on the terrace, offers the arriving guests the first wine of the evening. Couples spin on the terrace: Lieutenant Blanchard, almost a child, dances with Yvonne, who looks distant and alone in his arms. In the right corner of the terrace, the elderly dames, glass in hand, reminisce about their bygone glory days. In the left corner, three adolescent girls from Nîmes bring their golden heads together to exchange anxious impressions about a world not yet accessible to them, as their long fingers pick at the black grapes in a serving dish set out on the railing of the terrace, placed there by Butler with the intention of painting a still life. When the music stops, a chorus of voices can be heard in the pine grove singing an old harvest song, as well as the excited whispers of children assailing the fig trees under cover of dark. Later, as the moon rises over the hills, the dance continues on the wheat-threshing floor. You dance with Yvonne, and once again Lieutenant Blanchard, after giving you an anxious look, goes off among the olive trees in the orchard. You must speak to him tonight and tell him what the woman means to you. But when you go out to find him in the olive grove, you tell him only that you’re about to go away. You read surprise, pleasure, confusion in his childlike face. And hearing the fervour in his words, you feel you’re already far away, as if you’d left hours ago. But Lieutenant Blanchard doesn’t want to say goodbye yet; he wants to see you off tomorrow from his battleship. And so the next day you cross the waters of Toulon in a canoe that flies among the grey ships of war. You clamber up the ladder onto the deck of the Bretagne, where Blanchard leads you among the shadows of big cannons. To be sure, many vague toasts were then drunk in the officers’ canteen. Later, in his cabin of iron, Blanchard read you a few of his poems, in the tone of Rimbaud. Now it’s the final afternoon in Sanary, and you are alongside the Phoenician tower that still rises from the tip of the promontory: the sea laps at the rocks covered with black barnacles, and although there’s no wind, the pine trees lean in a combative posture, as if bent by an invisible mistral. Two shadows, Yvonne’s and yours, grow longer in parallel. You haven’t known what shape you assume in her eyes, but those eyes weep at the moment of truth. And finally you go back, solitary in body and soul. “Could have been! Could have been!” howls a demon from the distant hills.

After that period of joyous dissipation in Sanary, when your being answered the thousand calls of beauty, you were now beginning to turn inward, to fold back into yourself. You already knew well the four seasons of your spirit. And its two ineluctable movements: one of mad expansion and the other of reflexive concentration; and this time, you knew well, the coming autumn of your soul would correspond to the already visible autumn of the earth. You were in Rome, alone and in soliloquy: you were walking one morning along the Via Appia, among despondent monuments. You had just left the Catacombs of San Callisto, where dried blood and tears, terrestrial stench and celestial aromas, canticles and sobs eternalized their invisible presence. And your heart had set out on the road of anguish that you still walk and whose end is perhaps not of this world. Outside, the sun was shining high over the countryside. In the distance loomed the austere stonework of the aqueduct. From a nearby aerodrome came a sudden purr of motors, so you no longer heard that other hum of Virgil’s thrifty bees among the flowers. Before continuing on your way, you had inhaled the bitter aroma of cypresses and stroked the tombstones, at that hour as warm to the touch as a sleeping animal. Then you went back up the way of the Caesars, in whose solitude and ruin your imagination evoked much military finery, with so much music in the air, so many bronze carriages and proud-necked steeds. Over and above that world’s dissolution, your soul, as on so many other occasions since childhood, heard time’s lesson and retorted with its old cry of rebellion, issuing — you now know — from your soul’s immortal essence. Afterward, you were on your way back to your Roman lodgings, amid the suburban demolition where archaeological workers were digging and examining the earth. And suddenly excited voices led you to a poor ruined bedroom: the light coming in through the demolished roof cruelly exposed the wallpaper’s vulgar colours, the grease stains, and the human traces in the squalid little room, rented many times over. But in the centre of the room they had excavated and laid bare a column. The workers had already cleared away its shroud of clay, and once again the column revealed its grace beneath the sun, immutable as the truth, whether it be manifest or hidden, depending on time and place, but which in any case, be it buried or exposed to the light of day, is unique, eternal, and always faithful to itself.

Along mountain paths and goat trails, you have climbed up to the old monastery built in the midst of solitude. An interest in art, not piety, has guided you in that morning ascent. Upon entering the deserted chapel, your eyes are dazzled: frescos and panels in the colours of paradise, charming bas-reliefs, wooden carvings, bronzes, and crystal-work enjoy the undying springtime of beauty. And just as you are wondering who has gathered, and for whom, so much beauty in that deserted spot on the mountain, a row of black monks appears beside the altar, silently sitting down on carved wooden seats in the choir stall. And you are startled, for you have come here only for artistic reasons. As soon as the Celebrant begins to sprinkle the holy water, those in the choir begin to intone the Asperges. The red chasuble, with its cross embroidered in gold, is resplendent against the alb of purest white worn by the mute sacrificer. From his left forearm now hangs the maniple, blood red like the chasuble. And when the Celebrant goes up the steps of the altar bedecked in little red flowers, the monks, standing, chant the Introit. Next, the sorrowful Kyrie, the triumphant Gloria, the severe Epistle, the Gospel of love, and the ardent Credo all resonate in the solitary nave. And you listen from your hiding place, like a thief caught in the act, because you have come here only for aesthetic reasons. The wine and bread have been offered. Now smoke curls up from the silver censer. The Celebrant incenses the offerings, the Crucifix, the two wings of the altar. Returning the censer to the acolyte, the Celebrant in turn receives its incense and inclines his body in thanks. Then the acolyte goes to the monks and incenses them, one by one. And you attentively follow those multiple studied gestures whose meaning is beyond you. Not without anxiety, you think now that such a solemn liturgy is being carried out with no spectator whatsoever, in a deserted spot on the mountain — a sublime comedy performed by mad actors in an empty theatre. But all of a sudden, when the white Form arises above the Celebrant’s head, you seem to divine an invisible presence that fills the space and silently receives the tribute of adoration; you sense the presence of an immutable Spectator, without beginning or end, much more real than these transient actors and this perishable theatre. And a divine terror dampens your skin, and you tremble in your thief’s hiding place, for you have been guided here only by artistic concerns.

Winter had caught up you with in Amsterdam: days and nights came and faded away under skies of slate or coal. Your solitude had become a perfect thing, among men and women who were closed off from you like so many other worlds. And you fell back into yourself, until you became a creature of strange ways who during a whole winter burned his bridges and hunkered down in the redoubt of a Flemish room. Your pattern of sleeping and waking followed no order at all, only the rhythm imposed by those painful readings: they were books of forgotten sciences, hermetic and tempting as forbidden gardens. They had already revealed the notion of a universe whose limits expanded vertiginously in a succession of worlds organized like the turns of an infinite spiral. But your reason stumbled in that grove of symbols that hadn’t been designed for her; and your being diminished in a progressive annihilation, as the notion of a gigantic macrocosm dilated before your eyes. True, a route of liberation was offered you, a means of abandoning the circle of forms; but the ways were so dark and the intineraries so indecipherable that your reason fell faint over the books. At times an unexpected insight flashed up in the vortex of your mind, and it was the delicious pleasure of those intuitions which sustained and encouraged you along the harsh road of your reading. Other times, your eyes fell in defeat before letters hopping about like little demons. Then, deserting your room, you went out to wander the frigid wharves, past the barges dozing in the canals under a sky of slate or coal. You returned to your room at nightfall, only to fall into the same fever, which was later prolonged in sleep in the guise of disturbing dreams: you dreamed that an infinite chain of deaths and births led your steps through worlds where your being took on a thousand absurd forms. Or you found yourself in the Alchemical City, crossing the thresholds of the twenty doors of error and milling about its inaccessible ramparts, without finding the single door that leads to the secret of Gold. Thus were your body and soul consumed in that abstract universe. You were walking one evening through the gardens of Wundel, when the cries of pleasure from passers-by caught your attention: men, women, and children were shouting and pointing skyward where thousands of swallows, north-bound on their return journey, were condensing into a dense cloud of ink up above; thousands of aching wings, little hearts beating, tail feathers polished by many gales, and tiny eyes still reflecting the sun of other latitudes, pressed together at the zenith, hesitating before the decision to plummet earthward. The throng of people, under the influence of the sign of spring, let the ice within them melt, knocked down their walls, rebuilt the broken bridges of language and smiles. Abruptly, something like the neck of a whirlwind stretched down from the cloud, and a column of swallows descended slowly into the bare trees, clothing them in wings and whispers. You did not return to your torture chamber. The next day found you in Leyden, in fields teeming with red, white, and yellow tulips.

At last you are on the island of Madeira, an ancient cone of mountain rising above the waves. You’re on your way back down and have stopped halfway for a rest. Sitting in the shade of a laurel tree, you chew on an enormous loquat that bleeds rivulets of juice. All around you, flowers and fruit display an Eden-like enthusiasm. Green lizards are toasting on the hot rock. The sun beats down on both the island and the sea encircling it in a double embrace of surf. Then you contemplate your boat anchored in the roadstead; around it swarm the canoes of islanders, who dive into the sea after tossed coins. You’ve been reading in Plato’s Critias about the loves of Poseidon and the glory of Atlantis, the submerged continent — perhaps you are now perched on one of its remaining islets. You recall again that phrase: “From the central island they quarried the stone they needed; one kind was white, another black, and a third red.” And when finally you go down to the jetty, you notice that the lumps of rock on the surf-washed shoreline are black, red, and white.16

Home again, you enacted once again the confrontation of two worlds. You came back to your country with a painful exultation, a passionate urge for action, and a desire to make the free strings of your world vibrate in the ambitious style you’d seen overseas. But your message of greatness left your world cold; and in that coldness you did not read, certainly, any lack of vocation for grandeur, but only that the hour had not yet arrived. Then night truly fell upon you.

Adam Buenosayres refills his pipe. It’s raining hard again outside his window. He wants to cling yet to the images he has warmed up and relived in memory. But the images flee, disappear in the distance, return to their murky cemeteries. The past is now a dry branch, the present announces nothing to him, and the future is colourless before his eyes. Adam remains empty before a deserted window.

“Which was leading him to so sorry a pass…”

Chapter 2

— You, Mother! Are you aware of the responsibility you bear for your Son, who is soon to enter the stormy fray of life, with no other spiritual or moral arms than the ones forged in the home? Home, I said. Sacred word! Mother, have you reflected upon the dangers lying in wait for your child if he’s left exposed to the temptations of the street, which looks to be the case?

The Principal waits for an answer, his little eyes radiating severity and reproach. His voice is mellifluous, even though his earthen complexion, his sharply defined features, his rustic torso, and a viscous melancholy oozing from him like resin from a tree all reveal him to be an authentic son of Saturn. He wears — and swears by — a greenish-skyblue-grey suit, with spongy tones and rare glints of indigo, astonishing colours which, according to the scholar Di Fiore, could be produced only in the workshop of the great outdoors, or in one governed by the most niggardly economy. Nonetheless, his outfit is brightened by three vehement notes: a shirt the colour of magpie vomit (Adam Buenosayres’s definition), a frenetically green bow tie, and boots of hallucinatory yellow.

— Answer, Mother! insists the Principal, getting pedagogically vexed.

But the woman takes refuge in a seamless, humble, vegetable silence. She stands with her arms curved round her belly and her eyes in thrall to those magic, hypnotic boots. To be sure, her mind floats intact on the surface of the Principal’s speech, which she doesn’t understand and never will.

— She won’t cry, whispers Quiroga, the teacher from San Luis de la Punta de los Venados.1 He’s standing beside the large window in the Principal’s office with some fellow teachers — Adam Buenosayres, Fats Henríquez, and Di Fiore. Outside the window the sky is grey and pregnant with rain.

Fats Henríquez, embalmer of birds, fixes his cold, Anubis-like gaze on the Mother.

— Hard as a rock, he says at last, turning to look at a dead swallow lying in the palm of his hand.

— She’d be better off crying and getting it over with! Adam Buenosayres mutters between his teeth. The poor thing would spare herself the rest of the damn speech and give Pestalozzi^2 his first-degree satisfaction. Second-degree satisfaction is when the kid starts crying because his mother is crying. The third degree is the crowning touch, when Pestalozzi in turn weeps along with mother and son. That’s what he likes to call “a positive reaction”!

Peering at the sky through the window, the scholar Di Fiore approves with a nod of his big, brainy head.

— All told, he grunts, three dehydrated bodies. As if the atmosphere isn’t wet enough already!

Sunny and fresh, Quiroga’s laughter washes over the group at the window. Meanwhile, the Mother has settled firmly into her abstract attitude. The Principal, nonplussed at how long her conscience is taking to respond, raises his eyes to the bust of Sarmiento snoozing atop the Principal’s bookshelf between a criollo duck and a turtle, both stuffed. In the national hero’s dour countenance he undoubtedly finds the impetus he needs, because right away he forgets about the Mother and sets upon the boy, who at that moment is busy exchanging smiles and gestures with a small group of pupils outside, who reciprocate in vibrant solidarity.

— You, Child! declaims the Principal. Listen to me, Child! Look me in the eyes, Child! Because of your misbehaviour I’ve had to summon your mother, taking her away from the home that needs her so much. Answer me, Child! Is that any way to repay the thousand-and-one sacrifices your mother has made to raise you, protect you, and educate you? Mother, I said. Sacred word! Let’s add up the material costs alone. How old are you, Child?

— Ten, the boy answers without much concern.

— A real little man. Let’s say it costs a peso a day (and I’m underestimating) to keep you in food, clothing, and school expenses. Tell me, Child. How many days are there in a commercial year?

— A hundred and sixty, the boy hazards adventurously.

In the Principal’s face, the dun accents of Saturn are accentuated.

— Three hundred and sixty! he shouts. Three hundred and sixty times ten makes three thousand six hundred Argentine pesos.

The boy goes wide-eyed at this mathematical revelation.

— And that’s not all! the Principal adds triumphantly. Let’s suppose your mother were in possession of that much capital and calculate how much interest she’d have earned on it in ten years. Child, do you understand how interest rates work?

— No, sir.

— I suspected as much. Let’s take, for example, an interest rate of five percent, which is what Mortgage Bonds are paying. Let’s see, here. Just a minute.

Seizing a pencil, he does a feverish calculation on a notepad. At the same time Adam Buenosayres growls beside the window:

— God! What crime has this poor kid committed to deserve such punishment?

— A fist-fight with another kid in the hollow of Neuquén Street, responds Quiroga.

— Is that all? At his age, I was in a fight every day.

The scholar Di Fiore raises an index finger to his temple.

— See this scar? he says. Got hit by a rock when us guys in the Gaona gang challenged the guys from Billinghurst.

The four of them smile alongside the window. Sarmiento himself, on the bookshelf, seems less dour, as though he too were recalling the heroes Barrilito and Chuña.3 But the Principal is waving a sheet of paper in the boy’s face.

— One thousand eight hundred pesos in interest! he exclaims. Three thousand seven hundred in capital! Sum total: five thousand four hundred pesos!

Turning to the woman, he adds:

— Mother, after so much sacrifice for the sake of your child, are you going to let him be ruined by the influence of the street? Do you know where that influence could lead? To delinquency, the hospital, jail!

Quickly, Adam turns to his three friends and parodies:

— Jail, I said. Sacred word!

And he makes his escape through the door, leaving behind three cruel chortles, one mother engrossed in thought, one worried boy, one vexed Principal, one dead swallow.

A glacial wind whips through the column-flanked corridor. Adam Buenosayres deeply inhales its gusts. Then he slips between two columns out to the schoolyard where three hundred wound-up schoolboys yell and push and shove beneath a sky the colour of tarnished brass, between walls sweating moisture and fatigue. As he makes his way through hectic bunches of children, Adam Buenosayres takes the measure of the void in his soul. More than ever he feels a lack of internal pressure that leaves him helplessly exposed to external images. Scenes, shouts, colours, and shapes irrupt into his empty soul, like a mob of brutal strangers invading an uninhabited site.

Just then, a deafening clamour breaks out among the schoolboys. Looking across the schoolyard, he sees a swarm of boys around a centre he can’t yet make out. Their jeers and hoots of laughter seem to condense into one:

— Iron face! Iron face!

He walks toward the source of the uproar. But the chorus of boys is breached violently, as a kid comes charging out with head lowered in a wild bid to escape. Adam Buenosayres catches him on the fly and, glancing at his face, discovers the reason for the tumult: a terrible paralysis has hardened the lines of the child’s countenance, imposing a strange metal-or rock-like rigidity. Mouth and chin seem to be permanently contracted in a cruel rictus. His eyes, staring fixedly, express ferocity, undermined only by the tear trembling on each of his eyelids. He’s wearing a sailor suit; the long pants veil the severity of the orthopedic shoes. While straightening up the boy’s dishevelled clothes, Adam takes a look around. He sees a circle of faces observing him expectantly. Some of them, innocent in their wickedness, are still laughing and whispering, “Iron face!” Stroking the child’s cheeks still trembling under his hands, Adam asks him:

— What’s your name?

— Tristán Silva, answers Iron Face in a kind of grunt.

— Is this your first day at this school?

— Yes.

Adam uses his handkerchief to dry the two tears that can’t quite decide to slide down that frightful face. Then he holds out his open hand to the child.

— Tristán Silva, he says. You and I are going to be friends. How about it?

— Yes, grunts Tristán, who has grasped the offered hand.

To make the others aware of this gesture of friendship, Adam walks around among the onlookers, Tristán’s hand in his. Then he returns him to the group of his enemies, who now embrace and acclaim him. Oh, world! But Señor Henríquez, embalmer of birds, has just given the order to line up for a run. Three hundred schoolboys, anxious to shake off the cold, form up in impatient squads.

— Ready, set, go!

The race begins, the schoolyard rumbles underfoot, shouts of joy explode. Adam, in the centre of the circle, is watching the parade of vertiginous faces, when he feels Tristán Silva’s hand slip back into his.

— Shall we run? he asks.

— Yes! answers Tristan, piercing Adam with hard eyes.

Holding on tight to the child’s hand, Adam joins the circle of runners, amid flushed cheeks and noisy breathing. Clinging to Adam’s hand, Tristan hops in the air like a rag doll; the metal of his orthopedic boots clangs on the hard tiles. Not a single muscle moves in his face, but a long roar comes out of his chest and bursts from his lips. And Adam understands that Iron Face probably has no other way to laugh.

When the bell rings for the second time, the pupils break from standing at attention and in orderly fashion seek their habitual place in line. Adam is standing in front of his pupils, observing as they form up in a wiggly double file that is gradually straightening. Suddenly, he sees the Principal approaching with a triumphant air, his eyes tearful, his mouth quivering in an imminent sob.

— They’ve reacted! he exclaims. The mother and the boy have reacted positively!

— Congratulations, Adam tells him, winking to his left at Quiroga, who chokes back laughter.

But the Principal waves an energetic hand above his brow, as though refusing an invisible crown of laurel leaves.

— Just doing my job, he concedes. All in a day’s work.

Drying his tears with a coloured handkerchief, he turns and flees down the hallway.

Emptiness of soul, solitude, and ice. The two lines are now still, and Adam Buenosayres, tearing himself away from the spectacle of his own desolation, looks at thirty childish faces looking back at him, faithful mirrors of his own face. They mustn’t notice anything! And, as so many times before, a revivifying echo awakes in his heart at the sight of this new world waiting for him. To approach their world, to go back up the stream of their newborn language, grasp that burgeoning new life pliant to the mere weight of his voice or gaze! So he puts his right hand on Ramos’s shoulder and his left on Falcone’s, each of them at the head of a line.

— Did you bring your composition? he asks Ramos, the boy with the golden head.

— Yes, Ramos answers. It was a hard subject.

— Did it turn out all right?

In the boy’s blue eyes there is a glint of restless creativity.

— Hmm! he says. The description of Polyphemus…

— Sir! interrupts Falcone, rubbing his hands together. Today we’re doing Pythagoras’s theorem!

Adam looks at him, and smiles again at how the well the bird’s name suits the boy: his lean profile, bushy brows, and keen gaze are somehow as fierce and avid as intelligence itself.

— That’s right, Adam admits. Were you looking forward to learning it?

— Yes, answers Falcone.

— Why?

— The kids in the other sixth-grade class say they didn’t understand it.

— How tragic! Ramos mocks.

— I always understand, Falcone says confidently, blinking like a bird of prey.

Adam hugs the two heads, golden and hawkish, to his chest. Then, sought by many eyes, he begins his habitual walk between the double file.

First he comes upon Bustos, who stops him with his sharp voice, his perfidious clown smile, and his puddle-coloured eyes that look about ready to pop out of his head.

— Sir, announces Bustos. Another miracle!

— What happened?

— Cueto laughed!

Adam turns to Cueto, the sphinx of the class, and contemplates the child’s immutably serious face.

— No! he exclaims. It can’t be true!

— Cross my heart and hope to die! Bustos assures him.

Amid singing laugher, Adam moves on, pausing in front of Gaston Dauthier, a bundle of nerves.

— Bonjour, Dauthier.

— Bonjour, monsieur, Gaston answers. Are we going to play against the other class today?

— Hmm, Adam prevaricates dubiously.

He turns to the orator Fratino who, like Gaston, is already peering up at the sky.

— What do you think? he asks the boy.

Teseo Fratino raises a professorial hand and suggests in an exquisite voice:

— Should the weather conditions be favourable…

— Will we get rain in the fourth period? Adam insists.

— Sir, I cannot say. I have not consulted the barometer.

Fratino’s vocabulary provokes more laughter. But the orator’s cold eyes nail his mockers, and a sneer of disdain breaks the impeccable line of his mouth. Then Adam abruptly sticks two fingers into the ribs of Terzián, the actor.

— Hands up! he says.

Terzián raises his arms, as if terrified. His mercurial face reflects fear, then fury, then a furtive attempt at resistance. His arm begins to creep down to draw an imaginary revolver. But Adam keeps him covered, and the actor soon gestures his compliance before the inevitable.

Fatso Atadell has been watching the farce, his mouth full, eternally ruminating the pleasant fruits of the earth. He is vast in flesh, in clothing, in smiles.

— Fatso! Adam accosts him, pretending to be deeply concerned. Chewing on something again? Is man born only to encase himself in a horrible layer of fat? No, Fatso, no! The spirit has its needs, too. If you stopped chewing for a minute, you’d hear — oh, Fatso! — the voice of your soul asking for its lunch.

Serenely impervious, not ceasing to chew and smile, Fatso Atadell pretends to ignore Adam’s chiding.

— Sir, he announces. Papucio is sad.

Adam turns to look at Papucio, who has the look of an adolescent malevo overcome by melancholy.

— What’s wrong? Adam asks him.

— Nothing, grunts Papucio. My flowerpots are too tight.

— Your what?

— My shoes, sir. They’re gonna bring on my loquats again.

— What loquats?

— My corns. And if we play against the other class today — oh, brother!

Américo Nossardi is standing at the end of the line, apparently wrapped up in his own little world. He’s examining a model airplane, the patient work of his own hands.

— Does it fly? Adam asks him.

The young man raises perplexed eyes.

— No, he says. The motor’s too heavy.

The review is finished, and youthful squirming is making the lines wobble. Adam Buenosayres, detached from himself, is now one more member of the noisy phalanx.

— Heads up! he shouts. Look to the future!

Thirty childish smiles respond to his joke.

— Forward, march!

Beneath a sky of tarnished brass proceed thirty smiles.

The classroom is on the top floor, olive-coloured, with a big corner window overlooking the intersection of two little suburban streets. The rows of desks are all oriented toward the light of the window. On the right stands a wardrobe; on top of it, displayed for the world’s amazement, rests a cardboard planetarium, Nossardi’s ingenious construction. The nine planets, dyed a demonic red, revolve by means of a clockwork device around a happy sun within a space of violent indigo. Facing the pupils’ seats is the teacher’s desk, its only decoration a globe of the world with a cracked and fissured surface (a symbol?). Two chalkboards extend their black expanse across the front and lefthand walls. The former has a right-angled triangle drawn on it. On each of the triangle’s sides, Falcone has just drawn a square in different colours, to wit: a yellow square on the hypotenuse, and on the two adjacent sides a green and a blue one. At the other blackboard, Núñez is concluding the arithmetic demonstration.

— That’s it, sir, he says. A difference of only twenty-six square millimetres.

— Very good, Adam Buenosayres approves from his desk. He turns then to Falcone, who has just completed the graphic demonstration.

— What does that demonstrate? Adam asks.

— It demonstrates, recites Falcone, that in every right-angled triangle the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.

— Good. You can both return to your seats.

As Falcone and Núñez go back to their desks, Adam addresses the class:

— Has everyone understood?

— Yes, sir.

— So this is the famous Pythagorean theorem? Falcone says, without hiding the disappointment already gnawing at his voracious mind.

— Nothing more, nothing less, Adam responds. Let’s see, now. Who was Pythagoras?

— Sir, answers Dauthier. He was a Greek philosopher and mathematician.

Fratino the orator lets his melodious voice be heard:

— The story goes that Pythagoras discovered his theorem in the bathtub and that he ran out into the street, completely naked, crying “Eureka!”

— Musta bin a nutcase! Papucio grumbles from his corner.

But golden-headed Ramos smiles with pointed irony.

— Wasn’t Archimedes the guy who jumped up out of the bathtub? he asks.

— Archimedes was the one, Adam confirms. The orator Fratino is slandering Pythagoras, who was a very serious gentleman.

— Sir, declaims an unmoved Fratino. I committed a lapsus… how do you say?

— I’d say a lapsus memoriae, laughs Adam.

— That’s it, a lapsus memoriae.

From his corner, Papucio eyes Fratino malevolently.

— If you didn’t yap so much, he says, you wouldn’t make so many dumb mistakes.

— One can have a temporary lapse of memory, can’t one? protests Fratino.

— Go on back to the farm and drink chicken milk!

Papucio’s advice causes a wave of hilarity throughout the class, except for Cueto, off in his own world, and the clown Bustos, who is tatooing an anchor on his wrist; both boys are deep in meditation. The actor Terzián, moreover, is miming a pensive and dignified Pythagoras, the index finger of one hand on his temple, the other stroking his hypothetical philosopher’s beard. All to the delight of Fatso Atadell, who encourages him with his vast, full-moon smile. Meanwhile, the hilarity has calmed down. When silence has been restored, Papucio can still be heard whinging in his corner.

— The flowerpots still bothering you? inquires Adam.

— No, grouses Papucio. I was thinking about that theorem. What’s it good for?

Adam Buenosayres looks at him benevolently.

— Once upon a time, he says, a great mathematician had to sleep in a bed so short that, no matter how he tried, the poor fellow couldn’t stretch out to his full length. Either his feet hung over one end, or his head over the other. Well, he got out of bed quite perturbed, turned on the light, measured the bed, found a pencil, and started writing out all kinds of formulas. Until finally he remembered Pythagoras’s theorem and found the solution.

— How? Falcone, very intrigued, wanted to know.

— He lay down along the line of the hypotenuse — in other words, diagonally.

Amid the unanimous classroom laughter, Papucio scolds one last time:

— Wouldn’t do me no good, he says. I sleep on the floor.

— Seriously, though, Adam continues, man cannot ask that all things be useful in a grossly utilitarian fashion. How have we defined man?

— An intellectual creature, says Ramos.

— That’s right. Man, as an intelligent being, takes pleasure in knowing. And that pleasure in intelligence — isn’t that in itself useful?

— True! exclaims Falcone, astounded perhaps by an insight into himself.

But Adam Buenosayres notices that most of the boys are not following him. And so, changing his tone of voice, he adds:

— That’s why I always tell my pupil Atadell… Heavens!

Suddenly the target of everyone’s gaze, fat Atadell exhibits his mandibles in motion, his eternal, ruminating placidity, his smile lodged somewhere beyond good and evil.

— Up to the front! Adam tells him. Empty those pockets!

Not without effort, fat Atadell gets up from his desk, walks between two rows of curious onlookers, and lumbers up to the teacher’s desk. Once there, splendidly good-natured, he plunges his left hand into a fathomless pocket. From the cave comes a host of objects that form a line on the desk: two small half-eaten chocolate bars, a handful of currants, six obviously sticky dates, nine not-very-clean mints, a shapeless packet of Japanese-style nougat, two pods of carob beans, half a cake wrapped in tissue paper, a string of rock-hard doughnuts, four walnuts, and eight almonds. The felicitous birthing of the pocket’s progeny elicits jubilant exclamations. Expectations are high when Atadell plumbs his other pocket with his magic fingers. But, alas! The other pocket disappoints such legitimate hopes, for its contents amount only to six beat-up marbles, six feet of twine, and the very rusty trigger from a revolver. The fat boy’s two cornucopias now emptied, Adam Buenosayres sends him off with a benevolent gesture, then turns to the class.

— Work on your notebooks now, he orders.

While the pupils write in silence, Adam leans on the windowsill. Leaning out toward the street, he lets his eyes wander. The pregnancy of the air resolves now into a very fine drizzle which, veil-like, shrouds the suburb and softens its harsh contours. Below, by a doorway, an old man sits smoking his pipe. Beside him, a pensive woman forgets her mate, and her mind drifts off toward drowsy distances. A road sweeper, in the middle of the street, gathers dead leaves, puts them into his wheelbarrow, and goes off with his pile of silver and copper tones, furtive image of autumn. Dripping sheets hang straight down in empty patios. In one patio, over there, a magnolia rises like a sombre ghost. In another, a lemon tree staggers under the weight of its fruit. Further away the poplars are nodding in the Plaza Irlanda. In the distance, unanimous in their elevation, the two steeples of Our Lady of Buenos Aires point to the highroads of heaven for the benefit of the suburb. Gazing at them, Adam evokes the interior of the basilica, its altar in the form of a shrine, and the image of a woman enthroned in the heights, with the Child in one arm and a ship in the other.4 How good it would be to find himself in that deserted space now, beneath the light filtered and exalted by the stained-glass windows! And to meditate there on the secret of that enigmatic Woman, on the vocation of the Child, on the odyssey of the Ship! He notes, however, that his meditation is returning him to a clime that is off-limits for him this afternoon. He leaves the window and looks at the desks: all heads are bent over notebooks. All except Nossardi’s. With eyes on his miniature airplane, he is lost perhaps in a daydream of conquered heights. Bellerophon!5

— Isn’t our floating debt already too big? shrills the Principal, angrily setting his coffee cup aside.

— In my opinion, Señor Inverni rejoins, the national reserve is so formidable, it’s no problem to mortgage it somewhat. That is, of course, as long as it’s done for the benefit of public works and social projects, which we owe to future generations. (Bravo! Very good! Señor Inverni seems to hear frenetic applause from an invisible crowd.)

In front of the Principal’s angry face, Inverni takes a sip of his now lukewarm coffee. He is a teacher lean of flesh, and he has the pimply complexion, that colour of venereal disease frequently found in men of advanced ideas. But the Principal’s menacing brow is still furrowed.

— Ha! he laughs bitterly. Hand the country over to foreign interests!

The scene unfolds in the Principal’s office, around a table circumscribed by eight teacherly figures drinking their afternoon-recess coffee. Beside the window, the women teachers huddle in a hermetic group, their faces turned toward a waning light — the dry, withered faces of virgins dedicated to the goddess Pedagogy.

— It’s not just that our resources are in foreign hands, growls Di Fiore. The worst of it is that foreigners are carrying out a veritable program of corruption.

— How is that? asks Inverni.

— The Argentine, by nature, was and must be a sober man, as our country folk were and still are. And so were, and are, the immigrants responsible for the existence of the majority of us. But what’s happened? Foreigners have induced us into a cult of sensuality and hedonism, inventing a thousand needs we didn’t have before. And — of course! — it’s all so they can sell us the geegaws they produce industrially, and so redeem the gold they pay us for our raw materials. In plain language, that’s what I call eating with both hands!

The Principal raises his hand as if to bless Di Fiore.

— You said it, sir! he exclaims. You said it!

— So, protests Inverni, shouldn’t our country keep up with the benefits of progress?

— Useless needs! shrieks the Principal. Flimflams of foreign capital! Just look at what the English are up to now, trying to get us to wear their Oxford trousers!

Adam Buenosayres urgently elbows Quiroga:

— Look out! he warns him under his breath. Perfidious Albion is about to make an appearance.

— What have Oxford trousers got to do with anything?

With a half smile, the Principal spells out his concerns:

— It’s a scheme for selling more wool, he asserts. They design them ridiculously wide, so it takes twice as much material to make them, and long enough so they get worn out rubbing against the ground. And that’s not all! They’ve also introduced…

Here he gets flustered and glances out the corner of his eye at the didactic virgins.

— … short underwear, he says at last, cautiously.

— What for? asks Di Fiore.

— You’ll see. Short underwear has the effect of putting one’s knees in direct contact with the wool of the trousers. And so, within a single year, the body’s sudoriferous secretions destroy the fabric, which otherwise would easily last three years.

— A diabolical plan, growls Adam Buenosayres, as Quiroga tries to stifle a laugh.

And looking at the Principal as though eliciting a confidence, he says:

— I imagine you wear long underwear.

— Naturally! confesses the Principal. I’m not going to fatten the bank accounts of the English!

Quiroga’s laughter explodes with intense hilarity:

— But, Sir! he exclaims. Nobody wears long underwear anymore!

The Principal gives him a look full of vinegar and bile.

— Sir! he upbraids him. This is no joking matter.

Half joking and half sincere, plaintive and pathetic, Di Fiore begins to extol the virtues of long underwear:

— Our glorious forefathers wore it. And the garment gave them a truly patriarchal sense of security and decorum. It’s worn by old politicians even today, those who stay in power forever and never get around to kicking the bucket. And they’re right, because I’m telling you now, the secret of longevity is in long underwear.

The scholar’s words return the tertulia to its true atmosphere.

— A luminous theory, laughs Adam Buenosayres, looking affectionately at Di Fiore, lean, intelligent, down in the mouth.

— Hmm! objects the Principal. The problem with Argentines, gentlemen, is that they turn everything into a joke. And the solution to our problems, gentlemen, requires great seriousness.

— They’ll get serious one day! Di Fiore warns in a menacing tone.

Inverni looks at him for a moment, with lowered eyelids and a half smile:

— When? he asks.

— When the hour of truth arrives.

— And how do you know that hour will come?

— Sir, answers Di Fiore, I believe in la Grande Argentina.6

CIRCE-FERNÁNDEZ: “On the way, you will first come upon the Sirens, who fascinate all men who cross their path. Woe to the reckless one who approaches them and hears their voices! Never will he see his wife again; nor will his little ones throng round him at any joyful homecoming. Seated in a smiling meadow, the Sirens bewitch mortal men with the sweet harmony of their song. But beside them, human bones and rotten cadavers are piled up, drying out in the sun. Give them a wide berth, and use soft wax to stop the ears of your companions, so that none may hear them! But if you wish to hear them — if you wish to listen to those melodious voices without risk — have them bind you to the sailing ship: have them lash you to the mast, feet and hands.”

Through the voice of Fernández speaks Circe, she who knows many drugs. That admonitory voice, resounding in the classroom, makes the children’s eyes brighten with a sense of foreboding. Standing side by side with Fernández, Terzián is waiting, all ready to act out a hair-raising version of Ulysses. Balmaceda, Fratino, and MacLeish, the three illustrious voices of the year, will read the part of the Sirens; though still silent, their bearing already hints at menace.

In the watery afternoon light that rubs out lines, kills colours, and seems to devour even the slightest sound, thirty boys under the spell of ancient words now leave their jail and clamber over a honey-coloured beach, beneath a torrential sun that makes Circe’s palace glitter in the distance. The musical coast is festooned by a double line of foam. Beside the saltwater, the ship of grand adventures still lies upon the sand. The sparkling sea, bellowing like a young bull, licks the keel and the naked heels of the sailors. As Circe speaks, Adam Buenosayres, from his corner, studies the constellation of rapt eyes. Ramos, golden-headed, holds his breath as though afraid that his creative urge might disrupt the harmonious flight of the rhapsody. Forgetting his cardboard wings, Nossardi is now gliding in other skies. And even Bustos has been enraptured, his penknife in one hand and a half-tortured pencil in the other.

But Ulysses holds forth in his mariner’s voice:

ULYSSES-TERZIÁN: “My companions tie me to the mast, then resume their places on the ship’s benches and once again ply the foaming water with their oars. The vessel moves rapidly. Now we are close to shore, no doubt our voices can be heard from there. And now the Sirens notice the ship’s approach and begin to intone their sonorous chant.”

Ulysses stops talking, and immediately Balmaceda, Fratino, and MacLeish burst out in chorus:

THE SIRENS: “Oh, famous Ulysses, glory of the Achaians! Draw near, stop the boat and hear our song! No mariner has ever passed in his black ship without listening to the sweet tones flowing from our mouths. Rather, he who listens to us returns to his land wiser than before. For we know all the travails that Greeks and Trojans alike have suffered in Ilium; nothing happens in the vast universe outside our awareness.”

Ah, the ship! Watch out! The oars rise and dip in the accelerated rhythm of flight. The oarsmen’s torsos glisten in the sun. And thirty boys, aboard the ship of Ulysses, watch the hero as he struggles to free himself, at once prisoner of a mast and of a song. The boat flies over the salty meadows. The threat of the music has been left behind. Now it is time to untie Ulysses! Let wax no longer cover his prudent ears!

But Adam Buenosayres has deserted the ship and leapt to the beach. Amid carrion stinking in the sun and under a cloud of sticky bluebottle flies, he has seen the face of the Sirens and inhaled the breath from their horrible mouths. To hear the music, without falling into the snare of the one who proffers it! How? Most certainly, a ship and a mast are required.

Within the classroom and without, the foggy afternoon light gnaws at everything in a sort of universal dissolution. But thirty children row with Ulysses in the direction of the Blessèd Isles.

And Adam Buenosayres, lost in his corner, evokes an enigmatic figure of Woman in whose right hand a little ship fills its sails.

Chapter 3

— One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve.

The twelve bell-strokes were twelve little owls:

Someone opened the cage of the steeple, and off they flew.1

Midnight: solitude, emptiness. Alone, I alone on the skin of the world, spinning as it flees, fleeing as it spins, “an old top without children.”2 Why without children? At that time I was playing around with logic, not noticing that dissimilar objects are always harmoniously related: splendor ordinis. Last night I tried to explain it at Ciro’s place — quite sloshed. That other image, too: “The Earth is an antelope in flight.” Or this one: “World, a stone buzzing in the seven colours.” Cosmic terror, ever since my childhood: a little boy clinging to his motionless horse and sobbing in anguish beneath the southern stars. The cold mechanism of time, cone of shadow, cone of light, night and day, solstice and equinox: the sun tells us fabulous lies, and the earth dons and doffs her splendours like a prostitute; “Hail, drunken bluebottle!”3 And in the end only a stone fleeing as it spins, spinning as it flees in an infinite space… no, indefinite space. Because the notion of infinity applies only to… Enough, my soul, enough!

Adam pauses, under the rain, at the corner of Gurruchaga and Triunvirato. From there, still undecided, he contemplates the ghostly ambience of Gurruchaga Street, a tunnel burrowing into the very flesh of the night, elongated between two rows of shivering paradise trees, their feet bound in metal rings, like two files of galley slaves trudging toward winter. Phosphorescent like the eye of a cat, the clock of San Bernardo peeps out from its tower. Not a single tremor of the final bell-stroke remains in the air, and silence flows now from above, blood of dead bells. Unexpectedly, a treacherous gust rakes the trees and they whimper like children. A fistful of rain hits Adam in the face; he staggers in a deluge of fallen leaves rushing along, rustling like old papers, while the streetlamps suspended overhead dance a mad jig of hanged men. The gust has passed. Silence and stillness are restored beneath the rain’s soft song. Solitude, emptiness, Adam enters Gurruchaga Street.

— Hermetic doors and windows, the keys turned, bolts drawn: thus they defend their escape into sleep. The sleeper’s house, safeguarded like trench or tomb. Yesterday’s combat, right here: not a soul left on the battlefield! Men and women, Trojans and Tyrians, what are they doing now? Their prone bodies sailing away on beds of iron, wood, or brass inside impregnable cubes — all have stolen away! Only I alone. If in the depths of midnight, if at the precise instant when one day gives way to another, if at that very juncture one might slip through a crack, freed from time! Yesterday, an anxious little boy among the party lights and music, who saw how time flowed like acid, gnawing at the festive house and those inside. Or an adolescent who dreamed of banishing Time from his poetry… Lord, I would have liked to be like the men of Maipú, who knew when to laugh and when to cry, when to work or sleep, fight or be reconciled; men well grounded in this world, in its bright and colourful reality! And not go wandering doubtful and mistrustful as though among vain images, reading into the signs of things much more than they literally say, and receiving, in the possession of things, much less than they promised. For I have devoured creation and its terrible multiplicity of forms: ah, colours that call out, impetuous gestures, lines to make one die of love! Only to find my thirst deceived, then to suffer remorse for my injustice to the world’s creatures, for demanding of them a happiness they cannot give. And now this disappointment — also unjust! — that makes me see creatures as letters of a dead language. Not to have looked, ah, not to have looked! Or to have looked always and only with a reader’s eyes like those I had in childhood, back there in the garden of Maipú, when in the beauty of intelligible forms I attained a vision of that which is stable and neither suffers autumn nor undergoes change. And therein lie the injustice and the remorse: to have regarded with a lover’s eyes what I should have seen with the eyes of a reader. (Must jot this down as soon as I get home.) How well they go together, the street and midnight and the drizzle! The Izmir Café is closed, too. No. Somebody’s singing.

With his ears peeled, Adam Buenosayres stops in front of the Izmir. Past the half-drawn metal blinds, in the murky interior, he can see hazy human figures standing still or gesturing sleepily. From within come the strains of an Asian song; accompanied by a lute or zither, a plangent voice is tearing at throaty gutturals and wringing a sob from each and every ah. Adam can smell sweet anisette, as well as strong tobacco smouldering no doubt in four-tubed hookahs.

“Another cloistered world. They, too, have traced their hermetic circle, and now they sail away, escaping in song. I saw them yesterday — their greenish faces and heavy-lashed eyes — cruel witnesses of the battle. What landscapes or scenes will they be recalling now, enclosed in their circle, sailors in music? Faces, perhaps. Countenances of men, women, or children whose voices once sang this same song of torn gutturals and sobbed ah’s beneath a different sky — oh, but one infinitely more beautiful! Why more beautiful? For being far off. An ancient song, no doubt. And all the other tongues that sang it before: thousands of lips undone and faces dispelled, back there in the sad graveyards of Asia Minor: mouths full of dirt and eyes full of lime. All have stolen away!”

Adam takes off his broad-brimmed hat. Two or three withered little leaves fall from it. His hand wipes away the raindrops streaming down his face. Then he starts to walk again, up the street.

— And the days used to begin with my mother’s song:

Four white doves,

four blue…

Or that other song, in Maipú, a chorus of kids beside Grandma at the rain-lashed window:

Good Friday, Good Friday,

day of great Passion…4

And the one at Teachers’ College, adolescent voices, salt and pepper eyes in the big music room:

Eternal page of Argentine glory,

melancholy image of the fatherland…5

Or the one we liked to sing in the basement of the Royal Keller, we longhaired poets and passionate avant-gardists in the Santos Vega group, to the tune of “La donna è mobile”:

One automobile, two automobiles,

three automobiles, four automobiles…6

And that one in Madrid, amid the fervent twang of guitars and arguments:

Looks like snowflakes

are falling on your face…7

Or the one in Paris, in Atanasio’s studio, the table laid among figures of clay, the sacrifice of a white hen on the altar of the Muses, an army of bottles:

In a tower in Nantes

there was a prisoner…8

And that other one in Sanary, or the one in Italy… Songs! They come back now to put me face to face with a day’s pleasure or a night’s shame: remorse for having sung and for having heard others sing. Silence — how I sought and cherished it when a child! Voyage to silence, through the forest of nighttime sounds. And the way I’d walk on tiptoe with reverential stealth, my urge to silently open doors and drawers: liturgies of silence. Because I already knew, without being told, that silence is not music’s negation but all music in its infinite possibility and in its blissful indifferentiation. Yes, the musical chaos in which all the undifferentiated songs still form a single canticle, without mutually excluding each other, without committing this injustice in the order of time. Anaximander,9 old and dark, I salute you on this final night! And your disciple Anaximenes, as well, with his sacred pneuma: the breath of creative inspiration and expiration!10 The theory I expounded yesterday at Ciro’s — when quite sloshed. Shouldn’t have spoken, no one understood a thing. Yes, Schultz did, good old Schultz. Ah, all in One! Sadness is born in the multiple.

Sad and brooding, Adam Buenosayres looks at the manifestation of diversity around him. He caresses the trunks of trees, as though feeling for some heartbeat beneath the moist bark. Then he crouches down, picks up a handful of dead leaves, breathes in their bitter aroma, and lets them slowly fall. Afterward he moves on, touching wet walls, cold thresholds, the wood of doors, the iron of balconies.

— Smooth or rough, hot or cold, wet or dry: news from the realm of the external, vague news. Touch is not an intellectual sense. Could you attain awareness of the splendor formae of the rose by touching it? And yet, no other sense aspires so vigorously to the direct possession of creatures — to touch them, apprehend them, squeeze them, get them under one’s skin. Yes, the blindest, most fumbling, most disillusioned of the senses. And the least culpable. Would your hand reach out for a rose, without prior awareness of its splendor formae, a perception that only the intellectual senses can deliver? If only one hadn’t looked, heard, touched… Whoa! What apparition have we got here?

Adam takes another ten paces before the figure becomes clear; with a start he sees a motionless rider on his mount. Drawing nearer, Adam recognizes Corporal Antúnez of Precinct 27, sleeping in the rain, solidly placed in the stirrups, while his horse, reins drooping from its neck, picks at the blades of grass sprouting at the foot of trees. When Adam approaches, the horse raises its head and studies him nervously. But Adam strokes its wet neck, brow and muzzle, and the animal grows calm, rests its nose on Adam’s shoulder, snorts happily. Like a horseman of iron or steel, Corporal Antúnez sleeps on through the rain and wind. Before going away, Adam rubs his face up against the horse’s muzzle, the only warm thing available in the night, and smells its breath: a pure aroma of crushed grass.

— Uncle Francisco’s yellow horse. I liked the smell of horses. An odour of vegetable breath and farm sweat. This Corporal Antúnez must be a criollo. He has the soul of a cowhand. Like the fellows who would show up now and then at the ranch in Maipú, toward nightfuall. By the green-black tethering post, they’d ask: “Permission to unsaddle?” “Unsaddle, friend, and go on into the kitchen.” Hospitality without borders. Oh, such serious faces, alight with an almost terrible dignity (now I realize); little by little they grew indistinct in the smoke of the wood fire, as the china Encarnación watched over the meat roasting on the brazier, her big eyes eternally watering. “Pretty eyes attract the smoke.” Discreet laughter from another age! And then tales of trips and nighttime roundups out on the plain, in storms: Bahía Blanca, Río Negro, el Chubut, praiseworthy names that tasted of distance. Uncle Francisco assuring me a person could sleep well on horseback. Unsung heroic lives on the prairie: unsung heroic deaths. The death of that calf, for instance, muzzle in the dust, panting its last; before it was even dead, a hawk had perched on its head to peck out its eyes and devour them. And I probably shouldn’t have killed that chajá. I was fifteen years old and had a rusty musket. Nobody knew I was looking for a chajá so I could make toothpicks out of its feathers. A very bad omen. Aunt Martina cried beside the remains of the bird — a pile of grey feathers! — because she knew that when a chajá loses its mate, it loses its desire to live, it dies of hunger and grief. Immediately afterward, that dreadful summer, like a telluric damnation! The enraged sun beat down upon the flooded plain, raising steamy emanations and poisonous breath that seemed to corrupt everything, heaven and earth, men and animals. Uncle Francisco and I rode around on horseback inspecting the desolation; we skinned dead cattle, watched over the handful of sheep eking out their survival up on the hill, rounded up the cows marooned in gullies and reedbeds. A scene of misery, haunted, I sensed, by the vengeful shade of a dead chajá. And yet, a wildly rich, wingèd world was thriving there: flamingos and storks, herons and seagulls, crows and swans, all content in that paradise of still waters and vibrant reeds. And the mosquitos, in late afternoon, mobilized in ravenous clouds. Or that invasion of toads that got in everywhere, even our bedrooms, spitting like enraged cats; day and night we killed them, skewering them with the pitchfork. Everyone left, women and men alike, all driven away by flood, hunger, and sickness. Only Uncle Francisco, Aunt Martina, and I stayed on in the house, now too big for us. We had to start over from scratch: remake buildings and gardens, and save what little livestock was still alive. We were reduced to eating seagulls, tough meat; when they followed the plough, swooping, we’d knock them out of the air with a whip. The new settlement was to be built on the hill with its single tree, safe from the floodwaters. Uncle Francisco framed the outline of the settlement, setting corner posts and beams, ridge boards, wattle and daub, while I directed the mud-stomping operation, circulating on horseback among the mares covered in mud up to the base of their tails, making them knead the mixture of earth and water with their hooves, all beneath a scorching sun, with the humidity, and the drone of the horseflies which, after biting, would fall into a blood-gorged lethargy, until my whip squashed them against the necks of the mares. Uncle Francisco, laughing or humming, chewing his black tobacco, La Hija del Toro brand, mixed straw with mud, and kneaded it all into cobs; setting these in place, he gradually built up the rustic walls. But when the construction was nearly finished, his energy began to flag. That admirable man, who had overcome so many hardships on the plain, became taciturn and sullen. Incredibly, he even gave up his ostrich-throat tobacco pouch. That night, Aunt Martina and I heard him cry out out in his sleep, shouting orders for the roundup, laughing, swearing, as he tossed and turned on his fever-wracked cot, and thousands of cries from the aquatic beasts outside answered his monologue. It was a very long night. The next day the fever worsened. Uncle Francisco waved his earthy hands, as if working on an invisible construction. His throat parched, he kept asking for something to drink, or struggled to get up and go out to the well in the yard. Aunt Martina and I had to lash him to the bed with two large cinches. But the fever abated at nightfall, and Uncle Francisco, apparently lucid, expressed a strange desire for hot chocolate. As there was none in the house, someone had to go to the station, five leagues away across flooded fields, in nearly total darkness, the night black, hot, and humid as an oven. I was fifteen, and my imagination was easily spooked, but without hesitating I mounted the nocturnal horse and rode all the way to Las Armas and back. How I made it, I still don’t know; mucking though dense reed-beds in water up to the horse’s belly, stirring up storms of wings beating in the night, I had to guess at the whereabouts of gates, unwind wire fences on their tourniquet posts. That night, Uncle Francisco had his hot chocolate, and he sank into a childlike slumber. But the next day we found him dead at the foot of the well, his wet face beaming with immense beatitude. I still don’t know how I, hardly more than a boy, managed to get the clothes off the cadaver, its limbs heavy as ingots, then wash it and get it dressed. Meanwhile Aunt Martina, petrified in her pain, stammered incoherent phrases before the image of Our Lady of Luján^11 propped on a corner shelf between two burning candles. The wake and funeral rites would take place in Maipú. But before we could set out, horses had to be fetched and chosen, and the wagon hitched. The horses had been confined to a corner of the enclosure, the corral having been destroyed by the floodwaters. But that morning they seemed to have gone crazy — maybe it was the wind. Three times I had them together, and three times the lead mare made them bolt and scatter — I could have skinned her alive! At last, when the sun was already high, we set off for Maipú. Uncle Francisco’s body lay on two mattresses in the back of the wagon, his face uncovered, the smile of his final happiness still beaming. I sat in the driver’s seat, the four reins in my grasp. Beside me sat Aunt Martina, a taut-faced sphinx, tearless, expressionless. As we crossed the lowlands, the air overhead was beaten by white, pink, and black wings; reeds in flower trembled; and the glades gleamed like ferruginous mirrors. But Uncle Francisco’s head, jounced by the bumpy ride, kept on smiling, rocking from side to side as if to say no, no, no. As if Uncle Francisco had taken instruction in a deeper reality and wanted to renounce the visible beauty of this world, for another beauty that only eyes turned inward can see. As the sun rose in the sky, we ascended to higher ground, where the wheatfields laughed yes, where the flowers sang yes, where the flocks and shepherds said yes. But the swaying head said no and smiled: a green butterfly had got caught in his beard.12

Adam Buenosayres distractedly feels around in his pocket for his pipe and tobacco pouch. In vain. Forgotten at home.

— Heroic lives without laurels, on the prairie: unsung heroic deaths. Uncle Francisco, Grandfather Sebastián, Aunt Josefa, Casiano the Pampa Indian: all of them have slipped away, out there on the hillside in Maipú. After their battle with the land, they’re laid out and asleep in the fragrant earth; all of them reconciled with the land, in an ultimate embrace. And maybe with heaven too, because they deserved it.

Adam prolongs his midnight walk home. Slow and doubtful, his gait is that of someone not wanting to arrive. The night is intimate, the street abstract, the rain without beginning or end. And Adam would like to forget, let the wind rock him into forgetfulness of himself; or to dissolve like a chunk of salt in the rainwater as it falls and falls, whispering its ancient flood song. But he is all one sleepless eye that turns upon itself a cold, contemplative gaze. He has stopped now beside Old Lady Clotho’s doorway, as deserted as the night. There, in the shadow of Clotho the spinner, the children played the game of Angel and Devil. Adam touches the frigid marble with a sort of caress.

— A game of symbols. What are the Angel and the Devil looking for? A flower. What flower? The predestined rose, happy or sad. Yes, the game of games, perhaps. But if the soul receives the name of rose or carnation, before Angel or Devil come to claim their carnation or rose, where does that leave the soul’s free will? Where is the soul’s responsibility? A game of obscure laws: the theologians in suspense. In any case, the kids play the game happily, as if it were a comedy and not a tragedy. And what if it turned out to be not a drama but an ineffable comedy by the great Author? Then it ought to be played as the children play it, innocently and joyfully, with that wonderful whole-heartedness of children and saints. The drama lies in the loss of one’s innocence and joy. That’s why He said: “Become as little children.”13 Difficult! Ah, Old Lady Clotho has played well, no doubt. I believe she was picked by the Angel! We meet once in a while, at dawn, in front of San Bernardo. I’m going home from a night out, not having slept, grubby with ill-spent wakefulness and ashamed before the new light that smites me like remorse. Clotho is leaving the church after hearing early Mass, her capacious patched-up shawl over her head, ancient rosary between her fingers. We look at each other, I unclean and envious, she clear and true. She smiles at me. I think she smiles at me alone, unless the old woman’s smile is universal like the light. And Clotho redeems me with her gaze and her smile. She knows all and she absolves me, maybe because she has recovered the wisdom of children who play Angel and Devil. How good it would be tonight to rest one’s temples against her hard, grandmotherly knees, and to hear from her lips the great secret!

But Clotho’s doorway is empty, and Adam Buenosayres touches it, in a kind of caress. The limitless night, the murky street, and the infinite rain create around him an abstract ambience, in which he effortlessly divines the soul and himself. Never before has Adam felt so certain of a great divination, but the whole of him is a wakeful eye that turns upon itself, taking in his own unworthiness, and he tells himself it’s too late now to garner the wisdom of Clotho. That’s why, as he continues on his way, he carries within him the notion of his definitive death. He does not know — and it is good he doesn’t know — that he is only wounded and the nature of his wounds is admirable! He thinks he is alone and defeated. And he does not know that invisible armies have just gathered around him and are now fighting for his soul, in a silent clash of angelic swords and demonic tridents! He is unaware of this, and that’s good! But, isn’t that the Flor del Barrio? Yes, Adam recognizes her. Flor del Barrio is huddled in the hollow of a doorway and she waits as always for the Unknown One, gazing toward the end of the street, plastered in makeup and dressed up like a bride doll. A streetlamp, swaying to the rhythm of the wind, alternately bathes her in light and leaves her in the dark. Adam, now in front of the woman, observes her face, slathered in makeup, lifeless; her motionless mascara-stiffened eyelashes; her arms and legs, beneath motley-coloured clothing, more rigid than ever. And he asks her: “Flor del Barrio, who are you waiting for?” Silence! Flor del Barrio doesn’t answer. Then an unknown terror seizes Adam Buenosayres. He feels now there’s something artificial in those eyes, that mouth, those petrified facial muscles. So strong is the impression, Adam cannot resist the impulse to touch her face. But when he does, his fingers are left holding a cardboard mask. And behind it appears the true countenance of the Flor del Barrio: concave eyes, gnawed-away nose, the toothless mouth of Death.

— Imagination! Always busy, as now, on its deceitful loom! It wasn’t enough that I violated creatures, demanding of them what they need not give, could not. No, taking possession of their fantasies, I had to force upon them destinies alien to their essence, some of them poetic, others unmentionable. In how many invented postures have I placed myself, weaver of smoke, since childhood! I confess that, way back when, I imagined my mother’s death, suffering it in daydreams as if it were true. I confess to having beaten world champion Jack Dempsey in Madison Square Garden in New York, a hundred thousand frenetic spectators cheering me on. I confess that, one prodigious night, I broke the bank in Monte Carlo and walked away, rich in gold and melancholy, between a double row of polite gamblers and beautiful international prostitutes. I confess to having suffered the fury of Orlando because of jealous love, and to demolishing Villa Crespo armed only with a mace. I confess to having been a pioneer in Patagonia and founded there the port city of Orionopolis, famous for its navy, which was to expand its reign over the seven seas. I confess to having been dictator of my country, which under my iron rule experienced a new Golden Age through the application of Aristotelian political doctrine. I confess to having practised the purest asceticism in the province of Corrientes, where I cured lepers, performed miracles, and attained beatitude. I confess to having lived poetical-philosophical-heroical-licentious lives in the India of Rama, in the Egypt of King Menes, in Plato’s Greece, in Virgil’s Rome, in the Middle Ages of the monk Abelard, in… Enough!

So do his imagination’s monstrous offspring return now, one after another, filing past his shame-stricken conscience, tracing their ridiculous gestures, theatrical poses, damnable attitudes. Adam Buenosayres wants to be rid of them, but the monsters persist; he has the impression they’re circling him — laughing like demons, palming their howling mouths, winking malignant eyes — as they whirl in a carnivalesque round.

— Enough! Enough! I’ve wasted my only real destiny by assuming a hundred invented shapes. Like a weaver of smoke. Or a motionless god, perhaps, one who never loses his serenity, never breaks his necessary unity, but develops ad intra his possibilities, as though dreaming… Analogy? No! Megalomania. Only a wordsmith!

Angelic swords and demonic tridents clash noiselessly on Gurruchaga Street, fighting over the soul of Adam Buenosayres, wordsmith. For, according to the supreme economy, the soul of one man is worth more than the entire visible universe. But Adam does not know this, and it’s good that he doesn’t yet know. Phew! His nostrils sense the first emanations from La Universal tannery, looming now only a stone’s throw away, with its reeking walls and blind windows. Viscous and shiny under the rain, it looks like a malignant mushroom. Before facing the tannery, Adam stops at the corner, still hesitant. Usually, he holds his breath while making a dash for it across the danger zone. And this time?

— Ulcer of the suburb: soulless capitalists and corrupt inspectors. The stench of carrion, night and day. Yes, just like the dead animals on the prairie. I’ve seen them rotting in the sun, a-boil with worms and a-buzz with flies, in broad daylight displaying the full gamut of sickly greens and purples of corrupted flesh. Even more revolting is the stench of human carrion. First time I smelled it was that day at the Maipú cemetery, when they exhumed the remains of Grandfather Sebastián. Corruptible flesh can’t stand the stink of its own disintegration. But the soul has no sense of smell. Venerable Antigone, fighting both crows and men for the corpse of her brother, fulfilling the funeral rites, at midnight, her soul all alone amid the dust and the stench that cries out the flesh’s defeat! Or Rose of Lima, drinking ulcerous humours so as to humiliate the rebellion of her already mortified body. Or Ramon Llull,14 who advised against fleeing the smell of latrines, in order to recall, time and again, the body’s miserable poverty, so frequently forgotten. And why shouldn’t I do that tonight? Absurd!

But Adam has already set off for the tannery. Between shame and curiosity about himself, he deliberately walks slowy along the sidewalk, breathing in the gradually intensifying foul odours. Meanwhile, the invisible armies at war round about him are seized by a great anxiety. For the battle will take on a new rhythm now that Adam, unbeknownst to himself, has declared himself a belligerent. Now he is beside the tannery’s main gate; from beneath it slither black waters, slurpy viscosities. Pausing there, Adam rests his head against the wet iron and deeply inhales the emanations. A first wave of nausea shakes him from head to foot. Then, anguished, sweating, he vomits profusely against the gate. Still panting, swabbing tears and sweat with his handkerchief, Adam glances along the street:

— Fortunately, not a single witness.

He is not aware that a thousand eyes follow him closely, nor that the battle around him grows more intense, for the definitive moment is approaching. Adam does not know this, and it’s good that he is not yet aware. Curious about himself, smiling at his patently useless gesture, he leaves the gate and starts to walk again. His bodily upset has managed for a moment to silence those intimate voices that have been pursuing him all along the street. But no sooner has he put some distance between himself and the tannery than other voices rush in, murmuring or shouting in his soul, as though the street knew every last one of his regrets and brought them to mind, one by one, as precisely and inexorably as a judge. Over there is the zaguán with the girls (whispers, murmurs!), deserted now, dark and moist as a grotto.

— Young bodies, yesterday, flattered by the light, rendered precious by the praise called out to them by my blood, from this very spot. The One-in-Blue, the One-in-Green, the One-in-Pink, the three of them dispersed in a thousand provocative moves — ah, unawares perhaps, or aware of it ever since the first Eve! Animal splendour appealing to the ears of the flesh, but beckoning with the spiritual voice of beauty. Yes, therein lies the error and the invisible trap! I fell for it a thousand times before understanding it. And then another thousand times, with the troubled conscience of one who knows he voluntarily participates in a shameful game. I have taken those womanly forms and transfigured them, perfumed them with incense, sung their praise; later to humiliate, destroy, and abandon them, according to the intensity of my thirst or my thirst’s disillusionment.

Savouring the bitterness of these intimate reproaches, Adam Buenosayres struggles in anguish to keep them in the abstract terrain where they still resonate; he fears the images already reviving in his memory, images that come forward as vivid testimonies, stammering something still imprecise or gesticulating. But at last the images win out and charge ahead: they shout their names at him, the names of women; they undress with animal shamelessness, coldly exhibit their ways in love, mechanically howl their ecstasies, and parrot back to him the terrible words he once proferred them in his madness. And Adam Buenosayres, hemmed in, tries to fend them off, make them shut up, send them back to the shadowy realm whence they issued. But now new figures come forward, and Adam recognizes them with a shiver of terror. For they are not the impetuous creatures who once got burnt playing with fire but the women who, despoiled and offended, suffered violence and reaped pain. And now they show him their softly weeping faces, or gestures of rage, or mouths open to supplicate, insult, threaten!15 But, suddenly, one figure stands out from the rest — terrible Eumenides.16

— No, not her! Adam begs, sputters, covered in cold sweat.

For Eumenides nails him with her dried-out eyes and offers him a hand red with blood.

— Not her! Adam repeats, then spins round as if to shake off the vengeful image.

Then it seems to him that the whole street rises up against him, shouting from each of its doors, windows, and skylights: “Adam Buenosayres! It’s Adam Buenosayres!” And Adam flees now, crosses Gurruchaga Street, Eumenides hot on his heels, hooting incomprehensible words. Ruth, the reciter, shrieks from her tobacco shop: “Here she comes, Melpomene the tragic Muse!” And Polyphemus, at his station, raising a hand toward the statue of Christ up above, recites like an ironic demon, “Gaaaawd will rewaaard you!”

The bell tower of San Bernardo rises in the night. The wrought-iron gate is closed, the atrium deserted; no other life than the palm trees dishevelled by the wind. There Adam Buenosayres stops, his breath agitated, heart pounding. Clinging to the grille, he looks around and listens: no one, nothing. The voices are quiet, the images have vanished. Then the dense cloud of his fears, anxieties, and regrets explodes in a wracking sob, smothering him, like the nausea at the tannery. Next, without letting go of the grille, he looks up at the Christ with the Broken Hand. And there he remains, staring and weeping gently:

— Lord, in thee I confess to the Word which, through the sole act of naming them, created the heavens and the earth. Since childhood I have recognized you and admired your wondrous works. But I sought and followed you only on the perilous trails left by beauty. I lost my way and tarried on paths until I forgot they were only paths, and I but a traveller, and you the end of my voyage.

Adam interrupts himself here, suddenly discouraged. It seems that his words, spoken within, do not soar but rather plummet like clay pigeons as soon as they try to take flight. Meanwhile, angelic swords and demonic tridents have suspended their conflict, for the hour has arrived when Adam Buenosaryes must fight on alone.

— Lord, he says again in his soul, in thee I confess to the Word which, out of love for mankind, also took the form of man, assumed his infinite debt, and redeemed it in Calvary. I never found it hard to understand the prodigy of your human incarnation and the mysteries of your life and death. But in sad pathways I wasted and offended the intelligence you gave me as a gift.

With his eyes on the Christ of the Broken Hand, Adam becomes silent, waiting for an intelligible sign, the merest echo of his words, the shadow of a message. But he notes no sign whatsoever, only the starry cold that seems to rain down on his agony. Then there is a relaxing within, more painful even than tension. Adam does not know that a thousand invisible eyes weep for him on high, nor that the sword-bearers, all around him, have begun to exchange glances and smiles, as though from all eternity they possessed an inviolable secret. And Adam attempts to call out one last time:

— Lord, I can’t go on any longer! I am weary unto death. I…17

The bells in heaven have begun to ring, and they ring festively. Triumphant voices burst out in the nine choirs above. Because the soul of one man is worth more than all of visible creation, and because a soul is fighting well beside the grille of San Bernardo. But Adam Buenosayres does not hear them, and it is good that he doesn’t hear them yet. With his eyes on the Christ of the Broken Hand, he again waits for Someone to announce that he may have been heard. And again he is answered by silence pouring from the cosmos, the wind whistling in the palms, the murmur of the rain. Then his will breaks. His gaze descends, he turns on his heels, and stands there as if dumbfounded, in front of the streetlamp’s pool of light on the paving stones. A little black dog, whimpering, scuttles from here to there, sniffing, squatting on his hind legs at various spots, in the misery of a difficult bowel movement. And Adam Buenosayres, dead to himself, lets his still tearful eyes follow the twists and turns of that little drama.

The black dog has gone off into the night. Adam crosses Warnes Street and heads down Monte Egmont. The crisis in his soul is succeeded now by a great inner silence, a muteness of memory, mind, and will. But what figure is that, lying asleep on the front step of his house?

— A linyera,18 Adam answers himself. A poor tramp who has washed up in Buenos Aires and flopped down wherever nightfall finds him.

Keys in hand, Adam considers the bundle of rags curled up at the door. But either the man wasn’t asleep or he has woken up, because now he gets to his feet and meekly waits, as if waiting were what he must invariably do. By the light of the corner street lamp, Adam contemplates his face, coppery beard, and eyes at once dismayed and happy.

— What are you doing here? asks Adam.

— Waiting.

— For whom?

The man of the night has smiled.

— How do I know! For everyone.

Opening the front door, Adam thinks about the extra mattress, the fuss Doña Francisca will make when she finds out, and Irma’s rancorous delight.

— Come in, he tells the linyera, who gathers up his things.

Wordlessly, the man of the night has obeyed. Adam helps him carry his scruffy bundles of baggage. Then, in full darkness, he goes upstairs to the inner door and switches on the light. But when he turns around, he finds the man has disappeared. He runs back downstairs, goes out on the street, peers in all directions. Nothing.

— A poor linyera, repeats Adam Buenosayres. Of course, he prefers the freedom of the outdoors.

He closes the street door and goes up to his room, leaving his light off, afraid that his intimate possessions will jump into sight and strip him of the absolute emptiness in which he now rests. He undresses in the dark and lays his aching body down on the creaky old bed. Sleep descends upon him like a great reward.

Adam dreams he is marching with a legion of warriors, anachronistically armed warriors. In the midst of them, lashed by whips, stumbling, falling to his knees and getting up again, there walks a man bearing a cross. Strangely enough, in the flogged man Adam recognizes the linyera who was at his door. Now, however, there is blood in his coppery beard, and large grimy tears drip from his dismayed yet joyful eyes. The most curious thing about the dream is that both victim and persecutors are following the bank of river that could be the Olivos or Tigre, under a torrential sun that revels in the metallic gleam of the bees, in the vivid colours of the butterflies. A festive multitude goes there, unmoved when the procession passes by (do they not see it?), indifferent to the snap of the riding crop (do they not hear it?). Here, males and females dance to music blaring from a portable phonograph on the ground. There, paunchy men and women tend to their barbecues, open tins of food, and toss away greasy paper. The children, shrieking like beasts, try to knock down butterflies with a towel or beat skinny rental horses with sticks. Furtive couples, after a quick look around, sneak off into the reedbeds. Drunken old men trade thick-tongued insults, exchange slow punches, and finally collapse, vomiting copiously. Further off, brutal faces encircle a pit where game-cocks, spurs bloodied, fight to the death Adam looks again at the man with the cross, and in his dream is aghast at the blindness of the crowd. He wants to shout at them, but his throat is voiceless. Then he sees the warriors marching at his side, and terror invades him, for each and every one of those physiognomies seems symbolic. This yellow-tinted face, with blue pouches under the eyes, is the very semblance of Lust. That other one with the hooked nose, sharp chin, and beady eyes is called Greed. Over there are rheumy-eyed Sloth, clench-jawed Wrath, double-chinned Gluttony, and Envy gnawing at its thumbs. Adam’s hands grope at his own facial features and, weeping with horror, he discovers there the same odious traits, while the procession makes its way through the blind multitude and the flogged man falls down and gets up.

A great stillness reigns in the room. The silence would be complete now but for the rain’s whisper and the bed creaking under Adam Buenosayres as he stirs in his sleep. Baleful presences recede: defeated, they flee reluctantly to the four corners of the chamber. Standing by the head of the bed, Someone has laid down his arms and, leaning on them, keeps eternal watch.19

BOOK SIX

(“The Blue-Bound Notebook”)

1

I

My life, for the first ten years, offers nothing that merits the honour of the pen or the exercise of memory. At that age, the soul is like an empty goblet plunging deep into the inconstant river called reality (the name we first give to the earth’s deceitful colour), therein to glean, gather up, and devour visible creation, as though she existed for the sole purpose of such a barbarous harvest. It is a time when child, stone, tree, and ox go whirling hand in hand in the first dance, without distinction of colour or clash of frontier. But later, by virtue of her natural weight, the soul places herself at the centre of the wheel. From there, motionless and as if held in suspense, she sees that the other creatures go on spinning around her: the tree in the circle of the tree, the stone in the circle of the stone, the ox in the circle of the ox. And at that point the soul asks herself what circle among the circles might be hers, what dance among dances. And since she herself has no answer, nor receives any from others, she begins her journey of tribulation; for her doubt is great and her solitude waxes. My soul found herself in that conflict, and there she stayed until her true orientation was revealed in the figure of The One^2 for whom I write these pages. And I want to declare myself with exactitude in relation to that state of soul, in the hope that my story, should it one day be published, may give consolation and support to those who follow the paths of Love. For of love is the flesh of my prose, and from love’s colour is its garment dyed.

II

More in sweetness than in sadness do I evoke the image of that creature who, with one foot still in childhood and his cares already at work on the loom of meditation, was wondering what could be his circle among circles, his dance among dances. My childhood universe was the prairie of Maipú, open from horizon to horizon, and the house built in the lowlands, where the ever-present water attracted an avian world whose myriad black, white, and pink wings cut the air and furled back the light at the slightest provocation — the sudden intrusion of a horseman making his way through the reeds, or the movement of an otter hunter setting his traps in the glade. Fresh in my memory are the days in Maipú and that melancholy hour of nightfall when our house seemed as large as the universe: homey rooms, faces and voices, familiar objects, all were devoured by the incipient darkess, before the soft yellow lamps were lit. And if the infinitude of the countryside poured in through our open windows, a sky cruel in its immensity weighed too heavily on the house and made the roof creak at the hour when a long and delicious dread is born. Then it felt good to cry in a corner, but hidden away and in silence, so that no one would notice. Because more than once, when I was caught and questioned about my tears, I did not know what to say to those tall men and bounteous women who laughed and cried for concrete reasons only, and who would never understand how one can weep gratuitously, at nightfall, when the vocation to tears precedes the cause of tears in man. The men and women of my lineage cried or laughed without shame, full-faced, in the precise season of their grief or in the exact season of their joy. Well grounded in this reality, they exerted a rough and cheerful dominion over animals and things; they were secure in their circle of fiery horses, of spirited herds, of sown fields and flowers, which likewise responded to an exact season. And it was good, at times, to take refuge in the security of those valiant arms outstretched by the men, or in the warmth of those soft and fruitful breasts upon which the women would nestle a child’s small head, even though the child was crying for no reason, at nightfall, and neither women nor men understood, back there in Maipú, that one might cry for no reason at all when the vocation to tears comes before the cause of the tears!

As time went on, the unease as yet unaware of its name became more concrete, its nature clearer to me, until it attained a lucidity no less painful: I began to feel that the earth was neither solid nor durable under my feet. And it was not long before the shifting sands of reality, the constant changes I saw in the men, animals, and things of the prairie, induced in me an extraordinary degree of anxiety for such a young child. The strange and disquieting way things had of coming into being, then decaying, manifesting in days and nights, springtimes and falls, births and deaths, joys and misfortunes, whose mysterious ups and downs I shared with my prairie tribe, inclined me toward two movements of the spirit that I still haven’t abandoned: a tendency to doubt, which made me wary of anything that bears too visible a sign of transition, the colour of finitude; and a deep yearning for what is permanent, a desire cherished to the point of tears for a world in whose stability Time slept and Space foundered.

The devastation of Time was what first struck my childish eyes. So deeply did I come to feel the corrosive passage of the hours that I came to imagine Time as an invisible river whose mordant waters, tumbling over things, gnawed at everything, dwellings and their inhabitants, the prairie and its beasts. That materialization of time made such an impression on me that during my sleepless nights I could feel it moving the tiny wheels in clocks, or opening up rooftops to make them leak and drip, or biting the walls like a stealthy rodent. Ah, I remember a wedding party in the big house at Maipú! The night of cheer had the body of a god who danced among a hundred living mirrors and a hundred iridescent lamps, to the music of wild strings and impassioned brass. The children’s wonderment, the men’s high spirits, the flashy swirls of the women — ah, it all had me completely enraptured in the moment! And just when Grandfather Sebastián, drink in hand and tottering like Silenus, ventured to dance a mazurka amid laughter and shouts of encouragement; in a rare moment when the lined foreheads of regretful aunts were smoothed beneath their big black shawls; at that very instant, I heard an admonitory voice resonate in my being, and felt a glacial wind suddenly whisk me away from the party and its rhythm, devouring lights and sweeping away sounds. And before my eyes an incredible transmutation took place: I seemed to see time racing ahead in those women and men entwined in dance; I saw time working on them, making faces wrinkle, eyes grow sunken, gums deteriorate; I saw all of them twitching and curling like leaves in a burning tree; and I saw as well how the walls cracked, how the rooftops blackened, how the house in Maipú crumbled to dust. Then I wanted to cry out, but the cry of alarm died on my lips. And I fled headlong into the night, far from the house that was crashing down on all those heads. And indelibly etched in my memory is the image of that little boy, clinging to his watchful horse and sobbing in the middle of a wedding night, in front of the house full of music.

In parallel, the notion of Space, too, took on the aspect of a sorrow, a perception enhanced by the prairie, whose expanse is measured in the lather of horses, and where east and west, north and south were roads sliding away to absence, points where eyes searched longingly for someone’s return. But on new-moon nights my sense of Space acquired the dimensions of terror: lying in the grass, my eyes gazed into the sky, where the constellations of the South seemed to hang over me like the thickly clustered grapes of a heavenly vine. And I tell myself now that Don Bruno, the rural schoolmaster, should not perhaps have suggested in class the notion of appalling distances mediating between those worlds and ourselves; nor should he have calculated the thousands of years it would take for a railway train to get to the star Betelgeuse. Because I remember that, as I gazed at those stellar dust clouds, my soul collapsed in abysmal vertigo, entirely overcome by the brutality bearing down from above, crushing it to dust as if in a mortar. And I sobbed quietly, like a child lost in a wood, not yet knowing that the whole swarm of those worlds could fit into the tiny space of human understanding, since the intellect is essentially non-spatial, free of the three dimensions of Space. Recalling those childish tears, it occurs to me now that many children must still weep on the prairie, beneath the oppressive weight of southern nights, in order that joyous ascending pathways might be opened up in the pure sky of the Argentine fatherland.

Little by little the winds of anguish holding sway over my spirit began to grant me expansive hours of respite. And, little by little, prevailing over its continual devastation, the world of forms and colours started to reveal its secrets when I was in a happily contemplative state, a state whose virtue I did not then understand, but which freed me from myself and my terrors, lifting me up into sweet spiritual climes never before enjoyed. The splendour of those forms (spikes of wheat, horses, flowers) did not die on the prairie, for even though they defected at each material sunset, they were reincarnated, their beauty undiminished, according to the rhythm of the seasons; their splendour thus not only offered me a simulacrum of the stability I dreamed of but also awoke in my being deep resonances I didn’t understand, as though my mind and worldly objects had struck up an intimate dialogue in which the objects spoke and my mind vaguely responded. Only later did I understand the rapturous language of beauty. And I knew that my destiny was to pursue beauty according to the movement of love. Meanwhile, I clung to the security and delight graciously confirmed by the forms of creatures: in the springtime I witnessed their birth, and my heart rejoiced; I watched them die, and my heart became wintry. So it was that for some years my soul, the soul of a child, seemed to revolve around the very poles of the earth. Thanks to a floral aunt (if not a garden angel), I tended a miniature paradise behind the house, where carefully groomed trees perfected the miracle of fruit, a garden in whose shade flourished legions of flowers not normally found in the sunburnt and windswept prairie. Adam in my garden or Robinson on my island, I roamed there at all hours: amid its beauty my mind drifted about, buzzing, probing into the intelligible nectary of things, like a bumblebee seeking some suspected honey. I presided over the birth of forms: I watched them grow until they achieved a splendour that overcame the limits of matter, a splendour painful by virtue of its very intensity. And those colours, odours, and flavours would accumulate until I would sob softly, as if in nostalgia for the taste of some lost Eden, retrieved perhaps by my savouring those forms, bursting at the seams in their desire to tell me something. Then would come the autumn and twilight of the same cherished forms I’d seen arise in the garden, their decline now casting the sweet pall of death over my spirit. And just as the earth disrobed and put her treasures away, all of her seeming to curl up on the threshold of sleep, so my heart folded inward, entered its winter, growing outwardly drowsy but inwardly alert to the process of its deliberations. Winter days and nights went filing by: on the horizon a storm growled like a dog, approached, withdrew, and suddenly charged over the prairie with its squadron of clouds and lashing wind; rain fell, tapped against roof tiles and windowpanes, laid seige to the residence at Maipú with floodwaters, made windows blind. It was pleasant to wander through the darkened bedrooms, or seek out homey smells in clothing, or read forgotten sheets of old paper, or remember the delight of a flower or butterfly I’d embalmed between the pages of a book. And later a vague restlessness would lead to a premature, delightful espionage on spring’s arrival: keeping close watch over the trees in the garden, I measured the depth of their slumber, pored over their naked branches for an emergent sprout or bud. My yearning disappointed, I would root around in the soil and exhume hyacinth bulbs to see if they were still asleep or if their first tender shoots were out yet. In vain! The great revelation would come suddenly, one morning, after a night of warm rain. It only remained to go out to the garden and linger there, enchanted by a wild display of wisterias coming back to life.

At the same time, those emotions were gradually awakening a lively urge to express myself, an irrepressible desire to speak the same creaturely language with which I was becoming enamoured. Already, in the garden and orchard of Maipú, I had noticed that beauty inspired two phases of inspiration, and I observed their unfolding within me: a euphoria melting into tears, and the birth of a musical idea striving to emerge from within and become manifest. Since I at first had no art whatsoever at my disposal, I resorted to incoherent words or free-form phrases, not for what they meant in themselves, naturally, but rather for the intentional value I assigned them, according to the case. Thus a single phrase, solely for its musical power of suggestion, might translate the most conflicting emotions of my spirit. For example, “the rose, the pure rose, the emaciated rose” was a phrase I used to utter in all the nuances of grief or jubilation. Later, art succeeded chaos, and musical order replaced incoherence. I won’t enumerate here the many hardships and sleepless nights that the practice of song cost me. I’ll recall only that one morning, reading my composition in class, Don Bruno exclaimed to the children: “Adam Buenosayres is a poet.” The pupils stared at me without understanding. But I knew very well what those grave words meant and I blushed with embarrassment, as if stripped naked in public. I was fourteen years old.

III

Anecdotes of the usual sort will not abound in this Notebook, for its purpose has been to trace the story not of a man, but of his soul. And if the previous paragraph was illustrated by a few childhood episodes, it is because they reveal the two or three movements of my soul which, from an early age, become reiterated with varying intensity throughout the history of that soul. The depiction of these movements will henceforth demand, then, the idiom of geometry, or the imprecision of the symbol, or the colours of visions and dreams. All of which means my work will resemble the development of a theorem or the consideration of an enigma.

I said at the outset that my soul, as soon as she found her first solitude, went motionless at the centre of the wheel. And since from there she observed all creatures moving gracefully and obeying an exact rhythm, my soul began to wonder what would be her own movement, her natural rhythm, given that movement and rhythm was in all things, from the round animals of the sky that I saw moving at night to the tiniest creatures whose movements I studied in the orchard at Maipú. Nevertheless, whether because no one was guiding her or because she had not yet reached maturity, my soul had no answer and no way to ask for one. And the uncertainty of her destiny then began to afflict her in such a way that finally, in looking at herself, her eyes filled with tears; which occasioned both astonishment and the dawn of wisdom, as if the thread of her lament and that of her meditation started at the same time and thenceforth were as one; for, in weeping, the soul discovered she had not been born to weep and, in suffering, attained suddenly her vocation for joy. True, she was unaware of the origin and purpose of that vocation, for no one had told her; her misery wanted her to discover it for herself, by falling and getting back up, a thousand times in the darkest of labyrinths.

For the time being, though at the price of her lament, the soul knew her natural vocation. And knowing it, she not surprisingly wondered about the cause of a heartache such as hers, which was so contrary to the instinct for happiness tugging at her incessantly. Thus, contemplating her sorrow and regarding herself one day in the bitter mirror of her tears, she saw herself alone and immobile; and as her lament intensified at the sight of such solitude and repose, the soul clearly understood she had not been born to be alone or to live motionless, and this gave her a new subject to consider. For, if solitude was not for her, then this was proof that she had a companion, in the person of either a loved one or a friend; and if sadness was countering her vocation for delight, it was but a short step to understand that the terminus of her search for happiness was in that Friend for whom her solitude clamoured. At this point, she was beset by new doubts, as she wondered whether it was up to her to seek out the unknown Friend, or whether it was the Friend who ought to come to the soul in solitude. But right away she noticed that her repose was as painful as her solitude; when she rejected the stillness in which she found herself, she not only discovered she was destined to travel but also saw the figure of the Friend as the end and goal of her possible movement.

Much had my soul gained by thus beginning her meditation, and much yarn remained to be unwound from the skein. Now, certainly, she understood the possibility in her movement; but she was still ignorant of her natural means of transport, since in looking at herself again and again, she found in herself neither wing nor foot nor wheel with which to move. On the other hand, even if she had found the means of mobility she needed, she would not have known which direction to take, since she knew nothing at all about the Friend — neither his name, nor his form, nor his virtue, nor his abode. Henceforth the soul wandered as if lost between two unknowns: that of her own movement and that of the intuited Friend. But she could see no solution either within herself or without; which was why she embarked upon a long and studious vigil, always alone in the group of gathered beings, always immobile in the circle of those who moved. And so I wish to paint her, with a finger on her temple and her eyes moist, faithful to herself like the rose amid its thorns. For thus she was, on that beautiful and terrible day of her springtime, when she looked at herself and saw the wing of a dove being born.

A dove’s wing sprouted from her shoulder, I say, and the novelty of her feathers amazed the soul at first and stimulated the exercise of her mind, as she reflected now on the sign of the wing, now on the number of the dove. And if the nascent wing spoke to her of the potential for flight, the number of the dove announced she was destined to love. So it was that she at last discovered the nature of her movement in the loving transports so clearly being promised her. But she was not long in noticing that the loving transport requires not only a moveable Lover but also an immobile Beloved; nor did she take long to observe that, if the capacity of the Lover was in all certainty within her, the figure of the Beloved remained hidden from her, as though the wing’s moment were still far away.

IV

Henceforth my soul lived in a twilight state that might equally have been the prelude to a night or the dawn of a morning. While her understanding had enlightened her will, pointing out to it not only a means of transport but also the necessary existence of a Beloved toward whom she ought to move, the will was nevertheless unable to emerge from its immobility; for, even though it knew of him, it did not yet know the flavour of the Beloved; and since it was missing the flavour, its appetite was as if vacant; and when the appetite is vacant, the will does not stir itself; above all when its wing is that of a dove. I say, then, that her will remained motionless. At the same time, she held her peace, and her mind was falling asleep for lack of any new subject on which to place its attention. For this reason, the soul found herself doubly immobile, with no other action than that of her wakeful eyes and no other life than her impatience. She clearly divined, however, that if the Beloved existed (as her understanding let her know), he would not fail to show himself at some point, nor to call her name. Now, the soul did not know her true name; nor was she acquainted with the voice of the Beloved who would pronounce that name; and yet she was quite sure she would recognize the name and the voice as soon as they made themselves heard. As she waited for that to come to pass, she revolved around herself, listening closely to the murmurs of the earth; and as she revolved, she extended her wing of love, like one who lets a feather flutter in the air so as to find out from what quarter the wind may come. But everything around her was mute; no calls came from the earth, and the soul had no invitations.

Around that time, as I recall, my heart (due to its vigilance or the tension of waiting and hoping) was so full it would dissolve in tears at the slightest brush, like a moist little leaf at the lightest breeze. A mere look from man or woman, the timbre of a voice passing by, a colour or a gesture were enough to set off a sweet flood of tears in my heart. And it was because, by coming out of herself now and contemplating the world with eyes of love, the soul not only suffered but also came to suffer with, as though she were suddenly finding in the countenance of the other creatures something reflecting, resembling, or corresponding to her own enigma. And, I recall, it was around then that I had an extraordinary dream, whose exact meaning I grasped only later:

I found myself in an immense wasteland and in the middle of a night so deep that not a vestige of form or colour could be distinguished in either earth or sky. And as I tried to advance through the desolate place, it seemed to me huge columns of darkness were plummeting noiselessly down upon my head, and I could not lift my feet free of the sandy ground I was walking on; all of which plunged me, struggling, into a desperation as limitless as the nocturnal wasteland holding me prisoner. Thus lost in that clime of terror, I seemed to see a marvellous human figure suddenly rise up beside me and begin to look at me in a way no earthly eye had ever done. The face of that admirable gentleman was resplendent with so much light, so much power was in his beauty, and so much glory in his majesty, that my whole being was moved and began to forget its terrors, converted entirely to the grace in that vision. And I felt, in my dream, that in the presence of this Man there awoke in my memory the notion of I know not what lost flavours, what faraway music. And I felt, upon recognizing him, that my mind knew itself for the first time in the Man, and my will wanted to surrender, offer itself to him as a banner of love. Then, it seemed, he spoke to me in a fiery idiom, and since I did not understand the words of fire issuing from his mouth, the Man began to walk in the blackness, and I followed him, afraid of losing him. Then I seemed to see a miracle unfold: no sooner had the Man stopped walking than burning suns, pink moons, and golden comets took shape behind him, in the pure sky, until the night was transformed into a splendid noontide; and the wasteland, at the mere touch of his feet, turned into a most pleasant garden where, amid the flowers, thronged bright and nimble beings who, seeking one another, joined to dance in a thousand rounds. And it seemed that my eyes, upon seeing such beauty as was manifest in the garden, began to wander away from the Man leading me, and that my heels began to tarry near the circles of dance; until I felt as though I were caught up in the whirlwind of the fiesta and completely given over to its magic and madness. But, at the peak of my rapture, a chill wind seemed to blow over the garden, and forms, colours, and sounds all grew suddenly old; and the earth withered like the leaf of a tree; and suns, comets, and moons were going out like lamps at the end of a party. It happened then that, finding myself again in the night and on the barren plain, I looked for the Man who had previously appeared before my eyes. And as I did not find him, I wept, in my dream, with so much sorrow that at last I awoke and saw the reality of my lament.

V

I know not how much longer my soul lived that way, making real in dreams what wakefulness denied her. And still she knew not whether she waited in hope or despair, when there dawned for her a day exceedingly beautiful and open to all revelations. She was waiting, as I said, with her ear attuned to the world’s sounds, when suddenly it seemed to her that invisible brass instruments rang out in the springtime and that all creatures, putting aside their silence, began to raise their voices and express themselves in an idiom both direct and passionate. That language had the mettle of the voice of beauty, the “voice that calls.” And since the call of beauty is the call of love, and love tends toward happiness, it is no wonder my soul felt moved and jubilantly saluted the advent of those voices. What good fortune! So very recently, the soul had been wanting a call of love that might set her in motion, and now here were thousands of calls resounding in her ears, as though the earth had begun to sing through the myriad mouths of her creatures! So very recently, the soul, alone, had been asking for a Friend who might relieve her solitude, and now she recognized, in all those calls, the voices of a hundred friends inviting her from without!

Thus did my soul emerge from her first immobility, on a day not lost to memory. When she steered her movement toward creatures exterior to herself, her course did not follow a straight line but spiralled outward, plucking her from her centre, leading her further and further away in ever-widening revolutions around the centre. And I emphasize the nature of her movement so that my reader (should these pages of mine ever have one) may follow the soul on her path of love and surmount the obscurity, more apparent than real, of her story.3 I said she distanced herself from her centre in each revolution of the spiral; I say now that, from call to call and from love to love, she went so far away that she eventually lost and forgot herself. In forgetting her own essence, she was converted to the essence of what she loved; a singular being, she found herself divided into the multiplicity of her loves.

VI

If the strings I plucked so vehemently in those days were still faithful to my hands, at this point of the story I would raise a song of labyrinthine loves, a disorderly drunk of a song, tottering like a grape-picker at noon. Tumbling here, getting up again there, never steady on her feet of wind, wondrously lost among her loves, thus walked my soul for so many years. I said that she forgot her form so as to take on the form of what she loved. And, through an astonishing deceit, she thenceforth gave the name “life” to that which meant her own death; in the belief that she was living, she went on dying in every one of her loves. But a science of travel was developing within her: a wisdom based on the negative gesture with which creatures responded to her loving solicitude. For, in creaturely loves, she sought happiness, a terminus, a place of repose; but it turned out that her appetite was not assuaged, nor her pleasure fulfilled. Hence, she now began to understand the failure of her loves. Now, my soul knew her movement was legitimate; and, assessing the situation, she came to suspect the failure was due not to the nature of her movement but to its direction. And she started to wonder now whether her vocation to love might not be incalculably disproportionate to the love of creatures.

Little by little, whether as a result of her fatigue or her maturity in the art of disappointment, my soul began to check her movements, to restrain herself, to tarry. Until she came to a halt by herself at the centre of the labyrinth. And just as the hunter who, upon realizing he’s lost deep in a wood fearfully pauses and tries to retrace his steps, so did my soul urgently feel the need to make the return trip back to her first intimacy. I have already recounted how she strayed from her essence following a centrifugal spiral, a movement that in one sense took her away from her centre, but in another sense maintained her in orbit around that centre and subject always to the law of its attraction. Now I declare that, to that same gravitational force, my soul owed not only the limit of her dispersion but also the will to return, which was initiated according to the trajectory of a centripetal spiral whose effects were not long in showing themselves. For, if the soul had been divided in the multiplicity of her loves, now, upon escaping from the prison gilded by creatures, she was recovering her dispersed parts and reconstructing her graceful unity. And if, in wandering from her centre, she lost intelligence of herself, in returning she found her own image already there before her; facing that image, her mind came back to life, as if for a second springtime of meditation. She was returning: she returned at last. Until finally she was immobile before her centre.

VII

From that point on, my soul knew a state that belonged to neither life nor death, but rather to a frontier position where life and death were both similar and different one from the other. I found myself between two nights: the night below, that is, of the world that I was abandoning and whose forms, colours, and sounds now seemed very far away; and the night above, in which my eyes espied not the slightest sign of dawn. Placed between one night and the other, I say that my eyes never left the second night, as though they were awaiting I know not what future day. For my soul, despite her state of unmoored abandon, felt in a mysterious way that she was a captive, just as though she had chanced to take the invisible hook of an invisible fisherman who was tugging from on high. And finding myself in this state one night, cloistered in my sleepless room and bent over a book of obscure science whose useless characters danced before my eyes, I fell into a deep sleep, in which such marvellous things appeared to me that the recollection of them still leaves my mind hanging in suspense:

I found myself in a strange place, different from any I had ever seen on earth: a kind of barren landscape, cold and gloomy as an astral region. In dreams, I seemed to be suffering the same nocturnal oppression that tormented me when awake, but my suffering was so infinitely subtle that my whole being was but a studious gaze wandering over its own desolation. Suddenly, without clearly understanding, I sensed two attentive eyes staring at me from behind. When I turned my face toward that place, I saw the Man who had appeared to me so many times in dreams. He contemplated me for a long while, clothed more by his own youth and beauty than by his noble garments. And so much mercy did I read in those eyes that my own started to fill with tears. When the Man saw this, his lips parted and he said: “Why are you weeping?”4 I gave no answer, but cried even harder because of the double charity in that voice and in those eyes. Then I saw him raise his arm toward the heights and heard his command: “Look!” Following the direction of his arm, I raised my brow and seemed to see, as if pinned up in the blackness above, a great sphere of glass similar to a heavenly animal in its form and colour, but of such vivid transparency that not a single point of its mass was invisible. And, amazingly, that star had as an axis the naked body of a woman, which commanded the four directions of the sphere: the head to the north, feet to the south, right arm to the east, the left to the west. Nevertheless, I understood in my dream-state that as soon as my eyes looked up toward the prodigious vision, they wanted to lower again, as though they refused to contemplate it. Seeing this, the Lord of the night repeated his command: “Look!” Giving in to his voice, I again laid my eyes on the sphere. And something new happened then: as I studied that enigmatic figure of woman, I felt an ancient disquiet reawaken in my spirit; it came as a flux of voices I’d thought were forever dead, or as the resurrection of the image of happiness I’d interred in the first autumn of my soul. Bygone enthusiasms, lost tastes, warlike fervours, and songs of freshness held sway over me again at the mere contemplation of the woman crucified on the sphere. As a result, in my dream, I was reconstituted, my former being restored, until I was oblivious to the night and to the Lord who had invited me to such marvels. Then a great anguish came over me: I suddenly observed that the sphere was not immobile but in motion around the woman, like a planet on its axis. I watched as the sphere, like the moon entering its waning phase, began to decrease little by little, stealing away my delight in that vision, until the sphere was entirely hidden in the first darkness.

What I felt next is not easy to communicate in language: it was like the end of me, my self’s plunge into some annihilating abyss; and though in the course of my life I’d had several experiences that felt like death, what came over me in the dream seemed the deepest, the most terrible one of all. Suddenly, in the midst of my foundering, it seemed that the voice of the Man, taking hold of me and drawing me up from the abyss, commanded me for the third time: “Look!” And raising my eyes, I saw a halfring of silver, similar to the moon when it begins to wax; little by little it swelled until the original sphere was reconstituted, as though the celestial body I’d seen disappear were again advancing toward another full moon. And this time, it seemed to me, the sphere was not spinning in silence but producing a deep sound, like a bow drawn across a string. And from the immensity of the night, I heard a hundred forms of music rising and falling as they responded to the sound of the sphere, as though, by responding to that sound, all was harmonized in a graceful chord of unity. But when my eyes reached the image of the woman crucified on the sphere, on the cross of its axis and equator, my entire being, all will and understanding and sense, surrendered utterly to her. In truth, she was not the same lady I had seen earlier; nor was she different, but rather something like a sublimation of the other one. But while the woman was not different in and of herself, she differed in the effects she produced in my spirit; for it dawned on me as I watched her that henceforth I would not be able to look elsewhere, because my contemplation was born in her and in her it remained, irrevocably. And I felt that my heart burned in her fire, like fragrant wood; I felt that, in dying in myself, I was reborn in that admirable woman with a life whose savour, though tasted in dreams, will never be erased from the tongue of my soul. Afterward, the spell seemed to break when it occurred to me that the light shining from the woman of the sphere was not hers, but that it came from some sun, not yet visible to me, of which she would be the moon or mirror. And when I removed my gaze from the woman to search in the darkness for the unknown sun that must have been illuminating her, I suddenly woke up and found myself in the dark solitude of my cloister, in the wind that had blown out my lamp and was strewing papers across my table. I remember that a cock crowed in the foggy distance, and that through my window I saw the morning star shining at some thirty degrees above the horizon.

With this dream, I bring to a close the story of my soul in its abstract aspect, in order to recount now the advent of The One for whom I write these lines, and to whom the following paragraphs will be dedicated, as the dawn is to the day or the flower to the fruit.

VIII

It was springtime in Buenos Aires the day and the hour when she first appeared to me; her real name will not be written in these pages, since it was given her at birth by men and women who knew not how to name her in a suitably loving idiom. While I dare not declare that at the hour of our meeting the wisteria and the peach tree at her house were in bloom only for her and me, I shall nevertheless sing praises to the Great Harmony that brings together in a single chord the grace of a woman and the beauty of the earth on the day men call their first, according to the numbers of love.

As I recall, I was in the garden at Saavedra, in the company of the friend who had introduced me, and of the women of the house, all young and of gracious aspect. My friend was talking with the women in one of those Buenos Aires conversations in which clever words are used to both hide and reveal all.5 And I remained silent, smiling at my interlocutors, but in reality given over to the magic of the garden, within whose confines the afternoon and the silence were one and the same person. And there I was, at once distant and near the friendly voices, when the extraordinary creature of my tale appeared on the path of the mimosas: she was approaching as if tarrying, so slow was her gait at that moment precious to memory. But her smile went before her like an emissary. Since her dress was the colour of azure, dissipating in the subtle air, it is no surprise that I took her for a vision and wondered if the afternoon had not been personified in that exceedingly sweet womanly figure. Hearing my name from her sister, she inclined her brow and lowered her eyes in greeting. So absorbed was I in the task of admiring her, and so unusual was the commotion her presence caused in my spirit, that I was incapable of response. However, though my tongue was mute, a familiar voice now rose above the new tumult in my heart; as if finally to answer the vital question my being had been circling for some time, the voice seemed to exclaim: “There is the wing’s direction and the polestar of the dove!”

Fearful that people might notice my confusion, I then made an effort to follow what my friend and the women were saying in conversation. But my eyes could not leave The One (who shall henceforth thus be named). She was smiling in silence, as though she did not yet dare let her voice rise among the mature voices of her sisters; and her regard was turned earthward, a felicitous circumstance that allowed me discreetly to gaze upon her in rapt contemplation, my eyes now seeming to discover their true métier. Her youth was not yet in full flower, but rather the whole of her, in my eyes, hinted at a dawn comparable to the moment of first light hesitating at the brink of day. Space was ecstatic in her body’s three dimensions, time delighted in every beat of her heart, and light found sublimation in her entirety. Seeing her, I could not discern what substantial form or what adorable number of creative power had been incarnated in her fragile clay, but I did understand that it was a number brimming over, a form transcending or overflowing into a kind of beauty whose splendour, uncontainable, preceded her like a messenger, followed her like a shadow, and flanked her on the right as her lance, on the left as her shield. Tall and straight beneath the airy dress concealing her, her form seemed ready to sprout, painfully, like the bud of a leaf that swells and breaks and ventures a new lobe. And as I observed that lifeward tension in her being, along with the stature of her grace, I recalled the friend’s poem, which begins thus:

Tall among women now, the girl

wants the name Wind…6

So well did my friend’s image fit her that, never ceasing to look at her, I repeated in mente the two lines of verse, marvelling at how their meaning was only just then revealed to me. For, if Wind was the name that suited her, so then would her foot be wind and so her hand, when it would eventually rise and come down upon the flower of the soul. And at that thought, my soul quaked, as if intuiting in the woman a new heartache, the prelude of another war.

As the happy rhythm of the tertulia intensifed, so did the tumult in my being. And with my attention divided between the voices coming from outside me and the restless and unsettled voices within me, I resolved to get away from there, wishing to measure in solitude the proportions of that new conflict. So I left the house in Saavedra, and, as in a dream, I covered the distance separating that house from my cloister, its habitual four walls. Immediately upon arrival, my soul, secluded in her intimacy, began to reconstruct the image of The One in all her lines, weights, and colours. So perfect was the reconstruction that my soul again trembled in wonder before the image alone; aware of the nature of her excitation, my soul became fearful because she believed she had already lived it to the point of disillusionment, so that now, rearmed within immobility, she might be free of any new anxiety. That is why my soul pulled back for a moment from the sweetness of that new summons and began to reproach herself for her fragility: “What? After such a long journey, you are going to plunge back into the deceitful river of creatures? Will you again descend into the finitude and danger of earthly love, after having attained the notion of an infinite love?” But the voices of alarm could not gainsay the enchanted vision she bore within her. Instead, revolving around that image, she realized that the more she gazed at it, the more completely her will would surrender to it. Meanwhile, night had fallen upon the earth and was peopling my room with shadows. As I remember, I then opened the two shutters of my window, fell back into an armchair, and began to contemplate the vault of the starry sky, where a crescent moon pretended to sail above the little clouds of silver. The springtime night, its air humid and fragrant as a girl’s breath, brought forth a long-forgotten tremor within me, freshening in some ineffable way the dryness of my soul, as if suddenly inviting her to put forth new buds. From the suburban street a chorus of childish voices wafted up:

Between Saint Peter and Saint John

they built a new boat:

the sails were of silver,

the oars were of steel…7

Allowing my eyes to wander over the field of stars, I noticed a tenderness from bygone days stealing back into my heart, nudging it along broad roads to benevolence. And on that memorable night so much mercy seemed to rain down from on high that my eyes suddenly filled with tears, not of anguish, as was usually the case, but tears of relief at the peace brought me by the night sky. Attributing such salutary effects to the revelation of The One, I then turned again in imagination to contemplate her; and resuming my soliloquy, I wondered what might be in store for me, what goodness I would find in that mysterious figure of girlhood.

Recalling the episode of that afternoon, I noted first of all that the vision of the woman in Saavedra had suddenly bedazzled me, as happens when one perceives the light of beauty. As I contemplated her image now, it seemed beyond doubt that her beauty alone could be responsible for the dazzling effect. Moreover, I said to myself, there can be no bedazzlement unless some “splendour” causes it, and I remembered that all beauty was defined as a certain “splendour.” Next, I made two parallel observations. On the one hand, I told myself, all splendour implies a source of the resplendence, which raised the question, What was resplendent in The One? Whence the splendour of her beauty? On the other hand, I observed, her beauty did not dazzle my eyes as material light does, but rather my soul as does intelligble light. Now, given that her beauty was a light I attained through my mind, I reasoned, and that the mind is a power that tends toward the truth, then her beauty could be nothing other than the splendour of something true. To be sure, this last conclusion told me very little, for though I was certain her beauty revealed the presence of something true, I was still in ignorance of the truth being revealed to me by The One. And now I understood the double meaning of the word “revelation,” since her beauty raised a corner of the veil that covered her truth and then let it fall again, as if at once wanting and declining to manifest the truth.

But the beauty before me was not a matter for my mind alone, for it also invited my will, through an appeal in the mode of love I knew so well and so distrusted; and, for that to happen, it was necessary that what my mind knew as true must also appear as good to my will. Surely it was one and the same thing, which showed a different aspect, according to which of the soul’s powers were considering it. However, just as I had not uncovered the intimate nature of her truth, neither had the inner nature of her goodness been revealed to me: I only knew that, faced with her image, my mind operated through light, my will through love; and that they did so in a simultaneous act, such that, in contemplating her image, I knew not whether I loved her now because I knew her, or whether I knew her now because I loved her.

Nevertheless, prudence still clamoured within my being, telling me that an equivalent beauty with similar effects had many times inclined me toward deceptive love. But upon evoking my former loves, I recalled that they had been precipitate, lunging headlong toward creatures, whereas now my soul seemed to move with another rhythm in which I observed two movements: one of transport in slow revolutions around the exceedingly sweet woman, my soul surveying and studying the woman with loving care; the other of rotation on my soul’s axis, thanks to which my soul continued in her self-observation, studying herself in the mode and effects of her contemplation.

IX

The next day and the two or three that followed are vivid in my memory, thanks to the delight I experienced, as if I’d just woken up from a frightening dream. I’ve already described, in another part of my Notebook, the desolation my soul had come to know and the sterile flight of my intelligence above its own ruin. I’ll say now that, under the sole influence of the creature revealed in Saavedra, my whole being seemed to surrender to the rhythm of a nascent life and to a feeling of astonishment, a rising-up from ashes. I remember the brand new emotions, the old wariness, and the conflicting ideas; feeling cooped up in my room, I felt driven to go out in search of light and the open air, and took long walks which, far from pacifying the tumult in my heart, only accentuated it. I’ve already said that springtime in Buenos Aires and the woman of my sleepless nights had manifested themselves at the same time; so, during my walks it happened that my soul’s inward euphoria joined the outward elation of the earth, whose fervent awakening goaded creatures onto paths of exaltation. I preferred to walk in humble neighbourhoods, especially the sun-drenched streets of my Villa Crespo. There, the springtime sky, clear and moist, shone like a look of great tenderness. In the foliage of the trees along the streets, a green light heralded the sprouting buds. A prelude of incipient flowers played in intimate gardens and cordial patios. And my eyes, open like never before, devoured the signs of springtime and feasted on the sky’s blueness, round and smooth as a fruit. Everything had meaning: the hot laughter of the children, a woman’s voice in the distance, a bird swaying on a branch, the colour of a stone. Sympathy of some unknown lineage overflowed in my breast before all that was humble and silent: a delicious intelligence of love was one with a desire to press the living sheaf of creatures tightly to my soul.

One night (the third after the encounter), when I was out wandering, either chance or my longing for the woman of my adventure — I still don’t know which — led me to Saavedra. Never had the weight of any night seemed so light as it fell upon my shoulders; nor had Saavedra ever seemed so close to heaven. I was ambling along nocturnal streets, by grates and walls plumed with wisteria, their blossoms caressing my brow and bringing to mind the familiar taste of springtimes that had arisen and fallen back there, in Maipú, or perhaps yonder, in an orchard where angels now stand watch. The night air, sweet as wine, and the silence, disturbed only by rustling leaves or a bird stirring and singing between dreams, made me experience a serenity I had never known before. In that atmosphere my mind no longer worked with a tiresome web of inner words, but rather through a sure intuition of things, arrived at — it seemed — solely by opening the eyes and ears of my soul. I exercised that delicious form of knowing for the first time. And since all that light came to me through the mirror of The One, I began to suspect that a mystery was both hiding her and revealing her: she was hidden in its essence and revealed in its operation.

I cannot say if it was the glimpse of her mystery that made my heart beat faster and slowed my steps as I approached her place of residence. All I know is that when I got close to her garden my knees wobbled and I had to rest against a tree. The garden of The One was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence; among its bars heavy with years, the honeysuckle had woven its thick tangle and built up a fragrant wall between the privacy of the house and the indiscretion of outside eyes. I remember that my hands, plunging into the denseness, managed to break through the wall of leaves and open up a hole, which allowed me to take in the garden cloaked in darkness, in the centre of which rose the solid architecture of the house. I stood watching for a long time: agile silhouettes crossed the luminous rectangular windows; to my ears came the murmur of family conversations that now and then were cut into by the blade of youthful laughter or by abrupt gaps of silence swooping down on the house like birds of prey. If the air circulating round the house seemed lighter, it was no doubt crowned by a more benign sky. At that moment, all my vitality was concentrated in my eyes and ears. They tried to pick up the subtlest pulse of the house, in their desire to catch even a trace of the admirable woman who had been revealed to me in that same garden. How long I stood thus, clinging to the bars like a thief in the night, I do not know: little by little the intimate voices fell silent; one after another the lights in the windows went out. A deep chord was still resonating in the dark, as if some careless hand had suddenly fallen upon the keys of a piano and its vibrations were wandering away into the silence until they were finally lost.

Only then did I abandon my observation post and sit down at the threshold of the house. There I began to think about the feelings my nocturnal espionage had aroused. And above all it amazed me to think that The One moved within a family circle whose eyes beheld her at all hours; they had seen her birth, given her a name by which they called her; they followed her every gesture, but were unaware of her inner essence, such as it had been revealed to me in a brief instant of contemplation. And I asked myself then, in that soliloquy on the threshold: What was it that I saw in The One and others could not see? My answer, as at the first encounter, was that I saw her in her harmonious number, or better, in the set of singing numbers that formed her from head to foot and exalted her above nothingness through the creative virtue of numbers, in the same way that through numbers a piece of music is constructed and sustained within silence. And here I experienced a sudden start: that womanly cipher, that harmonious number, had not sprung from nothingness. How, then, to think about that number without thinking about the mind that had formed it and about the voice that had proferred it?

This return to metaphysics, on a night like that and on such an occasion, provoked a painful movement of rebellion in my spirit: to deduce the First Cause from its effects had always seemed to me a cold and sterile result of logic, incapable of moving the soul according to love. More precisely, the irruption of The One into my dark night had seemed to be announcing to my soul a bright day of liberation, a recompense for my soul’s tribulations. And just at the point when, in thinking about The One, I touched or believed I was touching the ultimate depths of my being, lo and behold, I stopped thinking about her in order to think about an Other, as though the woman of Saavedra were no more than a bridge of silver offered to I knew not what new pilgrimage of my mind. Rebellion and fatigue — that is what I experienced upon finding myself again at the beginning of a journey, just when I thought I’d arrived at quietude through love and at happiness through quietude. But I immediately noticed that the notion of the Other, suggested by the woman of Saavedra, occurred to me not as a result of a laborious process of reasoning but with the ease of an image that is reflected in water, which enamours the eyes of the one who looks at it, and that makes him^8 feel the desire to raise his eyes and look around for the original of the copy.

I stood up from the doorstep, my soul filled with an inexpressible commotion. I began to walk slowly down the solitary street, under the canopy of leaves rustling in the breath of the night. Again I raised my eyes to contemplate the immense troop of stars moving slowly across the sky in a sacred adagio; and for the first time my tenderness turned, not to the visible flock, but to the hidden shepherd who guided it from on high. There was in the night a correspondence of signs, or a concert of voices calling one another in recognition, happy just to be, to float for an instant above nothingness. But my heart, which so many times before had savoured such music solely for its musical delight, now refused to hear it and seemed to rise higher, as though, in abstraction from the music, my heart sought the face of the invisible Strummer. And when I understood that this unknown rapture was due only to the virtue of The One, my soul burned like a fragrant leaf and, become smoke, ascended above its own fire.

X

The story of my life is a succession of endings and rebeginnings, of rises and falls alternating with rigorous precision. Since childhood, I have learned to quail, at my peak moments of joy, for the pain whose advent I know to be imminent; every happy Sunday I’ve ever known has been overshadowed by a threatening Monday. Many have been the moments of marvellous rapture, when my soul, like a sharp sparrowhawk, has savoured the atmosphere of great heights; but the hawk has always come back to earth, its beak empty of any living prey. So it is that the soul, between rising and falling, has begun to dream of a flight without return; and that is why, ever since childhood, there is within her an aching voice that cries out for a never-ending Sunday.

The next day, when the euphoria of that night had dissipated, my spirit began to flag and my mind to doubt the value of its conquest. Withdrawing into myself as so many times before, I noticed that poverty and solitude reigned in my being more than ever. Suspecting that perhaps it had all been a game in my imagination, I rebelled against myself and decided to punish my own madness. Then, carefully reviewing the details of my first encounter with the woman of Saavedra, it seemed to me that something substantial remained. Then I became aware of my urgent need to seek her out and to measure in her presence the precise worth of my turmoil. Truth be told, a second encounter did not seem likely: the friend who had taken me to the house in Saavedra was away from Buenos Aires, and I dared not show up there alone, for fear of revealing my secret. Mulling over schemes, which I promptly rejected, and feeling more and more profoundly the need to see her, I finally resolved to provoke a meeting in Barrancas de Belgrano;9 I knew that The One walked through the park with classmates every afternoon on her way home from school.

I got there in plenty of time and sat down on a stone bench beside a giant magnolia tree. Suddenly, I recall, a vague dread came over me as I imagined the woman of Saavedra soon coming along that very path, its sand crunching beneath her feet. The effects of her first revelation were too present in my memory for me not to fear now the effects of a second revelation. When I imagined her recognizing me, even talking to me, my turmoil reached such a pitch that I got up and took a few steps in flight. But I returned to my bench of stone and, from that moment forward, oblivious of my surroundings, I kept my eyes on the path’s most distant point where she would rise like the dawn. My heart had begun to beat frantically, its drumbeats intensifying as the moment of truth approached. All of a sudden, the magnificent dawn broke. A youthful horde came up the sun-drenched earthen steps of the slope: bright girlish eyes, hair blowing in the breeze, mercurial bodies beneath dresses, tinkling laughter, voices hoisted aloft, the whole spring-like avalanche passed vertiginously before me. In vain did I seek the face of The One amid the flushed faces, her body among the bodies, her voice among the voices: The One was not there, she had not come.

When I came back to myself, night was falling: a chill exhalation from the garden made my body shudder, and I heard the sparrows up in the magnolia tree chattering their goodnight to the fallen sun. I was alone. Around me, the desolation of the earth seemed to well upward as the sky filled out with a multitude of stars. But the solitude of my soul exceeded that of the earth, so much so that I pitied myself; and I would have wept upon the dunes of my own desert, had there remained anything in me capable of crying. I looked into my being for the image of The One, and the desert answered me; I tried to recover at least my mind and my will, but neither responded. To be sure, The One was no longer within me; but neither was I, being outside myself instead. Where? The truth came to me then and there, and I received it with a shudder: until that moment I’d believed the woman of Saavedra, in all the empire of her truth, was within me; as it turned out, however, she did not reside within me, but I within her.

I went home to my room, leaving the Barrancas de Belgrano and crossing the city as it noisily set about its night life. There, between the four walls of my jail cell, the light out, I flopped down fully dressed on my unmade bed, closing the useless eyes of my flesh and the useless eyes of my soul. What my being could not attain in waking consciousness, it found in its other existence, in dreams. For it entered a world of tortured images whose true aspect I shall never remember, but in the midst of which my soul must have suffered terrors so lifelike that they passed into my flesh and jolted my body awake. When I sat up, a deep silence reigned all around, but I was still not free of that phantasmagorical imagery. Then, feeling my way in the dark, I walked over to the window and opened it wide: a spectral dawn light was bathing the rooftops of Villa Crespo as far as the eye could see; the stars were dimming in a sky of nickel; the grey bulk of buildings, the blurry outline of trees, the slow resurrection of colour, the entire old world once again waking up before my eyes exuded at that hour at a vague air of fatigue, an indefinable taste of death. I recall that an early bird, hidden in the paradise trees in the street, croaked two or three broken notes, as if it too were bewailing the fatigue of the world. Then I closed my window and drew the curtains. Having restored my room to nighttime, I went back to bed, longing for silence and oblivion. Upon my eyelids fell a long dreamless sleep, merciful simulacrum of death.

After that afternoon, and for quite a few days, I was in a singular state of absence, severely arid, though without fits or anxieties. Distanced from The One and absent from myself, I was but a double solitude. I felt like someone living in another heart, a heart in exile; and that someone knew not how to revoke his exile along with that of the absent heart. I was looking for the woman of Saavedra, unaware I was seeking for her, because in my being there was no glimmer of understanding. And that search was but an unconscious will to be; for to find The One meant to find myself, and finding her and finding myself would be resolved in a single act. My aimless wandering would sometimes bring me, as though in a dream state, to the house in Saavedra, on whose threshold I would suddenly stir up some inchoate emotion. There, beside the wrought-iron gate, oblivious to the mildness of the season and the evening bliss, I would nevertheless enter a state of unease, which, resembling life, reanimated my being for a few short minutes. Then, clinging to the sweet thought of her closeness, I meditated on The One, mentally associating her with the things of her daily world, with the sidewalk to her house, the little paths through her garden, the threshold of her door, the worn-out brass door-knocker, with everything that still retained, no doubt, the trace of her footstep, the warmth of her hand. In gathering up at least the vestiges of the presence so thoroughly denied me, my heart revived, if only for a moment, until it came time to go back home, when each step I took away from The One was, irremediably, another step away from myself.

XI

But at last came a red-letter afternoon I shall never forget. I still do not know if that friend who inititated me into the Saavedra tertulias had read the secret of my soul. I only know that by his side, one early afternoon, I crossed the threshold of the house, quivering, and stopped short as though stepping into a land both desired and feared. True, the grace of the garden had already been revealed to my eyes on their first encounter with The One; but then so great had been the work of my solitude and so deceitful the labour of my fantasy, that now my eyes, turned toward the garden, comtemplated it afresh as if for the first time. Moreover, glimpsed through the fence over the course of many nights, the garden had to my furtive eyes assumed the dimensions of an inaccessible province or the profile of a forbidden coast viewed by a mariner from afar: no wonder, then, my knees wobbled on crossing the threshold and my steps came to a halt before the world newly on display. But the voice of the friend waiting at my side infused me with courage, and we entered the garden on a path passing among new flowers. I walked as in a dream, with no fear or anxiety at all, weak and jubilant like someone recently brought back to life who marvels at all the things of the earth. When a turn in the path took us behind the house, I stopped, holding my friend back with my hand: there lay the garden in its full amplitude; and, mistress of that luminous domain, a Woman was coming to meet us.

She moved slowly forward, beneath a sun perpendicular to the earth: her body, without shadow, had the firm fragility of a branch, a sort of combative force in her lightness, a terrible audacity in her decorum. She wore a sky-blue dress wrapped round her like a whisp of mist; but the garden, the light, the air, all heaven and earth joined forces and worked to clothe her, so much to be feared was her nakedness. With her face turned to the sun, she showed the two violets of her eyes and the slight arc of her smile; a bee buzzed in circles around her hair. As she walked, her small feet crushed golden sand, seashells, and the carapaces of blue beetles. Her arrival seemed to last an eternity, as if The One came from very far off, across a hundred days and a hundred nights.

Ah, well did I recognize her power in the faintness suffered by my heart at every step she took! And I recognized too the admirable virtue with which she remedied that effect on me, when she finally came up to us and extended the double bridge of her voice and her hand. I was hearing her for the first time, and to my ears her words took on a resonance that was new and nonetheless ancient: hers was a morning voice, of the same family as other morning voices that once upon a time, back in Maipú, had spirited me out of childish frights and nightmares. And, certainly, it was a joyous awakening after the phantasmagoria of dreams possessing me, thanks to the charm of her voice and the brush of her hand — warm, dry and golden as a spike of wheat: a rekindled strength, boldness trying its wings, allowed me to face without flinching the Woman so long contemplated in my mind.

Then, beginning to walk, The One led us into her resplendent vegetal domain. In the time of my childhood, when I came upon a colour print or read some novelistic episode, I would long for the miracle of inhabiting those luminous realms invented by art. I recall having approached that ideal on a few memorable days, later, during my youth. But never, as on that afternoon, had I so felt the strange beatitude of living in poetry. And never had reality been so exalted before my eyes, to the point of becoming a set of pure forms and graceful, singing numbers. The three of us chatted in the garden, the glowing noonday sun burnishing our skin like a strong ointment, and made our way through the dense legions of flowers, bathed in an ecstatic light flecked now and then by a bird’s wing or the volatile gold of a butterfly. We walked next to the wall clothed in honeysuckle, where iridescent-throated doves cooed with no trace of fear: theirs was the music of the garden, and along with the elytron beetles hidden amid the herbs and the bumblebees, their chant filled our ears. The realm of The One was a world in lasting harmony: the death of a single insect would have upset its delicate balance. The One, pausing frequently, spoke to us of her garden, without looking at us, as though in an intimate soliloquy. It was like learning everything anew, but with no effort at all and with the living certainty of music. For the Woman guiding us through the garden had her own way of naming things: she would say “bird” and the essence of the bird appeared in the mind of her listener in a hitherto unknown light, as if The One somehow had the virtue of recreating the bird merely by saying its name.

Who, then, spoke of love? It was Friend.10 We were sitting, the three of us, on a rustic bench, in the shade of a willow whose verdant fronds grazed our hair: the strong aroma of heliotropes beneath the sun induced in us an inchoate inebriation more of the mind than of the body; and ever since that afternoon I occasionally tell myself that if the mind had a scent it would be comparable to the dry, ardent, chaste perfume of heliotropes. But who, then, spoke of love? It was Friend. The first thing he pointed out was the loving virtue thanks to which the Lover, with eyes turned toward the Beloved, forgets himself, exchanges his form for the form of what is loved, dies by degrees to his own life, and comes to life again in the life of the Other; until finally the Lover transforms into the Beloved. As the Friend spoke, my eyes looked into The One’s eyes, with an easy boldness I cannot explain. Then it was my turn to speak, but rather than talk about my own feelings, I related the drama of the Lover converted to the Beloved who hides or flees or ignores the Lover. With a vehemence that must have seemed strange in that garden setting, I depicted the anguish of the Lover who, dying within himself, finds no resurrection in the life of the Other. The One remained silent, although her eyes, looking into mine, emitted the clearest light, indefinable for me then, but whose true value I understood later.

I don’t know how long that unique dialogue went on between two voices and one gaze; nor is it my purpose to divulge all that was said on that midday occasion beneath a willow in Saavedra. I shall only say that, all of a sudden, the laughter and shouting of young men erupted into the garden. The frightened doves scattered in a flutter of wings. It seemed to me some magic circle was being broken, or the doorway to a secret was stealthily closing.

XII

There followed more light-filled days during which I visited the woman of Saavedra so many times that I believed myself arrived at the pinnacle of happiness. But one afternoon, when care seemed as far away as can be, I clearly realized that my repose was nearing its end and the dawn of anxiety was nigh. We were walking in the garden, at the hour when the shadows lengthen, and we chanced upon the greenhouse where sun-shy flowers resided: the white roses there intoxicated us with their perfume, and she too was a white rose, a rose of damp velvet. Her voice must have had some intimate affinity with water, for it was liquid, diaphanously resonant, like the well-water back in Maipú, when a stone fell in and aroused recondite music. Being alone in the floral nursery brought us closer together than ever. It was my great opportunity and my inevitable risk, because at her side I suddenly felt the birth of an anguish that would never leave me, as if at the moment of our greatest closeness there was already opening between us an irremediable distance, just as two heavenly bodies, as they reach their maximum degree of proximity, simultaneously touch the first degree of their separation. The grotto-like light, eroding shapes and forms, managed to exalt them miraculously; and the form of The One assumed for me a painful relief, a plenitude which, once glimpsed, made me shake with anguish, as if so much grace, so slightly supported, suddenly revealed to me how perilous her fragility was. And again the admonitory drums of the night began to beat in my soul, and before my terrified eyes I watched as The One withered and fell among the roses, she as mortal as they.

And baleful voices began to cry from within me: “Look at the fragility of what you love!” A fit of weeping overcame me then, which I desperately tried to stifle, not only because it betrayed, in the presence of The One, a side of my being that no one, not even I, could look at without trembling; but also because I was frightened by the absolute impossibility of giving her an explanation for my weeping. But she hadn’t missed the advent of my tears, and she said to me: “Adam Buenosayres, why are you crying?” Here, at the risk of seeming otiose, I need to express the effect those two little words had upon me: for the first time, I was hearing from her lips the letters of my name. When she encunciated “Adam Buenosayres,” I felt myself named as never before, as though witnessing for the first time the complete revelation of my being and the exact colour of my destiny. And when she then asked me, “Why are you crying?” she did so as though for all eternity she had known why, but with such sweetness that I wept all the harder and, without a word of reply, ran out of the greenhouse and fled through the crowd of flowers.

The voice of alarm raised within me that afternoon would never again fall silent. It sounded two or three times more, when I came into contact with the woman of Saavedra. But it arose so urgently, so distressing was its cry, that I could not bear to hear it and stopped my visits to the garden, clinging to the circle of my much-wept-over solitude. Distancing myself, I was losing her in the garden, but at the same time, it turned out, I was recovering her in thought, and more frequently, with more precision, with more dangerous intimacy. In those days, I admired no grace, assessed no perfection, discerned no truth that did not take me back in memory to The One and to the inevitable meditation on her death. And though such mournful ideas were interrupted when sleep overcame my body, I would then descend into a world of phantoms where the same funereal liturgy was rendered in terrible visions, the same grief rehearsed which, while awake, I felt only in premonitions.

Then I conceived of the incredible enterprise. Perhaps it was the venerable terror, or the fecundity of my lament, or the cry of never-extinguished hope. In any case, I was moved to undertake the difficult labour of enchantment, the strange work of alchemy — the transmutation of the woman of Saavedra. No doubt it was that: the heroic desire to put up a dike against the ineluctable, and to preserve in spirit what in matter was already flowing unstoppably deathward. Such was the extraordinary, prudential labour initiated by my cares in those days: seeing how vulnerable her resplendent beauty was in mortal clay, I set about extracting from that woman all the durable lines, volumes, and colours, all the grace of her form; and with these same elements (though now rescued from matter) I recontructed her in my soul according to weight, number, and measure. And I forged her form such that henceforth it would be free of all contingency and emancipated from all grief. I recall describing the details of such an astonishing operation in a necessarily obscure poem written at about that time; my friends didn’t understand the poem’s true scope and spun the most diverse conjectures. My hope is that, should their eyes chance upon these lines some day, my friends will remember the poem and finally discern its obscure meaning; I hope they’ll see why in the last phase I called the transmuted woman: Niña-que-ya-no-puede-suceder, “Girl-who-can-no-longer-happen.”11

(Note: The following chapters bring the Blue-Bound Notebook to a close. They were written, no doubt, by Adam Buenosayres after his definitive tertulia in Saavedra. The manuscript lies before me now, awaiting transcription. But before continuing, I contemplate its tormented lines, full of scratched-out phrases and corrected words, altogether different from the handwriting in the first part of the Notebook, whose exquisiteness speaks of an artist’s slow, painstaking work. This last part begins with an extravagant fable or apologue. It goes like this:)

XIII

It comes to pass — not every year — that Springtime, tired perhaps of lying dormant in the sap of trees or the blood of animals, shakes off the vapours of sleep and says to herself that it’s now time to dance upon the earth. In vain the heads of astronomers swivel in denial; in vain the almanacs, perturbed, warn her the time to dance is not yet come. Mindless of such wholesome counsel, Springtime sallies forth into the world: her bugle plays reveille for the flowers, her dance arouses a profusion of prematurely sprouting leaves. This does come to pass, but not every year; and in the orchard of Maipú a certain young peach tree did not know this (I was a child then, and spy of hidden gestures). It happened once that — while the elderly peach trees, experienced in the exercise of prudence, were still asleep and ignoring the deceitful song of spring — the young peach tree opened its blossoms (thus did my love misjudge time!) and exposed them to the benevolent critique of the sparrow. But it wasn’t long before the frost returned (silly little fable); and that year the young peach tree, its blossoms whimpering, learned the exact date of its springtime. Thus does my love, weeping, learn its lesson.

In the last part of the Notebook, I gave an account of the alchemical work I’d initiated with the virtues of that laudable woman, redeeming them from the devastation I perceived already in progress and translating them to the intimate retreat of my soul, where they might acquire the stability of things spiritual. I say now that no sooner had I begun than the inevitable doubling of The One took place, producing the necessary opposition between the earthly woman, who was being reduced to nothing, and the celestial woman, whom my soul was building up in her secret workshop. And since the construction of one was being done with the remains of the other, it was not long before I noticed that as the spiritual creature grew in size and virtue, the terrestrial creature diminished in inverse proportion, until it arrived at its limit of nothingness. Thus did “the death of The One” impose itself upon my mind with the rigour of a necessity. And its date must have been, in my eyes, as foreseeable as that of an event in the heavens.

Nevertheless, no sooner had I received this news than a deep chord detonated in my being and something vital was left forever wounded. I’ll never forget the nocturnal hour when, crossing the threshold of Saavedra and wending my way among the throng of astonished faces filling the vestibule, I came, as in a dream, upon the narrow box containing the remains of The One; yes, the coffin of walnut wood whose edges marked for her an unbreachable limit. She was swathed in the brightest of linens. Her sisters had combed her flaxen hair, crowned her brow with a ring of little white flowers, and placed between her stiff hands an ivory rosary and the book of her first communion, just as they would have adorned her for her wedding. Yet the whole of her spoke of such appalling distance that, when I looked at her, my being became unhinged and its inner voices began their woeful lament, to the point of nearly bursting out loud, finally finding an outlet in sweet avenues of tears. Afterward, I remember an all-night wake whose infinity seemed to deny any new dawn; and a whirlwind of bare faces sobbing in the candlelight, unsightly yet beautiful in the terrible shamelessness of their grief; and the house full of weeping or — what amounted to the same thing — fraught silences; and then a lassitude of limbs, a hunkering down of lights and a drowsiness of tired animal; and at last the break of day, insisted upon by imbecile roosters, but indecisive and apathetic, as though fearing that not enough pain remained in humankind to fill another day on earth. And I’ll not speak now of the stupor experienced by eyes before the dawn light no one had summoned; nor of the brilliance of the funeral procession of lacquered coaches and horses’ hooves; nor of that unbearably slow journey through Buenos Aires whose indifference stung like an insult; nor of the cradle of red clay which lovelessly received that vanquished body of a girl; nor of the return trip without her, from solitude, amid solitude, unto solitude.

XIV

Listless days ensued, filing by like automatons in front of my being, every morning bringing their tired old collection of pawed-over junk, every evening taking it away. Indifferent to the play of exterior images, my mind empty and my will paralyzed, I recall how stupid and rigid seemed the chill mechanics of time, the obligatory waking-up and the useless return to sleep, each time the earth emerged from or re-entered its cone of shadow. Night-time, however, brought with sleep the sweet parody of death, and the dark delight of reviving in a subtle world made of images that arose in another space and came into being in another time, witnessed by another awareness in my being. But in my dreamspace The One’s death, too, was reconstructed according to other laws; and it attained a fine-tuned intensity so painful that I would wake up suddenly, still filled with fragments of images and voices. Then, opening my ears and holding my breath, I would listen to the furniture creak, the wind sigh in the paradise trees on Monte Egmont Street, and someone else moaning in dreams in the other room, sounds and whispers of sounds that overwhelmed me with anguish, as if my nerves extended beyond my skin and branched out through the house to pick up its most intimate vibrations.

But on the last of those nights I had an extraordinary dream whose meaning, impressed upon my defeated mind, opened up a path from which my mind will surely not henceforth swerve. I seemed to be in rickety boat, standing on its poorly fitted planks, and paddling ceaselessly over the waters of a lagoon. The devastated body of The One lay across the bow of the boat, wearing the same clothes and accoutrements as in her final night in Saavedra. Still paddling, I contemplated her womanly form, my soul racked by a tearless pity whose sweetness I cannot now depict, while the paddle, cutting through the dead waters, stirred up terrible odours and sliced into phosphorescent chunks of dead meat that swirled and sank into the depths. Next it seemed the boat came to rest at a jetty as dark as ink. I took up the woman’s body in my arms and went up some sort of stairs until I came to a door that opened soundlessly before me. Then, it seemed, Someone behind the door held his arms outstretched toward me and I deposited in them the dead body, which was soon borne away into the interior gloom. When I tried to follow, it seemed, an invincible force pinned my heels at the threshold, and the door slowly closed, separating my heart from those remains I’d brought over the waters. Wounded to the point of deep distress, I seemed to shout out terrible words and beat my fists against the closed door; since there was no echo of a response, my blows and shouts became more violent, until I seemed to feel behind me the presence of someone staring at me fixedly. I turned around then and made out the shape of an old and ragged man whose face seemed not unfamiliar. Looking at me mercifully, he said: “Let death take its own.”12 And since I asked him who he was, the old man answered: “I am he who has moved, moves, and will move your steps.” Then I seemed to recognize the same voice that had spoken to me, both when awake and asleep, so many times before; and, as if the sense of all my actions in this world were owing to that voice, when I heard it issue from the man’s mouth, my eyes shed convulsive tears. Seeing which, he told me: “Pay no more mind to multitudinous images, and seek the single, true face of The One.” Not understanding the meaning of his obscure words, I seemed to hear others from the man’s lips coming into my mind, words ordering me to pursue the work of the heavenly woman, whose praises the man sang so passionately that, caught up in a rare exultation, I suddenly awoke, the flavour of that music in the ears of my soul.13

Ever since then my life has had a well-defined direction, a well-placed hope in the vision of The One who, redeemed by the work of my loving mind, breathes in my mind and is nourished by my substance,14 rose that eludes death. She not only triumphs in her now immutable springtime, but she continues to transform and grow, according to the dimensions of my soul’s own desire: rose that eludes death, flower without autumn, mirror mine, whose perfect form and unique name I shall know some day, if, as I hope, there is a day when man’s thirst finds the right water and its true spring.15

BOOK SEVEN

(Journey to the Dark City of Cacodelphia)

I

On Saturday April 30, 192–, in the lowlands of Saavedra, at midnight, the astrologer Schultz and I set out on the memorable journey I now propose to recount. Our itinerary was to include, according to the astrologer’s nomenclature, a descent into Cacodelphia, city of torment, and an ascent to Calidelphia, city of glory.1 Needless to say, the mere announcement of that journey had plunged me into doubt, hesitation, and not a few reservations, aware as I was that for some time Schultz had been pondering a trip to hell in order to explore its sinister realms, a descent undertaken by precious few heroes even in antiquity, and by not a one, as far as I know, in the vulgar, prosaic age we live in now. Just a couple of hours earlier, I recall, we were sitting in Schultz’s studio, where I was still grumbling and making last-ditch objections. The astrologer listened in silence, moving with absolute calm amid handwritten manuscripts and volumes lying open, celestial spheres and zodiacs, astrological tables, and other paraphernalia that stuffed his studio.

— Let’s suppose for a moment the two mythological cities might actually exist, I joked. Even if we were crazy enough to follow in the footsteps of Ulysses, Aeneas,2 Alighieri, and other infernal tourists, what merit do we have that would make us worthy of such an adventure?

— I have the merit of my science, and you the merit of your penitence, Schultz answered with much gravity.

I fell silent in surprise and confusion for, although I didn’t exactly know what Schultz’s science entailed, I was well aware of the lugubrious state I’d been floundering in for some time, its chief symptom an indefinable aridity, and I thought I’d kept this a jealously guarded secret. Recovering from my astonishment, I turned to Schultz with a question on my lips; but at that instant the astrologer was examining a ball of twine held between his fingers.

— What do you reckon is the diameter of an ombú? he asked doubtfully.

— Listen, I answered laughing, what the heck have ombú trees got to do with anything?

— You’ll find out, he said. I’m talking about the one we discovered the other night in the outback of Saavedra.

Then, recalling the scene with the magus and the ombú and the bonfire burning amongst the tree’s black spurs, I mentally assessed the thickness of its trunk.

— Five feet or so, I said at last. Maybe a bit more.

Schultz nodded. Scratching with a pencil, he figured out how long a circumference would correspond to that diameter. Then, unravelling a portion of twine, he measured out a length equal to the circumference he’d calculated, marked the spot with a knot, added to the measured-out length three units from who knows what bizarre metrical system, cut it off with his famous black-handled penknife, and finally put both knife and string in his pocket, all with the air of someone performing a liturgical ceremony. The job finished, he let himself fall back into an antediluvian armchair.

— I’m going to set you straight on two points, he announced, as if during his manoeuvres with the string he’d been considering my final arguments. First of all, we won’t be undertaking a voyage to Tartarus, as metaphysicians understand the term. Pshaw! That would be too ambitious, at least for you.

— Thanks! I interrupted, feeling a prick of resentment.

— Which means, Schultz concluded, that if you imagine you’re going to play a pathetic, dime-store Orpheus at my expense, you’d best renounce that illusion right now.

I couldn’t help laughing out loud.

— Gladly! I answered. So, what’s the second point?

In his antediluvian armchair, with legs crossed and arms hanging loose, the astrologer was the very image of indolence.

— Cacodelphia and Calidelphia, he said, are not mythological cities. They really exist.

— Sure, I grumbled, just like your blessèd broody angels.

— What’s more, insisted Schultz, the two cities conjoined form a single city. Or better yet, they are two aspects of the same city. And that Urb, visible only to the eyes of the intellect, is the counterfigure of the visible Buenos Aires.3 Is that clear?

— Clear as mud.

I report our colloquium in so much detail, giblets and all, so readers may get an exact impression of the spirit in which Schultz and I tackled that singular adventure; and above all, because such a frivolous beginning was to contrast seriously with the extraordinary nature of the episodes to follow. But before recounting them, I should perhaps sketch a profile of the astrologer Schultz, the journey’s instigator and guide.

Standing nearly six-foot-six, the astrologer had a long, skinny body, a wide brow, and silvery hair. His severe face was afflicted with a sort of earthy pallor, approaching the colour of tubers, and was animated by the light of grey eyes whose gaze would suddenly fall upon you like a fistful of ashes. It was just about as impossible to calculate his age as to square the circle, for while some thought he was fast approaching the third childhood, others didn’t hesitate to give him all the years of Methuselah; and still others, refraining from laborious speculation, credited him with the simple, straightforward immortality of the crab. One thing I can say is that Schultz sometimes showed traces of an infinite decrepitude, no doubt the result of certain astral oppositions. At other moments, under more favourable signs, he was capable of fits of mad glee, and he would dance the entire night away at the Tabarís Cabaret;4 or he would hang out in neighbourhood general stores, singing lewd songs that even the prudent tough-guys from Villa Ortúzar couldn’t hear without blushing. And here I must put special emphasis on his moral nature, equally contradictory: it was true that the general orientation of his conduct lent him a certain ascetic tone with regard to the vulgar appetites (many people swore, for example, that Schultz’s sole nourishment was the nectar of flowers, and that his relations with women bordered on the ineffable, consisting in an exchange of more or less vagarious fluids). But it was no less certain that Gildo’s Grill (corner of Rivadavia and Azcuénaga) had more than once witnessed him voluptuously attack a heap of steaming entrails, cow’s kidneys, and bull’s testicles, and that he was wont to fall into ecstatic perorations before certain feminine thighs, whose perfection he attributed to Jupiter’s classical munificence. As for the astrologer’s wisdom, popular opinion was equally divided. Some imagined he was at the ultimate stage of Vedic initiation. Others thought he must be afloat in the sublime realms of theosophical fiddle-faddle. And then there were those who, too suspicious by half, revered him as the most doleful humourist ever to have drawn breath by the shores of the River Plate.

II

It was with this strange Virgil^5 that I hit the road for Saavedra one more time, on the aforementioned day and year, not long before midnight. By his allusions to the ombú I understood what place the astrologer had in mind, and I was afraid we’d have to cross for a second time the rugged region we had braved forty-eight hours earlier. But Schultz, always foresighted, took me on a long detour around that solitary plain, so that our second incursion began at the exact spot where the first had ended.

It was one of those nights in the Province of Buenos Aires when the calm, humid air creates a dense and static atmosphere, like a womb pulsing with the seeds of future upheavals. The sky was as motionless as the earth below: the high, slate-dark cloud cover was gashed by the horn of a mangy moon on the wane. Beneath the uncertain light bleeding down from above, Schultz and I crossed the first uneven stretch of fallow land, both of us wordless and panting, our eyes peeled. As we made headway, my initially blasé attitude gave way to interest and excitement, perhaps because of my penchant for things supernatural, which, though with me since childhood, had been flaring up of late; or, who knows, it may have been the magic of the terrain we were penetrating, where space and time apparently took on other dimensions.

In any case, when a slope in the plateau took us down to the very foot of the ombú, I had the strange notion that we’d walked an infinite distance over terra incognita. I recall that, sitting down at once on one of the ombú roots, I wanted to linger over my inner impressions and savour the calm silence, so wondrously suggestive at that hour, in that place. But Schultz snapped me out of my introspection:

— We haven’t come here to mooch around! he muttered between his teeth.

Then he took out his famous string, tied one end to the ombú’s trunk and the other end to his venerable penknife. Pulling the string taut, he used it as a radial spoke to trace out a large circle on the ground around the ombú.

Next he marked three points in the circle, which no doubt corresponded to the three vertices of an equilateral triangle. I watched him perform these operations, I must admit, without yet understanding their object.

— Light, the astrologer ordered. Your cigarette lighter.

I took it out of my pocket and lit it. Everything became clear to me when I saw Schultz make a ritual bow over each point of the triangle, his penknife scoring the ground with the dread names of Tetragrammaton, Eloha, and Elohim.

— Cripes! I exclaimed. This is a magic circle!

— Shhh! the astrologer silenced me. Bring the light closer.

I obeyed mechanically, and then saw him incribe the names Santos Vega, Juan Sin Ropa, and Martín Fierro in among the others.

— Strange confluence of names, I murmured.

— Yes, Schultz admitted, but the person we’re going to invoke requires it.

— Who is it?

Without answering, the astrologer made me enter the circle and put out my lighter. Next I heard him articulate the following spell:

Lagoz atha cabyolas

Harrahya

Samahac ori famyolas

Karrehya.6

— Are you speaking Basque? I asked innocently. My grandparents are Basque, and I wouldn’t want…

— Silence, you fool! he hissed. To hell with your grandparents!

Raising his voice, he declaimed into the vastness of the night:

— I conjure you, Doña Logistilla,7 in the name of the living God, El, Ehome, Etrha, Eel Aser, Ejech Adonai Iah Tetragrammaton Saday Agios Other Agla Ischiros Athanatos, amen!8 I conjure you to appear before me in pleasant form, without noise or evil odour, and to answer and obey me!

The spell recited, Schultz and I listened, though without hearing a damned thing. But then, all at once, a gust of wind hit the ombú, whistling through each and every one of its branches. A moment later, we heard a furious pack of dogs bearing down on us.

— That’s enough now! someone shouted in the night. Git outta there, Cinnamon! Back, Fang! Gi’down, Pastor!

A frenzied, ear-splitting mob, the dogs rushed right up to the circle. But there, they stopped short and backed off, their fur standing on end, copiously pissing themselves and howling as if they’d been soundly whipped. Behind them shuffled a sharp-boned old woman wrapped in a shawl, her eyes a little too bright. As she drew near the circle, we recognized the same Doña Tecla we’d met at the Robles wake. According to nasty gossip, Doña Tecla was a frequenter of caves and covens, famous for casting evil spells, and without rival in the arts of the go-between, as handy at repairing what has been torn as at tearing what is whole.9

— Howdy, boys! she greeted us with politic courtesy.

— Hey, Doña! Schultz snapped at her. How about shutting up that pack of dogs!

Gathering the dogs around her, Doña Tecla pulled up her skirts and underskirts and let fly the loudest fart I’ve ever heard in this world.

— Go fetch! she shouted at the dogs. Go fetch, Pastor! Go gid’t, Fang!

The dogs sniffed the air and tore off at full speed, barking like crazy in the night. Then Doña Tecla, rubbing her hands as though warming them over an invisible stove, turned to Schultz and muttered:

– “Nice fire,” the old hag said as ’er shack burned down.

— Yes, replied the astrologer. But it’s no bad year when the crone drops a pup.

— In proverbs a bluffer, still a duffer! snarled the witch, not hiding her chagrin.

She stroked her bony chin, raised her mummified index finger, and said:

— Its beak’s a pecker, its arse a schlepper.

— The sewing needle! Schultz answered without missing a beat.

— Okay. But just remember that in mules we find two legs behind, and two legs before. We stand behind before we find what those behind be for.

— For my part, rejoined Schultz, I’m not the fig plucker nor the fig plucker’s son, but I’ll pluck your figs till the fig plucker comes. And I ain’t the pheasant plucker nor the pheasant plucker’s mate; I’m only pluckin’ pheasants ’cause the pheasant plucker’s late.10

I listened in astonishment to that display of folkloric jousting. And at this point it looked to me like the old woman was fixing to get mad. Dancing a couple of steps from a cueca, she stomped her feet hard, planted herself in front of the astrologer, and let him have it with the following ditty:

From my neck o’ the woods I come over,

My shawl dragged o’er the bog,

Just to come and see your

Face of a drooling dog.11

But Schultz, no doubt playing with a stacked hand, in turn stomped his feet within the circle, then stepped up to the old woman, and answered like this:

From my neck o’ the woods I come over,

My shawl not catchin’ no snag,

Just to come and see you,

Horsey-faced old nag.12

And here it was really something to see how Doña Tecla wrung her hands, sweating in anxiety:

— What’s the cure for rheumatiz? she asked, clinging to the last shreds of her wisdom.

— Buck-armadillo grease, prescribed the astrologer.

— To make a man go blind?

— Take a black snake and sew its eyes shut with red thread.

— You win, Mandinga!13 exclaimed Doña Tecla in unconditional surrender. Here I am, at yer service. What kin I do ya for?

The astrologer Schultz regarded her with an air of supreme dignity:

— We withcome, he announced, to inframbulate in the cacosites and suprambulate in the calirealms. And I order you to tell me where the holiportal opens.14

— Hey, now! grumbled the witch. Coltskin boots ain’t for everybody.

— But I am the Neogogue, revealed Schultz.

— Mercy, me! exclaimed Doña Tecla, crossing herself.

Without another word she entered the circle and went up to the ombú. But before showing us the opening of the passage in a cleft in the trunk, she raised her arms heavenward and cried out:

— Them Pollygogs are gonna pyro-shit theirselves now!15

Then, as I recall, Schultz and I slipped through the cleft of the ombú into a tunnel that sloped downward, impelling us on a wild, vertiginous descent. Suddenly the ground disappeared under our feet: something like a very strong whirlwind literally sucked us toward the depths. Then I lost consciousness, not in a faint, but rather as though falling asleep.16 And here the reader who, like me, has been tagging along on this adventure, must pause a moment and think whether you hadn’t better flee the ombú and go back to the visible Buenos Aires, still nearby; or whether you trust enough in your courage to descend with us into the intelligible Buenos Aires. Because once you cross the threshold of the cleft and plunge down the vertiginous tunnel, there will be no turning back: you will find yourself in the suburbs of Cacodelphia.

III

Upon regaining consciousness, we found ourselves in a region whose nature I couldn’t make out at first. Something like a dense fog surrounded and squeezed us, closing down our horizons almost at the tips of our noses. I’m saying, not fog, but “something like a fog” because its terrible dryness burned our throats, eyes, and nasal passages, as if an atmosphere of suspended volcanic ash were pressing down upon us. The ground was similarly arid. We stepped gingerly, and it crunched beneath our heels like saline crystals or calcified detritus. A vague murmur, as of the sea or multitudes, filled the area, rising and falling rhythmically like the tide.

— Let’s wait here for the fog to settle, Schultz said in a calm voice. We need to get to the jetty, and we don’t want to get lost in this suburb like a pair of fools.

— Suburb? I protested. This place looks like a cross between Lapland and the Sahara, or I don’t know a thing about geography.

— As soon as the fog dissipates, Schultz assured me, you’ll see how terribly populated this suburb is. Meanwhile, just to avoid any possible confusion, I’ll sketch out the basic outline of Cacodelphia’s architectural plan and tell you how I came to construct the city.

His professorial tone was decidedly absurd in such a time and place. But I listened to him with that amazing matter-of-factness we assume in dreams, impassively accepting the most extravagant oneiric creations.

— When I decided to give a visible image to the intelligible Cacodelphia, the astrologer began, my first concern was to avoid crass imitations. Wary, then, of building a garden-variety Inferno, I conceived the form of the inverted-empty-cone, which I called Divicone, within which the Cacodephians would be placed as though inside a gigantic glass, according to the greater or lesser burden of their souls. The densest among them would inhabit the bottom, as montrous figures laboriously swimming through a kind of putri-slime, which they would be eternally swallowing and vomiting. The middle-weights, provided with flotational bladders and scales, would occupy the glass’s central zone, nimbly swimming in water varying from murky to transparent. The lightest ones, the lofty-souled, would be assigned to the upper part of the Divicone; there, thanks to their semi-aerial condition, they would tend to rise like iridescent bubbles and spill over the edge of the glass in search of the regions of holy fire.

— A poetic idea, I commented.

— You’re right, poetic, Schultz allowed. Merely poetic. I was obliged to discard it.

— Why?

— Because of its imprecision, typical of everything poetic. I needed to organize my infernal space mathematically so as to make it comprehensible and passable. So then I dreamed up a subterranean skyscraper (or, if you will, an earthscraper) with various floors, each of them constituting a different infernal abode; the floors would all be connected by an elevator shaft, which would stand as the vertical axis or line of celestial motion.

— A prosaic idea.

— And a very dangerous one. Because it lured me into the temptation to put escalators and diabolical elevator operators all over the place. In other words, to construct a motorized hell that wouldn’t look all that different from the Gath & Chaves department store during a liquidation sale.17

— Exactly, I said. So, after all its mutations, how did your Cacodelphia end up?

The astrologer put on the professional voice of a tourist agent:

— Cacodelphia, he announced, is a helicoid track that spirals downwards. It is made up of nine stages or turns of the spiral, each of them being the site of an infernal barrio or cacobarrio. Where one turn of the helix ends, another begins, with no other complications than a tricky access whose dangers the curious tourist must face and overcome. The vertical axis of the Helicoid is a tube running through the nine cacobarrios and whose virtues I’ll apprise you of when the time comes. As for the amazing details of its construction, they are not included in the prospectus, and they will be revealed to you in situ by the company’s agent.

— And this place where we are now, I asked, is it the first turn of the Helicoid?

— I think I told you this is only a kind of suburb, an agatasbarrio — neither fish nor fowl. But I see that visibility has improved. Follow me and keep your eyes open.

The mist was clearing, and the territory was visible thanks to a sort of milky light seeming to emanate not from above, but rather from the ground itself, and which gradually brightened like the light of a lamp being given more wick, little by little. Schultz and I — with him leading and me hard on his heels — were now walking down a glossy, crunchy incline that gave us the sensation of treading upon the dry crust of a lunar landscape. And as we advanced in the increasing light, the dull roar we’d heard earlier in the fog was also intensifying. But now we could distinguish the diapason of a thousand human accents, a thousand interwoven voices, neither happy nor sad, reverberating as though inside a cavern. Suddenly the incline threw us onto a kind of terrace or plateau that seemed to give onto a void.

— Come and take a look, Schultz said, leading me to the edge.

I looked and for an instant wondered whether what my eyes were seeing was in the realm of reality or fiction. Extending as far as the horizon, in a patchwork of salt flats and sand dunes, was a cheerless plain, arid and monotonous, cracked and furrowed by drought, shiny with saltpeter. Men and women, infinite in number, were swarming in throngs over the plain, running here and there, randomly, like autumn leaves swirling in unsettled winds: the multitude would pause suddenly, its thousands of heads swivelling round like so many indecisive weathervanes; then women and men would go back to running, knocking into each other, pausing, raising their revolving heads. Suddenly there rained down upon the plain a flood of grimy papers, sheets of newsprint, illustrated magazines, gaudy posters. The multitude threw itself upon that grubby manna, picking it up by the fistful, greedily chewing and swallowing it. Immediately afterward, the men lowering their trousers and the women lifting their skirts, they all squatted and solemnly defecated; at the same time, squawking like parrots, they declaimed pompous editorials, movie columns, political debates, soccer news, and crime stories.

— Good God! I murmured, turning to the astrologer. What people are they, writhing in such agitation on the plain? All those faces look familiar to me, as if I’d seen them a thousand times on Florida Street, in Luna Park, or at the Boca Juniors’ stadium.18

— It’s poor old Demos, answered Schultz, our great majority, equally inclined to good and to evil, who go whichever way the wind blows. These days, it’s clear from their actions and words that the majority is wooed by contemptible winds. But with this very clay, a Neogogue will work wonders.19

— And why have you stuck them in this hell?

— We haven’t yet got to the really dark Cacodelphia, Schultz corrected me again. This is the suburb of the irresponsible, those who cannot be held accountable.

— But it’s already gloomy enough, I insisted, looking once again at the plain and the grotesque bustle of its inhabitants.

— If you think about it, Schultz concluded, you’ll see it’s the faithful image of the existence they all lead in the visible Buenos Aires. But now it’s time to go down into the Helicoid: that’s where you’ll see those who do bear responsibility, and in postures not at all comfortable.

The astrologer walked along the terrace. I followed him, wondering now about what jetty he could have been talking about earlier; for, though I looked and looked again all around me, I saw no sign of any river, lake, or sea. It wasn’t long before we came to the edge of a hole, cistern, or well at the very centre of the terrace. Inside it was a very smooth inclining plane.

— What’s this? I asked warily.

— A slide, answered the astrologer. It’s the holitoboggan.20

— If we’ve got to go down there, all I can say is good night and good luck!

— It’s very simple! Schultz assured me. You sit down on the flat surface and let yourself go merrily sliding off.

Matching action to word, the astrologer hopped onto the slide and instantly disappeared, leaving me behind shouting that I wasn’t going to follow, that we should go back to Buenos Aires and he could go to hell all by himself. I listened for a long moment, leaning over the cistern. Not a voice could be heard from the depths. Then, consigning myself to the devil, I climbed onto the slide and let myself fall into the deep. I had the sensation that my body, thrown at full speed, was corkscrewing madly into the depths of the earth.

IV

Schultz’s holitoboggan rudely dumped me onto sandy ground, fortunately quite soft, where I somersaulted three times, cursing in pectore^21 the infernal inventor who’d dreamed up that puerile transit system. Once I’d sat myself up and shaken the sand from my face, hair, and clothes, I saw the astrologer, indifferent to my fate, contemplating the surroundings with the unenthusiastic gaze of a professional tourist.

— Listen here! I shouted at him, still half-blind, groping around for my hat, and anxious to give Schultz a piece of my mind, which in my view he richly deserved for his lack of toboggan-esque solidarity.

But I said not another word, astonished by the strangeness of the landscape before my eyes: a lagoon whose pasty, absinthe-coloured waters splashed against the beach where we sat, depositing on its sands capricious festoons of a shiny backwash like a snail’s trail of slime. Gigantic, smoke-black monoliths in the form of rough-hewn African idols emerged in their severity from the contractile waters (and I so describe them because of their animal-like quivering, which gave the lagoon as a whole the aspect of a great irritated mollusc). As for the lighting, I couldn’t guess its source (the same thing kept happening throughout Schultz’s Helicoid), but it came down from a plafond or ceiling gelatinous like the water, and it had the grey-pink colour of pulmonary tissue.

I would have spent a long while before that diorama, had the astrologer Schultz not dragged me from my abstraction and led me to a small wharf or jetty, very well hidden on the shore. Beside the jetty, an old motor boat was rocking gently. In the stern stood a man in a blue overall, arms crossed and eyes turned toward the water. Schultz put his fingers to his lips and whistled at him, but the man gave no sign of having heard.

— Take a good look at him, the astrologer told me. See how desperately he’s trying to put on the look of Charon the ferryman.

Turning to the man in the blue overall, he shouted:

— Hey, Gallego! Tone down the histrionics!

The man in the motor launch gave a start, turned around, and shook his fist at us:

— Bourgeois pigs! he thundered. The National Transport Corporation is a hoax! Go fly a kite!

We had reached the side of the boat, and I couldn’t hide my surprise when I recognized the man’s grouchy mug.

— The bus driver of Number 38! I exclaimed. I’m not travelling with this beast!

But Schultz had hopped aboard and he made me follow him. Then he turned to the fellow in the blue overall.

— Get moving! he ordered with an imperious gesture.

The motor roared, and the swampy water of the lagoon swirled behind the propellor. But the boat didn’t budge.

— Why aren’t we leaving? scolded the astrologer.

The man in blue crossed his arms and stared at him in a fury.

— This is an outrage! he protested. I’m taking a grievance to the Union! I didn’t sign any list of conditions. The law’s on my side.

— Are we or are we not in an inferno? Schultz argued. Here you can’t do whatever you bloody well please. Remember, you’re condemned.

— I’m going to appeal! shouted the fellow in blue, rebellious.

The astrologer’s two eyes, at once piercing and human, drilled into him.

— Do you recall your village, back in Galicia? he asked.

— I refuse to answer any questions! roared the fellow in blue. I’ll talk only with my lawyer present.

— You used to plough your land, prune your vineyard, slaughter your pig, sing the carols your mother taught you, and profess the wisdom of your grandparents. Admit it, bagpipe:22 you used to have wonderful dignity. Do you admit it or not?

— I admit it, stuttered the fellow in blue, intimidated.

— And what did you do, as soon as you got to Buenos Aires? Schultz asked him in a pained tone.

— Well, I…

— You let your hair grow like a compadrito, you tied a silk scarf around your neck. You were seen in the neighbourhood dance halls, strutting like a bully and making unheard-of efforts to imitate characters straight out of Vacarezza melodramas.23

— But…

— There’s a “but,” I know, continued Schultz. No sooner did you open your mouth than you gave yourself away. So you started to swallow the “j”s and the “u”s that made you suspect, and you learned the local argot — cathouse and broads and slammer and hey buster! In a word, you forgot the dignity you surely once had, and crassly imitated your new environment.

— That was at first, confessed the fellow in blue, eyes downcast.

— If only you had stopped there! Schultz retorted. Because once your shyster side was awakened and you started devouring vile scandal sheets, there was no problem you didn’t have an opinion about, no truth you wouldn’t deny, no question you wouldn’t weigh in on, from the appointment of bishops to import duties, not leaving out the theory of relativity and Kantian idealism. So you lost the innocence of your people and the joyful sense of life! And then — oh, jughead! — when you found yourself at the wheel of a bus…

— I had to bring home the bacon! the fellow in blue protested.

— Sure, Schultz admitted, but by becoming such a menace? Because, once you’d got your foot on the accelerator, was there any traffic regulation you didn’t break? Was any pedestrian safe, any elderly gentleman spared your fury or any woman your insults? Soul of a slaver! You crammed them into your infernal vehicle. And with your human cargo swaying and groaning, and Death herself sitting in your lap, you — O irrepressible charlatan! — pontificated ad nauseam about brotherly love and the rights of man.

In the course of our journey, that was the only time Schultz had it out with an inhabitant of Cacodelphia. Later, when he was reminded of it, the astrologer confessed to me his tirade against the Sangallego had been delivered in the name of justice. Because, after all, the Sangallego was there not only to purge his faults, but was under the obligation of an extra job ad honorem.24 Be that as it may, when the fellow in blue heard those harsh words, he lowered his head and took the wheel of the boat.

We soon put distance between us and the shore. Schultz had become studiously silent, and the fellow in blue hardly seemed to breathe as he concentrated on steering the vessel among the black monoliths emerging like reefs from the water. We went zigzagging past them at an alarming speed. Seen up close, the human contours of those stones took on monstrous proportions: flattened heads, thick and greedily sensual lips, half-closed eyes, boobs with pointy nipples, spherical bellies covered by a living scab of a thousand little creepy-crawlers that scurried away into the water as we passed. A new discomfort was added to the malaise of the vertiginous trip: from the depths of the lagoon, great bubbles rose to the surface and broke under our propellor, releasing strong ammoniac emanations that irritated our noses and eyes. Moreover, as we advanced, the progressively dimming light deepened into a purple twilight in which lagoon and sky were indistinguishable.

Unexpectedly, just when I feared that a nautical catastrophe was imminent, the boat stopped beside a jetty identical to the one on the other shore. Schultz got out, and I followed him for a few steps, tentatively, for night was falling on that desolate country. In front of us ran a wall, with no other access but a sort of crack or cleft. The astrologer pointed it out:

— There, he said, begins the first turn of the Helicoid.

We were already on our way there, when the man in blue, heading back to his post, shouted after us in a stentorian voice:

— Death to obscurantism!

His final imprecations were drowned by the farting motor.

V

Those of my readers who have some knowledge of infernal excursions will be expecting here an invocation to the Muses or some other flourish of poetic rapture as has traditionally been the fashion in these situations. Well, such readers are just going have to do without, because right from the get-go at the gates of Cacodelphia, Schultz clipped the wings of any possible lyrical whimsy I might have indulged in. Just imagine, reader, you’re at the very threshold of Tartarus, shaking with dread at the mere thought of the visions which before long will unfurl before your eyes; and your brain (if perchance you have one) is busily meditating on the pious theme — what else — of mortal destiny. Next, imagine your infernal leader or guide suddenly offers you a pair of rubber boots like the ones hunters use in marshes, and he opens a big red umbrella right in your face. Reader, my friend, if at such a moment you are up to saluting the Nine Sisters with even a laconic “good day,” it’s because you deserve to live among the blessèd in Calidelphia, where I hope to see you later, if the spirits watching over this story are as favourable to me as they are now.

We had reached the crack in the wall. There, Schultz groped around and found two pairs of boots and the umbrella I just mentioned, whose presence in that place caused me a twinge of hilarity. Nonetheless, I imagined those accessories were there for a reason, and so, imitating the astrologer, I put on the boots that had fallen to me.

— Let’s have the rest of the gear, I asked him wearing boots up to my crotch.

— What are you missing? Schultz asked.

— A double-barrelled shotgun.

The astrologer opened his monumental umbrella.

— This isn’t a joke, he scolded, then ventured through the cleft.

I followed him through the entire thickness of the wall. At the end of the passageway I paused before the vision of what must have been the first barrio of Cacodelphia. At first I could see only a lustrous grey sky, a dense shower falling from it. But then, through the rain, I could make out a shantytown, a random scatter of shapeless shacks with battered zinc roofs. They were built right in the mud out of kerosene drums, bottomed-out barrels, and shells of old cars. A loud-mouthed multitude squelched around the muddy little streets: men and women, dressed in city clothes and covered in mud up to their eyeballs, plopped a foot down here, pulled the other out there, fell down, and got up again with no sign of distress.

— A symphony of mud, I commented, turning to the astrologer.

— Petits bourgeois, Schultz explained. Little folks with puny vices, petty in their meanness. They have neither a speck of virtue nor any grandeur in evil that would earn them a harsher but more honourable place in hell.

— You’ve got them mucking about like beasts.

— They’re in their element.

Without another word, the astrologer strode into the mud, and I found myself obliged to follow his route. Beneath the big red umbrella, we got ourselves into the midst of the sloshing, groaning multitude. Seen up close, the inhabitants of that quarter displayed a tendency to the porcine form, though without completely losing their human aspect (little pig-like eyes, boar-like snouts, flabby double chins, and obese bodies bursting out of torn, mud-encrusted garments of cashmere and silk). But they all had an air of insolent pride, ill-suited to their grotesque figures and their miry exertions. Seeing that none of them noticed us, I asked Schultz:

— Can’t they see us? Or do our boots and umbrella make us invisible in this circle?

— Those people, he answered, look only at themselves. They’re incapable of seeing the otherness of others, as required by the laws of charity.

His answer smacked of a pat phrase and I was about to demand an explanation, but was dissuaded by the sight of the shacks among which we wended our way. There, fat women in outrageous housecoats stood at windows combing streams of mud out of their manes, while others hung clothes out to dry on eternally dripping clotheslines. In tiny yards crammed with abandoned tires and old sardine cans, men of solemn bearing used kitchen knives to scrape the caked muck from their shoes and hats. Most astonishing of all were the shouts, coarse music, and strident conversations filling the shacks. Only when I noticed the antennas on the rooftops did I discover the origin of the tumult: radio sets. Yes, one in every house: honking-big valve radios, at full volume, crooning soppy tangos, screeching old fox-trots, blaring radio-dramas, cawing out City Council meetings, repeating lessons in cooking, hygiene, or calisthenics.

— This place is hell! I exclaimed, covering my ears.

— Naturally, said Schultz. But don’t wander off track; keep to your left. The further we get away from the axis, the longer it will take to go round this turn of the spiral, and I wouldn’t want us to stay in this quagmire forever.

I headed left, cursing the rain, the voracious mire sucking at my boots and the scoundrel who’d got me into this pigsty. Suddenly, someone called out to me from a nearby window:

— Neighbour! Hey, neighbour!

— Campanelli! I exclaimed, recognizing the chubby man beckoning me with friendly gestures.

The astrologer drew back the umbrella and furrowed his brow.

— Who is it? he asked.

— An old enemy. Schultz, you old devil, you couldn’t have put him in a better place. Can I talk to him?

— Three minutes only, conceded Schultz.

We went up to the window. Inside, I could see broken sticks of furniture and wallpaper peeling away in swaths amid the damp gloom. Campanelli, resting on his elbows at the windowsill, was putting on, for my benefit, an air of timidity and compunction that was truly laughable. In front of an enormous telephonic radio set, his adipose wife was doing exercises in her bathing suit, under the guidance of a callous radio announcer. Miss Campanelli, daughter, was sitting on the floor before a toy piano with twelve keys, obstinately repeating the first three bars of the “Waltz Over the Waves.”25

— Well? said I, calmly sizing up the man in the window.

— I don’t know if you remember me, stammered Campanelli. I lived in apartment X, just above you.

— Yes, yes. All is forgiven.

— What have you forgiven me?

— Those minor irritations, I ventured almost tenderly.

Campanelli smiled bitterly.

— You don’t understand, he murmured. You don’t know everything. Do you dare suggest that my conduct expressed merely a naive brutality?

— I wouldn’t go that far.

— Much further, my dear sir, much further than that! said Campanelli, getting wound up. But one thing at a time. What was your first revelation regarding my person and my family?

I looked at him long and hard, surprised by the turn the conversation was taking.

— Look, said I. At that time I was, and still am, what’s known as a “man of letters”: a contemplative type, a spinner of fables, a chaser of subtle metaphysical notions. I don’t know if I make myself understood.

— Go on, please continue.

— Silence, for me, was something absolutely necessary. Is it my fault my nerves aren’t made of brass? And you people, in the apartment above…

— Don’t hold back a single detail, Campanelli implored with bated breath.

— At first I suspected you were all walking around in steel-toed boots. Especially you. Three times a day, before meals, you used to clomp around the table, trotting as anxiously as a famished animal.

— That’s right, that’s right! said Campanelli, rubbing his hands together.

— Then I noticed how roughly you treated your household goods — always banging on the furniture, slamming doors and windows. And the way you brutalized the toilet: after three days it broke on you, remember? Pretty soon I’d drop my books and pen, obsessed by the pandemonium raining down on my head. Sir, by listening attentively, I came to know every detail of your daily life.

— For example?

— Your taste in the arts. You used to tune in to the most vulgar radio stations and choose music that mimed noise, preferably of the gastric variety. Or else top-forty ditties: you’d listen to them a hundred times, and the females in your house would pick them out with one finger on the grand piano another hundred times. The radio plays were for the evenings; you chose melodramas filled with anguished screams, hysterical sobs, gunshots and stabbings, all of which was no doubt necessary to touch a chord in your impervious sensibility.

Campanelli clapped his hands in a fit of sincere enthusiasm.

— Bravo! he exclaimed. Give me your best shot! There is, however, a small error in your last round of observations. My wife was the one who listened to the melodramas. I, personally, couldn’t stand them; I’ve always detested everything dramatic and heroic, whether in real life or in fiction. I was one of those fellows in the movie theatre who always laugh at the most heartrending scenes. And it wasn’t out of bloody-mindedness; I just didn’t get drama — a total lack of comprehension. Besides, you must be aware that tragic scenes can affect the peristaltic movement of the intestine. Being a man of slow digestion, I preferred to sit in a padded seat at the popular theatres. I used to laugh my head off there, laugh in stitches, to the point of losing my breath and feeling my sphincter go dangerously slack. And those fat women who used to sit beside me, laughing: there were nights they’d go home with their underwear quite damp. But please continue, sir. I am very interested in what you have to say, you have no idea how much.

Campanelli’s exultation had left me pensive.

— I don’t have much to add, I said. There were your evening habits. You used to yawn like a lion, pull off your boots, and let them thump on the floor. And then, something unmentionable…

— Eh? What? Campanelli interrupted me, all excited.

He quickly turned to the woman doing calisthenics:

— Turn that radio down! he shouted.

— O.K., Rudy, she panted.

— And that piano too! Campanelli scolded the girl.

— O.K., Daddy, she squeaked like a parrot.

— Wretches! he observed. They pick up that language watching American movies. But you were talking about something unmentionable…

— Sir, I began, looking at him severely now. Why did you have to choose stormy nights to perform your matrimonial duties? Time and again I would hear you, amid thunderclaps and flashes of lightning, going at it upstairs and shouting: “Charge!” and “Fire!” and other bellicose expressions in the worst taste.

A bitter ecstasy came over Campanelli’s face.

— How truly you have spoken! he sighed with tears in his eyes. Was that, by any chance, the last straw?

— When?

— When you complained to the concierge.

— Did he tell you?

— He used arguments on me that could have convinced a stone, whimpered Campanelli. He was a Spaniard from Castille who talked tough but had a soft heart. He told me you were no ordinary man, that you were very sensitive and your nerves were a mess. He concluded by calling upon my sense of charity.

— And you?

— You can’t imagine what a tremendous rage I got into, listening to the concierge’s spiel. Sir, I had my values: for me, one’s monthly income was the foundation of the human hierarchy. And I knew that all you had was your measly teacher’s salary, supplemented by the odd poorly remunerated poetic collaboration. Besides, I had an eight-cylinder automobile, whereas they said you had to get around by streetcar. So it’s no surprise I took your complaint as a slap and an insult: it was a slap at my cheque book and an insult to each and every one of my eight cylinders. But what really exasperated me was the reverential way the Castillian concierge would talk about you — you, who probably wished him a good evening as your only tip!

— We also talked about Castille, the goatherds, the clay soils, I corrected him.

— I know, retorted Campanelli. I know everything now. But after the concierge’s sermon, I took such a scunner to you, it was ridiculous. From then on, I deliberately threw noisy shindigs in my apartment, just to get back at you and make you suffer more.

— Yes, I said, there were times when I thought the roof was coming down on my head.

— And the truly abominable thing was, I didn’t even participate in those orgies; I just pricked up my ears and waited with bated breath for your complaints to come up from below, or even an insult. Sir, I heard you sobbing at midnight and beating the walls with your fist!

The man at the window buried his face in hands and wept bitterly. I cast about for some consoling phrase, and all I could come up with was a few pats on the shoulder. Schultz, who’d been listening to the conversation with absolute impassiveness, kept looking at his watch as though demanding my return to the famous umbrella.

So we left the shack and waded back into the sea of mud, under the never-ending rain, still bumping into the burghers of Mudtown, among whom I looked for other familiar faces. Campanelli’s story had got me thinking:

— What amazes me, I said at last, is the contrition of the man. I knew him as quite heartless.

The astrologer looked at me without kindness.

— And who are you, he grumbled, to poke your nose into someone’s conscience, trying to fathom its twists and turns?

— The lowest of the low, I answered. Still, in my view, his contrition should earn Campanelli a promotion in this Helicoid.

Schultz laughed, albeit without enthusiasm.

— You may have a point there, he said. But, if you think about it, this is a private Inferno, clandestine even, with no license plate or any other official validation.

— Another amazing thing, I insisted. That animal Campanelli spoke with disconcerting elegance.

A chorus of laughter and exclamations distracted us at this point and drew us toward a group of very excited burghers who had formed a circle around two gesticulating figures. We elbowed our way up to the front row, where we could see a woman and a man standing in the middle of the ring and glaring at each other furiously, like two cocks in the pit.

— Señora Ruiz, Schultz announced like a circus impresario.

— And I know that man! I said. I’ll be damned if it isn’t Professor Berreta!26

A spectator at my side stuck out his elongated, tapir-like head and glared at us with visible annoyance:

— Shhh! he muttered. It’s the man’s turn to speak.

Professor Berreta, overdressed in a funereal greatcoat, black gloves, and dismal gaiters, had levelled a menacing index finger at Señora Ruiz.

— Listen! he said. I accuse this mummy of possessing seven different nightshirts, one for every colour of the rainbow, which she puts on to receive, not without spasms of pleasure, the seven physicians who periodically root around in her guts.

A round of applause burst forth from the circle, and Professor Berreta gravely saluted the spectators. But Señora Ruiz, skinny and tough as a stick, stared at the professor through her lorgnette:

— I accuse this man, she shrilled. I accuse him of carrying around with him three atomizers filled with as many disinfectant sprays, which he uses to disinfect his hands, mouth, and nose whenever he’s out in public, on the bus, in the café, or at the movies, for fear of microbial fauna and direct or indirect contagion. I accuse him of keeping a minutely detailed Diary of his health, including urine and stool analyses, his red corpuscle count, the exact time of his defecations, and the precise state of his metabolism.

Loud and enthusiastic was the applause the spectators bestowed upon Señora Ruiz. Nonetheless, showing no sign of weakness, Professor Berreta returned to the charge:

— This lady, he said, has the rare virtue of contracting any given disease by merely reading about its symptoms. Her presence has honoured every medical clinic; her venerable skeleton has been laid out on every operating table. With truly satanic pride, she keeps organs cut out of her by agile scalpels in bottles of clearest crystal — her appendix, half her pancreas, and a kidney — all so she can show them off to her relatives, like trophies of so many victories. Furthermore, in her appalling conceit, she boasts of having produced the biggest faecal bolus ever to illustrate the pages of the Journal of Medicine.

Shouts and jeers, applause and whispers celebrated Professor Berreta’s exceedingly grave accusations. Señora Ruiz, who had withstood the punishment quite well, raised her hand to call for attention:

— This man, she declared, is guilty of always having a condom between himself and the noblest claims of nature: never has he patted a child’s head unless wearing rubber gloves, nor been with any woman without previous, careful, and mutual sterilizations. By the ponds of Palermo, he used to check the direction of the breeze, lest it bring unhealthy emanations from their standing water. This Adam, gentlemen, would have disinfected Paradise, tree by tree, and wouldn’t have eaten the fateful apple unless it were served up as boiled apple sauce.

Endless was the public ovation that greeted Señora Ruiz. But the astrologer Schultz signalled to me:

— Let’s go, he ordered. I suppose they’ll keep on shouting at each other ad infinitum.

— Body worshippers, I said. Old Professor Berreta’s disinfectants didn’t do him much good: he got run over by a bus.

— The ones with real responsibility are lower down, Schultz announced ominously.

We left the ring and, bearing always to our left, we continued to traverse what remained of that turn of the spiral. The buildings, now thinning out, were reduced to the barest hovels dug out of the very earth or improvised with assorted odd materials. Notwithstanding his apparent haste, Schultz stopped in front of a shack knocked together from a couple of sheets of zinc. Inside a man and a woman lay sleeping — she in a loud-coloured dressing gown, he in a pair of oversized sunglasses.

— Doctor Scarpi Núñez, announced Schultz. And his consort, Buxom Betty.

Hearing him, she blinked her blue eyelids.

— Shhh! she whispered. Dr Núñez is with a client.

But Doctor Scarpi Núñez opened first his left, then his right eye:

— We academics… he began to splutter in a solemn tone.

— Et cetera, et cetera, Schultz interrupted. We know the story already.

The astrologer turned to me:

— This gentleman with his doctorate, he said pointing at the man, represents not the learned ignorance^27 that bore such good fruit in better days, but rather ignorant learning and titled illiteracy. Son of a Ligurian shoemaker who had brought to this country his infinite decency, heart of gold, and a useful trade, this so-and-so might in other climes have come to be almost as good a cobbler as his father. But — alas! — the Ligurian shoemaker suddenly found himself in a city that prided itself on conferring doctorates on its million and a half inhabitants, a city where every single useful trade or virtue of the heart cowered before the pompous affectation of a university degree. So what did he do, the Ligurian shoemaker, with his son and his cobbler’s knife and stirrup? Day and night he hammered away at worn boots in Saavedra, taking bread from his own mouth and sacrificing sleep for daydreams, whilst this lump of coal reluctantly sat exams, pared his nails, wasted nights at the dance halls, and added the Castilian Núñez to his native Italian Scarpi, looking straight to his future and askance at his past. And when at last this wonderboy got his diploma, the Ligurian cobbler thought he’d died and gone to heaven.

Doctor Scarpi Núñez sat up halfway in his hovel and adjusted his eyeglasses with dignity.

— My dear sir, he mumbled, allow me to inform you that I am not ashamed of my origins.

— Dr Núñez has responded! cried Buxom Betty triumphantly.

— Dr Núñez is hiding the truth, Schultz told me. Because as soon as he had set up his law practice, married for money, and taken up a life of luxury inspired by Malthusianism and frivolity, this so-and-so had only one major concern: to hide the Ligurian shoemaker, thrust him into the shadows by means of a hundred stratagems, the mere mention of which would wring tears from a stone. The Ligurian shoemaker finally got the message. At first, not wishing to bring shame upon the glory he’d cobbled together out of a thousand broken boots, he went back to his tiny room in Saavedra, and only by night did he go out and steal up to the so-and-so’s door, where he stroked the lawyer’s bronze nameplate. But later, the solitude in his soul and the chill in his heart inspired an indifference many folks take for madness: today, the Ligurian cobbler lives with a little dog called Beffa,28 whose sole passion is to bark furiously at all the bronze nameplates in the neighbourhood.

At this point Buxom Betty, flushed with anger, grasped Doctor Scarpi Núñez, who was obviously asleep, and gave him a shake, shouting:

— Tell him where to get off, Doc! Don’t let him push you around!

— Quiet, Betty, he sighed. Don’t play up to that dime-store Virgil.

But Schultz paid him no mind and went on talking to me:

— However, if this man is now languishing in a pigpen in Mudtown, it’s not only for his behaviour with the Ligurian shoemaker. Sure, he probably did acquire the skills of pettifoggery, as just as the chimney sweep acquires his, but in his core he remained uncultivated, coarse, grossly crude. Even worse, the pride of his new status made him forget every last vestige of his native virtues. If we were to compare them now, the Ligurian shoemaker would seem a paragon of refinement and sensibility alongside his son.

— This man is delirious, Betty! snored Doctor Scarpi, practically asleep.

— Imagine, continued Schultz, still looking at me. As soon as this so-and-so saw his diploma in a gold frame (in abominable taste, to be sure), he considered himself entitled to pass judgment on each and every instance of human thought and imagination. Just ask him if he didn’t go to concerts, exhibitions, and theatres, there to scandalize connaisseurs with his vulgar opinions and fundamental ignorance. Just ask him if he didn’t exhaust some people’s patience and make others laugh. And when still others enjoined him to stick to his last,29 ask him if he didn’t trot out the dogma of equality and everybody’s right to an opinion, as guaranteed by our Magna Carta. Go ahead and ask him, while he’s there in front of you!

Schultz stopped talking. I turned to the so-and-so, not to ask him a question, but curious to see how he would respond. But Doctor Scarpi Núñez was now roundly snoring, swaddled in his blankets of mud.

— Shhh! Buxom Betty silenced me. Dr Núñez is not available.

We walked away from the pigsty, heading for the exit from Mudtown, which wasn’t far off.

VI

— Blessèd are those of strong kidneys and unyielding waist!30 Blessèd are those who neither besmirch their soul with the body’s delirium nor destroy their body with the delirium of the soul, but have observed the happy medium and harmonious order in which man honourably takes his place between the level of the Angel and the level of the Beast! Happy are those who have no imagination, or who’ve had its wings clipped by the scissors of loving Reason! And happy those who, upon hearing the sirens’ song, have listened while bound to the mast like Ulysses, so they could enjoy the music of the intelligible realm without foundering on the reefs of the sensual!

Schultz solemnly pronounced these words when the second turn of the spiral hove into view. The astrologer’s flatus vocis seems justified now, as I evoke in memory images from the second circle of hell. Yet my pen hesitates, so shocking were the scenes I saw in that sector, and so numerous the hosts who suffered there the rigours of the Earthly Venus.

We had left Mudtown through another cleft in the wall and, abandoning umbrella and boots, we came to a halt at the edge of a precipice that cut off our path. When I peered over the edge into the abyss, a gust of hot wind lashed at my face, but not a single human sound arose from the depths. Suddenly, something like a very distant drum started beating below; the drumbeat grew louder and louder until it was like thunder, making the walls of the abyss vibrate, and I jumped back. But then, just as quickly, the thunder ebbed to a drumbeat and then to silence, a silence pregnant with menace.

— There’s the bridge, Schultz advised me, heading for a fragile structure soaring from one side of the abyss to the other.

I followed him without comment, but was suspicious of the bridge, which at a distance put me in mind of the toboggan slide or some other contrivance of the astrologer’s fertile imagination. Great was my relief when, drawing near, I saw it was indeed a bridge, complete with wooden handrails, and looking a lot like the ones you see arching over streams in Chinese woodcuts. As usual, my relief was succeeded by a burst of daring that had me blithely strolling across the bridge without a care. So I didn’t notice the astrologer’s brow gradually clouding over with worry. We must have been about halfway across, when the thunderous drumbeat started up again, but this time a vicious wind swept up from the abyss and nearly blew us away.

— Grab the rail! shouted Schultz.

I obeyed in the nick of time and closed my eyes until drumbeat and wind had died down as quickly as they had arisen. But Schultz still looked worried:

— It’s not over yet, he announced. Now comes the hard part.

His gaze sought something on the remaining stretch of bridge before us.

— Where has the filthy beast got to? he wondered aloud, moving forward with extreme caution.

No sooner had he spoken than the monster appeared at the head of the bridge. Now, looking back over the incidents of the journey, I tell myself that animal’s showing up there was the nastiest trick Schultz played on me in all the spirals of his Helicoid. Blocking our way was the gigantic figure of a woman, completely naked. Her dishevelled locks were entwined with brass-foil roses and chiffon laurel leaves. Her idiot’s brow bulged above wild eyes, below which fleshy lips greedily protruded in the four cardinal directions. Where her breasts should have been, the heads of two dogs stared slit-eyed, as if dozing. Her belly, huge and round, looked like the battlefield of every delirium. A crab with immobile pincers concealed or substituted for her sex, and from each of her buttocks sprouted a gawky gallinaceous wing. All in all, the beast expressed a sensuality so painful that my legs turned to mush at the mere sight of her.

— I’m not going any further! I protested, turning away from the courtesan who stood guard at the head of the bridge.

— Don’t let Dame Lust intimidate you, the astrologer advised me. Don’t let her see you’re afraid.

— I’m not afraid of that scarecrow! I retorted. And, if you ask me, those bloody wings growing out of her rear-end are in mighty questionable taste.

Paying no attention to my protests, the astrologer Schultz took my arm and led me toward the woman. But Dame Lust was stirring; her two dogshead hooters stuck their muzzles out and began to bark furiously; her sexcrab extended menacing pincers; and the two ungainly gluteal wings started flapping vigorously in a futile attempt to take flight. Hopping like a chicken, the woman came closer and stared us in the face:

— How ’bout it, boys! she cooed in a monotone. How ’bout it!

— Yeah, yeah, answered Schultz without stopping.

— How ’bout it, boys! How ’bout it! intoned Dame Lust, backing away from us in little hops.

Thus we arrived at the end of the bridge and stepped onto terra firma.

— Goddam franeleros! she yelled after us as she returned to her post, the two dogsheads rabidly biting each other.

Before I go on to describe the various precincts of the second spiral and the order in which we toured them, let me clarify that this sector of hell was nothing like a barrio. As I later realized, it looked more like an enormous movie-production lot, where weird set-designers had seemingly mounted, one next to another, six heterogeneous sets unconnected by any passage.

The first scene (and don’t ask me how we got there) was an immense theatre, decorated with pornographic plaster figurines, threadbare curtains, and fly-specked mirrors. A multitude of randy men filled the orchestra seats and galleries up to the rafters. The air was so thick with cigarette smoke, animal heat, old sweat, garlic soup, and cheap perfume, you could’ve cut it with a knife. While Schultz was looking for a pair of empty seats, I scanned the crowd and spotted the ornate jackets of milkmen, the blue coveralls of mechanics, the shiny suits of office workers, the wide-brimmed hats of students, the top hats of aristocrats, and the Perramus trenchcoats typical of burghers.

— Half of Villa Crespo is gathered here, I remarked to Schultz as I sat down beside him.

— Three quarters of the whole city, he corrected me. But let’s listen now.

The crowd was clearly growing impatient. Suddenly an infernal stomping of feet raised a most acrid cloud of dust. The men in the upper gallery responded with jeers and whistles, and banana peels were pelted against the curtain bearing ads from our most noted specialists in venereal disease. In an apparent attempt to assuage the spectators’ impatience, a brass band somewhere off-stage began playing, out of tune, the San Lorenzo March.31 But the whistling only intensified, and a chorus of indignant voices, a thousand-strong, struck up a chant:

— Song-and-dance, no. We want a speech! Song-and-dance, no. We want a speech!

The brass band stopped playing, the curtain went up, an expectant hush filled the hall. Suddenly, emerging from backstage through red curtains, a little man came on stage and went straight to the footlights, as a clamorous ovation received him triumphantly.

— The pipsqueak Bernini! I cried.

— Quiet! ordered Schultz. Names are not be mentioned in this circle of hell.

It was indeed the pipsqueak Bernini who had just come on stage, receiving the applause with the blasé majesty of a condottiere. Since the applause grew louder, the pipsqueak acknowledged it with a thin smile.

— Listen to the Boss! someone shouted from the orchestra seats.

— Boss! Boss! howled the delirious multitude.

The pipsqueak Bernini raised his hand in command:

— Students with eyes eager as bloodhounds for the chase! he declaimed. Salesclerks intoxicated by movies! Factory workers with active right-hands! Bourgeois gentlemen in unwilling celibacy! And above all, you, oh federal-government employees! It is no ordinary problem that brings us together in this enthusiastic conference, but one that has tormented man since time immemorial. The raciest pages of history are littered with attempted solutions. I refer to the problem of sex.

— Very good! someone shouted.

— When he speaks, he becomes a giant!

— Silence! Silence!

The orator made a sign, and some hidden projector bathed him in a cone of yellow light.

— In today’s society, the pipsqueak resumed, this perennial problem has taken on catastrophic proportions. As you are all no doubt aware, an imbalance between supply and demand drives up the price of articles of prime necessity, precisely when the demand for them outstrips their supply. Well, gentlemen, that is just what’s happening in the case of women in our city of Buenos Aires.

Deep sighs were heaved in the hall, and the beam of light falling on Bernini turned from yellow to red.

— Do you sigh, my brave listeners? exclaimed the pipsqueak. Yes, it is your sighs, and not some noisome wind, that come to pluck at the strings of my lyre! I’ll not weary your legitimate attention with statistics. But tell me this: who among you has not found himself in a café of an evening, in the company of a hundred-odd members of our sex, gazing avidly, silently, hungrily at three or four feminine divinities inaccessibly ensconced in a stage box where they struggle with their rebellious musical instruments?32 Who among you, I say, has not been at a family dance in Villa Ortúzar, wasting your breath and patience trying, in vain, to get a dance with one of those disdainful beauties who plays hard-to-get? Disdainful, I call them, and with good reason. For, as if it weren’t bad enough that the adorable creatures are so few, we must also suffer the way they treat us with haughty superiority. A superiority, it must be said in all fairness, that’s due only to their advantageous situation in the marketplace.

— That’s right! That’s right! shouted several voices above the dull roar of the rest of the audience.

— You’re becoming indignant, my brethren! thundered Bernini. A just anger fills your breasts and darts fiercely from your eyes. And what about Florida Street? Women pass by in twos and threes, dressed and coiffed like goddesses, with an absent air as of mythological beasts, with the insulting arrogance of all that is costly. You see them and get a lump in your throats. You’d do anything for them: stoop to clear the sidewalk of old streetcar tickets lest they trip on them; or unscrew their belly-buttons and polish them up with the useless silk of your ties.

— He’s as good as Castelar!33 cried a Galician Spaniard in ecstasy.

— Not even the great Alfredo Palacios^34 at the top of his game had this man’s silver tongue, declared an electrician, with tears in his eyes.

— Alas, gentlemen! the pipsqueak added. In vain you shave your homely mugs daily. In vain you exhaust the imagination of your tailors. In vain you resort to massages, hair removal, and aesthetic surgery in hopes of achieving the charm that Nature, cruel Stepmother, has denied you. The beauties ignore you, or pretend to ignore you. And now, bring on the bearded philosophers from the North! I dare them to expound, in front of me, their bearded theories about the sadness of Buenos Aires!35 I’ll show them the sole cause and origin of our famous melancholy: it’s that the opposite sex condemns us to solitude! Ah, gentlemen, admit it! At one time or another, some lonely Buenos Aires midnight had you feeling the urge to weep bitterly against the worthy jacket of some night watchman!

The hall exploded into irrepressible sobs. Sodden eyes were covered by multicoloured handkerchiefs. The beam of reddish light falling on the orator turned a lugubrious purple.

— But I haven’t yet come to the most serious issue, announced Bernini. I wouldn’t be standing here before you if our cause were not also of concern to the nation, whose interest far surpasses the sum of our individual interests. For I wonder now: what will become of our homeland if this oppressive separation of the sexes continues? Ah, gentlemen, I seem to hear even now the bones of our forefathers turning in their graves! Toothless mouths open and cry out to us: “The Fatherland is in danger!”

Universal was the consternation among the audience. Men were collapsing in a faint in the orchestra seats, and five portraits of national heroes — part of the stage decor — came clattering down from their place on high. In the midst of the pandemonium and the bustle of the stretcher bearers, the pipsqueak Bernini raised a stentorian voice and restored calm:

— Well then, brethren! he cried. Lift up your hearts! For the hour has come to solve the problem!

Cheers and applause greeted his words, and the orator took a bow, smiling beneath the rain of flowers falling from everywhere, as the lighting turned from darkest purple to the rosiest of pinks.

— And you will ask me, how will it be solved? Here is my answer: either by limiting the production of males (a viable option only if the National Congress resolves to correct Nature’s injustice). Or by taking the pedagogical route and passing a law to make women take courses and learn all about the hapless male sex, not only in terms of our topography but also of our history, sentiment, finances, and hedonism. This instruction would involve the use of photographs, colour illustrations, famous anecdotes, plaster replicas, vertical and longitudinal cross-sections, and even live specimens.

Gleeful laughter and roars of joy resounded in the hall. Thousands of canes and hats were thrown up onto the stage. One respectable burgher, in a gesture of liberality, released a dozen doves he’d brought in a cage. Then the audience surged toward the dais, intending, I suppose, to take possesion of the pipsqueak and hoist him aloft in triumph. I never found out if they actually did so, because Schultz tugged me out of the human deluge and led me through a deserted corridor to the exit.

As I mentioned earlier, there was no linkage between the sets, no intermediary passage from one to another. And so the exit was in fact the entrance to the second infernal scenario. I’ll now attempt to describe it, though holding back certain crude details ill-suited to the decorum I wish for my story; indeed, the reader will often find me teetering on the edge of indecency. Now, on the threshold of the second scene, the astrologer Schultz solemnly warned me:

— Look, but say nothing: that’s the watchword in the Pond. You may recognize many faces in this place, but charity demands our discretion and silence.

Once we were inside, the warm, foggy, clammy atmosphere gave me the impression of a Turkish bath — the more so when, between jets of steam, I glimpsed Moorish architectural motifs. Equally dense was the prevalent silence. But suddenly there was a splash, and the most mournful of voices demanded:

— Don’t disturb the water!

Then, through the steam that was now thinning out, I saw an immense pond. Standing in water up to their knees, thousands of naked men and women were vegetating. I say “vegetating” because such was the idea suggested by those torsos locked in motionless embraces, united to the point of agony in every form of love imaginable, encrusted in and clinging to one another like the myriad branches of a leafy glade. Artificial suns, strategically distributed, rained fire down upon the multitude, wringing from them dense goat-like odours and rivers of sweat which flowed over necks, gleaming backs, bellies pressed against one another, hairy tufts, and thighs. The pond water seemed dead beneath a scum of reddish mildew and vegetal putrefaction. Here and there, amid the welter of nude bodies, grew plants with fleshy flowers of frightful beauty, evil-coloured mushrooms, and reeds as sharp as awls covered in pink snails’ eggs. Crazed by the human stench, swarms of glossy Spanish flies and horseflies furiously bombarded the multitude, stinging them repeatedly. Once in a while, one of the bodies would try to shake free of the embrace holding it locked to the rest; the whole human tree would then shake, releasing dreadful emanations from the pond, and pitiful voices stammered:

— Don’t disturb the water!

As if walking on eggs, the astrologer and I hurried along the bank of the pond, suffocating, sweating buckets, and determined to get ourselves out of that oven. But, leaving behind the Pond of the Lustful, we came upon a third setting no less unpleasant, which in my notes I’ve termed the Ravine of the Adulterers. It looked like an ancient riverbed, but no water had ever flowed over its gravel. Instead, something like a metallurgical heat, an invisible fire scorched the riverbed’s sands, multicoloured rocks, and prickly cacti. Human creatures of both sexes, naked and sad, were hard at work in the ravine, carrying, or rather dragging along their onerous burdens. A cacophonous brass band accompanied them, playing the “Song of the Volga Boatmen,” but with such comical dissonance as to delight a Stravinsky.

— Notice the overwhelming majority are men, Schultz told me.

— How honourable for our city, I answered. But what the heck are those people dragging?

— Come closer and see for yourself.

Approaching the bank of the riverbed, I saw what workers had in tow: their own sexual organs, but grown to incredibly monstrous proportions; they were tugging and jerking them over the sharp stones of the ravine.

— Brutal! I exclaimed, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

The band stopped playing at that point. Work stopped, too, and the workers waited.

— Was one woman not enough for you? asked a voice as though from a loudspeaker.

— Ah! answered the workers in chorus. One wasn’t enough!

— Did you need two?

— Ah, we needed two!

— And why not three?

— Ah! Why not three?

— From another’s garden.

— Ah, from another’s garden.36

— Well, then, sweat it out now in the ravine!

— Well, then, let’s sweat it out now in the ravine!

The brass band started up again, and the workers started pulling with all their might. I looked and looked again among their company, certain I’d find many people I knew, but without success. A few vaguely familiar faces, when they noticed me, immediately turned away with a definitely suspicious celerity. Suddenly, a man broke apart from the group and approached me, walking with as martial a gait as his great burden allowed.

— Conscript, atten-SHUN! he ordered in a stentorian voice.

— Yes, colonel! I said, recognizing him and saluting.

— Shhh! he silenced me. Absolute discretion! If you have to make a report, say that you saw Colonel X.

— At your orders, sir, I acquiesced. But I’d like to take a snapshot of you and hear a word or two about your current state.

— Not a word! he refused. Absolute discretion! Let me remind you, however, that mythology records an extramarital relationship between Venus and Mars. In fact, right now, just around the corner — and I tell you this in soldierly fraternity — I’m having a whale of a time with a certain nymph from Palermo. Sex appeal, the gringos call it. An old fox, I say.

— But, colonel…

— Silence, conscript! About-face! Forward, march!

I mechanically obeyed and went to join Schultz, who was waiting for me unfazed.

— Fine, the astrologer said. Now let’s go over and look at that slime-covered Wall.

Schultz unceremoniously led me into a fourth infernal sector called the Wall of Dirty Old Men. Among Schultz’s inventions, this one struck me as the most noteworthy (of course, I hadn’t yet seen the Meadow of the Ultras or the Canefield of the Sodomites). As its name suggested, this scenario featured a high, smooth wall. Countless old men in the form of slugs were trying, with extreme difficulty, to crawl their way to the top of the wall, leaving behind a shiny, gelatinous trail. But once they reached a certain height, the old men hesitated a moment, then fell straight back down to the bottom. Over and over again, they climbed up and fell back down, as obstinate as the creatures they resembled.

When we got close to the wall, Schultz spoke:

— Among the scourges afflicting Buenos Aires, one finds these shitty fossils. Having failed to become “mature young men,” they are condemned in perpetuity to be “dirty old men.” I’m quite aware that porteños have a tendency to Venusmania, either because of the climate or the aphrodisiac virtues of our River, or for some other unknown reason. The Italian monk Sergi, who visited Buenos Aires in 1640,37 as well as the English tourist Vidal in 1815,38 both point out in their memoirs the unbridled obsession among our men for the demotic or popular Venus (and I’m surprised that our friend Bernini, sociologist of indisputable merit, has not used this argument in support of his sadly famous doctrines). But, in other times, aided by a religion that admonished him from the cradle, the porteño male prudently submitted his ardour to the holy yoke of matrimony; or, after sacrificing the calf of his youth on the goddess’s altar, put on the slippers of wisdom and honourably redefined himself in his old age. Those were the elderly gentlemen of yesteryear, handsome and strong as carob trees, whose company one could not keep without gathering the well-seasoned fruit of experience! How different from the picture offered by the fossils of our time! With one foot in La Recoleta Cemetery^39 and the other in a private booth at the Tabarís, the old crocks nowadays stubbornly cling to a false virility based on orthopedics and cosmetics. There you have them, slobbering all over my wall and leaving it a filthy mess! Fathers of our homeland who for half a century sat broody in a ministerial armchair hatching nothingness, and who now celebrate their jubilee years in bachelor pads reeking of perfume; directors of companies and managers of magazines who play the satyr with office girls and shopgirls; retirees and investors, chasers of typists; professors and academics…

— Splat!

That “splat” interrupted Schultz’s metaphorical speech, and the astrologer looked with displeasure at the slug who’d just tumbled down at our feet.

— Ah! said Schultz. It’s the senator.

— Hee, hee! laughed the slug. A slip isn’t the same as a fall. We good old boys are like that!

— Bah! said the astrologer. I can still see you standing at the door of the Jockey Club:40 you’d just had your facial massage, and you were dressed in natty white stockings bordered in black, a tie fit for an adolescent, and a corset cinching you like a pot-bellied donkey.

— It wasn’t that tight, rejoined the slug, trying to adhere once again to the wall.

— And perfumed like a rake! insisted Schultz. You’d watch the girls walking by and drool like a turkey, your watery little eyes examining their every detail, as if they were racing fillies.

— Can’t a fellow forget his grey hairs once in a while?

— That’s how you went bald, no matter how hard your toupee tries to cover it up. You were as luxuriously tricked out as a mummified fop. But what really made my blood boil was your urgent expression and that mysterious look you affected, as if you were trying tell the world you had what it takes to pull off an amorous exploit.

— And why not? said the slug trying to feign modesty.

— Don’t make me laugh! exclaimed Schultz. I know how you used to trot after dressmakers and accost the young women taking tea at Harrods, offering them everything from a Renault sports car to a professorship in literature.

— My lips are sealed! the slug insinuated.

— Of course! added Schultz. Then you used to try to dribble the ball past the goddess of Death by stuffing yourself with pills and enemas. I can just see you swaddled in your garish dressing-gown, feeble and farting around in your bachelor pad, your fur-piece resting on the wig stand, your glass eye in one cup and your false teeth in another. But whenever the voice summoning you to the mausoleum let up a bit, you’d gather your rickety skeleton together and turn your bones over to those restorative hands that keep on prolonging your enormous ridicule.

— Tra-la-la, tra-la-la! sang the slug, now creeping up the wall.

Then the astrologer turned to me:

— Let’s leave him here to climb the wall and bust a gut, he growled. Now I’ll show you the fifth sector.

An autumnal, saffron-coloured meadow beneath an opaque, ashen sky. To the north, a line of copperish trees, hugging themselves and shivering. To the south, a volcano dead from the cold. To the east, a non-descript swatch of sea. To the west, a mossy medieval castle; on its battlements, grave and alert, men in red hunting tunics, each grasping a horn not as yet blown. And running across the meadow, women both young and mature, dressed as Asiatic goddesses or as prostitutes of ancient, lavish fiefdoms; coiffed in the style of Ceres, Mithra, Astarte; adorned with pearls snatched by the Malay diver from the ocean depths, with gems brought forth by the unhappy miner, with gold and platinum stolen from the bowels of the earth, with tropical feathers of all sorts, and with the pelt of every beast, fierce or meek, ever to have been stalked by hunters, from the snows of Mongolia to the torrid zone of Africa. That is what I saw when I entered the fifth scene.

— Who are those luxurious women? I asked Schultz.

— The Ultras, he answered. Ultra-courtesans, ultra-poetesses, ultraintellectuals: super-females, as finely tuned as lutes.

— What?

— They are the ones who, by dint of sighs, ruined the varnish of hours. The ones who twisted and spun the fleece of melancholy. Who got tipsy on ineffable nostalgias every Tuesday afternoon between six and seven. Who stood before luxurious mirrors and parodied the thirty-two postures of the rational soul. Who tried with their fallopian horns to produce the pure sound of the intellect. The ones who…

— Enough, already! I interrupted. And what are they doing in this inferno?

— Alas! sighed Schultz. There you see them, trying to look like Sappho and imitating the pose of Lysistrata. If you draw near, you’ll hear them debating arduous problems in philosophy, art, or economics. But it’s easy to see they speak only through their sex.

— What is their punishment?

— You’ll see when the huntsmen sound their horns.

As I waited for events to unfold, I turned my attention back to the superfemales. Some were walking with a kind of measured step, crunching dead leaves underfoot, and with the austere aspect of women who drag fatality on a leash behind them (I can’t swear to it, but I thought I saw among them Marta Ruiz, that fire amid ashes!). Others (and I clearly saw Ruth of The Golden Ant) hugged their lyres of gilded cardboard and seemed to be intoning sublime odes to the water in the east, to the volcano in the south. The rest of the women, their voluminous dresses sweeping behind them, went running after pink, yellow, and green flags, and harangued one another (wasn’t that Ethel Amundsen?) or belligerently brandished toy popguns. Only then did I notice the excessive theatricality of both scenario and actors — a hyperbolic falseness that seemed intentional. I was just thinking about this when one of the women approached. Astonished and confused, I was about to cry out her name, but the astrologer Schultz, in the nick of time, covered my mouth with his hand and prevented my indiscretion. Meanwhile, the Ultra had planted herself in front of us with that majesty I’d admired so many times in the visible Buenos Aires. She was as tall as Schultz, opulent in curves, and lean of face; her jet-black hair was adorned with artificial sprigs of cedron, poppy, and laurel; two silver snails nibbled at the pink lobes of her ears; and she was dressed, or undressed, in a close-fitting nightgown down to her feet, which were shod in some indefinable shade of saffron or autumn. But most noteworthy of all was that she bore, like Themis, a balance-scale made of gold; and on each of its plates was a human brain.

— Here I have the two brains, the Ultra informed us. This one, the man’s, weighs 1,160 grams. The other one, the woman’s, weighs 1,000. Do you gentlemen think that a measly 160 grams of grey matter justifies the odious condition of inferiority men impose on us?

— Now, Titania, don’t get yourself into a flap, responded Schultz condescendingly.

The black eyes of the Ultra flashed in fury:

— That’s just what I can’t stand in you men! she shouted. That way you have of listening to us with patronizing indulgence. Are women not intellectual creatures?

— Hmm, said the astrologer. Metaphysics doubts it.

— Loathsome wretch! whined the Ultra, shaking her fist in Schultz’s face. A man who thinks nothing of eating flowers out of the vases on the table.

But the astrologer looked at her with the severity of a judge and said:

— Let the accused maintain decorum! Renounce your intellectual urges

— they probably won’t impress the jury anyway — and tell the truth. Victim of a fervour not at all intellectual, did you or did you not outrageously troll the American continent?

— So what? rejoined the Ultra defiantly.

— Is it true that local production wasn’t enough for you, so you went fishing in other continents and managed to attract numerous male specimens, all of them refined in the use and abuse of intelligence?41

— I had to do my research, objected the Ultra.

— And something else, insisted Schultz. Let the accused declare whether or not she persisted, on her return to Argentina, in the ridiculous, dangerous, and fortunately useless task of trying to refine the peons of her estancia, forcing upon them Honneger’s concertos, novels by D.H. Lawrence and André Gide, as well as Freudian doctrine.42

— Brutish peasants! muttered the Ultra. They used to fall asleep at the first chord or sentence. Impossible to get a single line of Mallarmé into their thick skulls.

Schultz clucked his disapproval and then said to me:

— What I find hardest to take about Titania is her detestable mania for subordinating things of the spirit to the vague, exquisite, ineffable titillations of her “sensibility.” There isn’t a single piece of music, not a metaphysical idea or psychological observation, that she doesn’t immediately refer to her all-embracing sympathetic nervous system.

— Ah, monster! shrieked the Ultra in a splendid fit of anger. A man who goes out at night and sniffs the tramps asleep on the street.

She said no more, for the huntsmen in the battlements unexpectedly blew their horns in a spirited call to arms. It was just one blast, but when the super-females heard it they stopped dead in their tracks for an instant. Dropping their lyres and banners, they all ran toward the woods and waited in front of the copperish trees. No less hastily ran Titania, abandoning — alas! — her illustrious scales, the train of her long dress sweeping along dead foliage. A second trumpet blast sounded, but deeper this time, as though calling for the kill. Forthwith, a drove of white, black, and pink unicorns came galloping out from among the trees, manes flying in the breeze, horns poised at the ready. Whinnying feverishly, they charged the super-females and bored them up to the hilt.43 The melee of women and beasts, of shrieks and neighs, was soon shrouded in a reddish dust-cloud, the details of the encounter obscured. Then from the battlements another blast of the huntsmen’s horns signalled retreat. The unicorns returned to their forest glade, their horns reddened. The Ultras got to their feet, adjusted their dresses, and again took up their banners and lyres. In the moss-green castle the huntsmen dozed off.

— That’s about all there is to see here, said the astrologer then, leading me away by the hand.

Like a man who leaves one nightmare to embark upon another, I followed Schultz to the sixth infernal sector. The new scene looked a lot like the “mazes” one finds in amusement parks, with their twists and turns, their distorting mirrors, and the way their design, no matter how childish, insinuates a promise of getting inevitably lost. Although Schultz had let me know we were now in the Labyrinth of Solitary Souls, no human presence could be seen in the corridors. Two or three times I thought I saw either a furtive shadow slipping through some narrow passage or a heel disappearing round a corner of the maze. But I didn’t see a single complete image — not so much as a profile fleetingly glimpsed in some mirror. Later, when recapitulating the whole adventure, the astrologer confessed to me that the circulation system of this labyrinthine sector, whose discreet orderliness I couldn’t get over, had been entirely inspired by a certain establishment non sancta, located on the rue de Provence in Paris, which in his youth he had frequented no less studiously than passionately.

I was wondering if any inhabitants at all were to be seen in the sixth sector when, rounding a bend, we came face to face with the Grand Solitary. He was a man of indeterminate age, greenish face, furtive and feverish eyes, and lyrical mane of hair, dressed in a dark suit.

— Have you seen Valeria around here? he asked without looking at us.

I said nothing. But the astrologer, quite without curiosity, asked him in turn:

— Who is Valeria?

The Grand Solitary looked at us then with a hint of agitation and declaimed:

— It is she who has looked down upon me from her magnanimity, as the rose bends down to the worm!

— Nonsense, muttered Schultz. Normally, it’s the worm that climbs up to the rose.

— I did not rise to the rose! protested the Grand Solitary. The rose came down to me. Besides, who dares suggest that Valeria does not exist?

He looked at us challengingly, but Schultz stood up to his gaze:

— If you’d just calm down and forget about those delirious metaphors…

— Look, interrupted the Grand Solitary, those metaphors are now dead to the world, tucked away in the haberdashery El Porvenir,44 necktie section, eighth shelf on the right. I no longer write. What for? Valeria is a reality, and she has leaned down to me as the stem of the hyacinth does to the…

— Enough! the astrologer silenced him. Either you express yourself in plain language, or we won’t listen to you.

— But Valeria does exist! cried the Solitary. In my long hours at the haberdashery, I myself came to doubt her reality. But then, like the dawn light that treads beatific…

— Sure, sure, Schultz soothed him. You wouldn’t have dreamed it, would you?

— Sir, said the Solitary, our kisses, that night, could have forced open the lock of jubilation. Do you want details? Valeria is the last, sublime descendant of a ranching family. “New aristocracy,” you’ll say. Bah! The alembics of Argentina distill rapidly. True, her grandfather was an old cowboy from the south, accustomed to spending nights on horseback out on the range — never got used to sleeping in a regular bed; still sleeps on a saddlery horse installed in his luxurious bedroom decorated with prairie landscapes. There the old man dozes on his wooden sorrel horse, his satin pyjama swathing him like a chiripá, while a simulated pampero blows over him from strategically placed fans, and the lowing of cattle comes from hidden phonographs to lull him.

Concerned, I looked to Schultz. But the astrologer was cold as an iceberg.

— And Valeria? he asked.

— Her bedchamber, explained the Grand Solitary, is neither that of Cleopatra nor Aspasia nor Phryne, but the quintessence of them all. I shan’t enter into intimate details at the moment, for discretion flowers like a carnation within the breast of every lover. But you must know that her bathroom is of porcelain, with illustrations from Ovid, Boccaccio, and other great masters of universal literature.

— Let’s go, I said to Schultz when I heard those words. He’s quite mad.

Making our getaway, we continued our journey through the Labyrinth. But the Grand Solitary was following us:

— Valeria exists! he declaimed fanatically. The wind that sways the lilies of her garden wears slippers of water and whistles the preludes of Debussy.

Our pace became a frenzied trot.

— Valeria’s nightshirts, he insisted as he trotted at our side, were woven on the murmuring looms of aurora…

We covered our ears and ran full speed out of the Labyrinth.

Still running, we entered the seventh and final setting in the Spiral of Lust, of which I got only a sketchy notion, since we flew through it as though running over burning coals. It was a dense cane field, with bundles of very high stalks, hard and sharp as spears. On each of the spears, two or three men were skewered through the sphincter. Adolescents, young and middle-aged men, they flapped their arms as if trying to take flight; their agitation made the cane stalks bump together with a metallic clicking noise. A kind of vague language could be heard in that scenario: anxiety-inducing rumours and whispers and murmurs, which suddenly became louder when the skewerees noticed our presence.

— Shhh! Shhh! they called to us then, swinging eagerly back and forth up there.

But the astrologer and I ran like the wind until we reached the end of the spiral.

VII

A double door of monumental proportions stopped us. After a short rest to catch our breath, Schultz said:

— Take a look at the door before us.

I looked. Besides its gigantic size, its solid bronze construction, and that hint of mystery suggested by closed doors, I admired for a moment the profusion of bas-reliefs covering it from top to bottom.

— Uh-huh, I said at last. A door with ornamental motifs.

— Those aren’t ornamental motifs! protested Schultz, visibly wounded. Those designs contain an occult allegorical meaning which you must decipher if you want the door to open for you.

I looked again. The bas-reliefs on the left leaf seemed to represent (with admirable success) a paradisal orchard where myriad trees bowed gracefully beneath the weight of flowers and fruit, and where numerous birds, tigers, deer, monkeys, and serpents lived together in the most wonderful friendship. Above, and to the right, as though in the domain of heaven, could be seen a winepress where wingèd numina crushed large bunches of grapes underfoot; the juice pouring from them ramified into a hundred streams and channels irrigating the orchard. In the upper-left portion, other genies were milking a powerful celestial cow, and from its udders descended a river of milk that girded paradise. And man could be seen anywhere and everywhere: lord and master of the garden was he, lying in the shade of trees and stretched out by running streams, eating without travail the easily available fruit or drinking without care the free-flowing juice, motionless in ecstatic contemplation or aflame in a whirling dance.

The right leaf of the door vividly rendered a cheerless humanity toiling away. Here, calloused labourers could be seen working hard land, ploughing, seeding, and harvesting. There, tossed and turned by an angry sea, fishermen of bitter aspect were pulling up nets pregnant with seafood. On plateaux and plains, rain or shine, hardened shepherds watched over flocks and droves. Deep in the jungle, amid clawed beasts and thorny vegetation, ferocious hunters hurled spears at the wild boar, set traps for deer, released falcons against the pheasant or greyhounds against the hare. The most extraordinary thing was that all those fruits torn painfully from earth, water, and air (corncobs and grains, tubers and fruit, fish and shellfish, flocks and herds, birds and reptiles, frogs and insects) were being conveyed into a huge human mouth by means of carts, boats, pack-horses, mule trains, camel caravans, and elephants.

— What’s your reading? Schultz interrogated me as soon as I had finished studying the door.

— Bah! I answered. There’s an allegorical meaning, but it’s pathetically simple.

— How so? said he, visibly disconcerted.

— The two leaves of the door tell two stories in contrast and opposition. Any nincompoop can understand that the left leaf depicts the Golden Age, when earth and sky spontaneously gave us their fruits, animals were meek, and man lollygagged in perpetual delight. So, necessarily, the leaf on the right symbolizes the Iron Age we live in now, as evidenced by all those tiny human figures knocking themselves out to bring home the bacon. Even more important, the leaf on the left refers to the perfect man, newly sprung from his Artificer’s hands, and who needed nothing more than fruit to sustain a body meant to be a transient support for his soul, which was continually slipping away on the roads of ecstacy. On the other hand, the right-hand leaf depicts the joyless humanity we belong to, one that devours all of creation in order to fatten up an anatomy that nowadays we doubt is even inhabited by a soul.

— Conclusion? Schultz asked me.

— I notice that both panels harp too much on the edible. It makes me uneasy.

— Why?

— Because I’m sure that behind that door you’re going to show me something like the Hell of Gluttony.

No sooner had I pronounced these last words than the door solemnly opened; apparently, I’d found the key. I immediately strode forward, followed by a sourly silent Schultz (obviously he wasn’t pleased by how easily I’d solved the riddle). The door closed behind us, and we found ourselves in the murky hall, with no apparent exit.

— To heck with all the gutbuckets in Buenos Aires! exclaimed the ill-humoured astrologer. I know very well they’re of no interest whatsoever. But those abominable gobblers, those lustful omnivores, those greasy kitchen heroes demanded their place in my Helicoid. Seriously, they turn my stomach! Look at the walls in the city, its subway stations, newspapers, and magazines, all full of posters and ads exalting the virtues of a hundred laxatives, a thousand pills, and the ten thousand medicos devoted to restoring a million broken-down digestive tracts in our burgh.

— If I were you, I wouldn’t talk too loud on this subject, I told him.

— And why not?

— Rumour has it that by dint of some strange experiments you’ve infinitely enlarged the repertoire of the edible.

— For example?

— Isn’t it true that, at a meeting of the Friends of Art,45 you ate a bouquet of blue sweet peas decorating the conference table? And at the Teatro Colón, during the second act of Lohengrin, didn’t you do the same thing to an expensive orchid you spied languishing on the breast of a young Fräulein? Then, at a luncheon in the Spanish Embassy, weren’t you caught using blasts from the soda siphon to alter the traditional structure of Codfish à la Biscay? And haven’t you been seen a hundred times at Gildo’s, revolutionizing the innocent laws of the parrillada criolla with outlandish barbecued combinations?

The astrologer smiled modestly.

— Physiology of Taste, he said. Getting stuffed is not to be confused with getting fat!46

Then, avoiding the subject and resuming his look of disgust, he added:

— Let’s go over there. We’ll only take a look.

He led me through some grimy serge curtains onto a platform. From there, the Third Inferno was suddenly revealed in all its amplitude to my eyes, ears, and nose. Actually, I’ve just reversed the order in which my senses were offended. My sense of smell was hit first, and by a stench so nauseating that it made me wonder if Schultz hadn’t gathered all the eateries in Buenos Aries into that hole — inns in Carabelas Alley, cantinas in the Boca, grills in Mataderos, dairies in Paternal, plus every last pizzeria on the Paseo de Julio. At almost the same moment my ears were beleaguered by a din that was nearly music but not quite; only afterward did I find out what it really was. Seconds later, my eyes had adjusted to the semi-darkness of the dive and could make out something like a monstrous Banquet. The table, in the form of a gigantic spiral, took up the central area of this circle of hell. Sitting around the table in their thousands were what looked like commensals in rigorously formal attire, apparently being served by what looked like scurrying, outsized waiters.

— The kitchens are on the right, Schultz whispered to me. The vomitoria are on the left.

We went down a little iron staircase like the ones you see in engine rooms. When we got to the floor level of the banquet, Schultz dragged me over to an area terribly overheated by great ovens and braziers, where a hundred gigantic figures in scullions’ caps were apparently dedicated to practising an infernal chemistry. By the light of flames flickering from ovens and stoves, I recognized, with a shiver, the chefs’ lineage: they were Cyclopes. I clearly saw their heat-flushed faces pouring sweat, their single eyes in mid-forehead watering copiously from the smoke and onions! Darting and feinting among huge legs like stalking tree-trunks, the astrologer and I made our way through the Cyclopean kitchen.

Some chefs were turning monstrous spits on which whole animals were impaled and roasting golden brown: there were steers fat from winter pasture, greasy heifers with the skin on, and fillies that provide the juicy flank steak so dear to the Ranquel Indians, devourers of horsemeat. Other chefs were basting the suckling pigs and lambs roasting on vertical spits with copious brine, or pouring it over immense grills where thousands of chitterlings, large intestines, kidneys, udders, and testicles, as well as other internal and external mammalian organs were sizzling, alongside their brothers in fire, the sausages: chorizos criollos, Cantabrian blood sausage, Italian cotechini, long Andalusian sausages, and Teutonic frankfurters. Over here, busy kitchen boys were oven-roasting a universe of chickens, tinamous, turkeys, geese, pheasants, ducks, quails, and owls, turning them over and basting them in metal serving dishes. Over there, they stirred enormous cauldrons a-simmer with all the fauna of lake, sea, and river, from the gigantic pejerrey of the Paraná River, pride of its species, to the aristocratic Chilean lobster, and including the spider crab of Tierra del Fuego, salmon from the pisciferous Lake Nahuel Huapí, fish and shellfish from Mar del Plata, carp and catfish from the Argentine Delta, and scaly creatures from the Chascomús lagoon; as well as octopuses from foggy Galicia, cod from chilly Norway, Pacific-plying tuna, and crabs from industrious Japan. In fathomless pots, pasta was boiling alla italiana — tangled tagliatelle, deliciously stuffed capelletti, pregnant ravioli, sinuous spaghetti, and democratic macaroni. Then there was the difficult alchemy of making sauces in earthen casseroles or copper saucepans, through the slow cooking of hares marinated in wine, partridges boiled in milk or steeped in cognac, cockles and oysters in whisky, to all of which were added obscene tomatoes and weepiferous onions, proverbial oregano, fragrant basil, and glorious laurel, along with treacherous garlic and never-forgotten parsley, arcades ambo.47

By this point in our tour through the kitchen, we were spattered in grease up to the neck, red-eyed from the smoke, and sneezing from the spice, when along came a Cyclops disguised as a maître d’hôtel (livery trimmed with braid, short trousers, white stockings and gloves), barking impatient orders at the scullions:

— Trincha! Subito!

Then he turned to the legion of cyclopean waiters escorting him:

— Presto! he shouted. Avanti!

— Ciro Rossini! I cried, recognizing the dyed hair, nighthawk face, and voice from some sentimental comedy.

Not hiding his discomfiture, the Cyclops looked at us searchingly for a moment with his single eye. But once recognition had dawned, he hastened to greet us with the same festive smile we’d always found at Ciro’s Gazebo.

— Boys! he beamed. A little party in famiglia! Bravo! A tavola!

And he pushed us amicably toward the spiral-shaped table which, as I said earlier, occupied the central area of the cave. Leaving us immediately, he turned to hound the waiters, already on their way back bearing great steaming platters, and growled at them:

— Subito! Trincha! Presto!48

The astrologer Schultz and I had to dodge the rowdy platter-bearing crowd threatening to bowl us over. At the same time, the music (or whatever it was), which I’ve already mentioned with some reluctance, underwent a change in tempo, its former largo accelerating to a prestissimo that makes me laugh now but which at the time filled me with unspeakable dread. Once the last waiter had filed by, I noticed a kiosk in front of me, similar to the ones used by military bands; inside there were Cyclops musicians in nightmarish uniforms, scratching and blowing at instruments unfamiliar to me except for the colossal string bass and two giant trombones. The instruments were variously made out of long gourds, primitive tubas, lengths of pipe, and calabashes; and they produced deep bass tones, burps, and hiccups as they played something like a flatulent Brandenburg Concerto.

— Cute little orchestra! Isn’t that you all over! I cried to Schultz, expressing my displeasure.

— A mere detail, he clarified. Let’s go over to the table and see what’s really important in this part of hell.

I followed the astrologer over to the banquet table, where I could observe at my pleasure the double line of commensals seated there. They were skeletal, scrawny-necked men and women, with green faces, deep bags under their eyes, and bilious hands. The men were stuffed into rumpled rental tuxedos; the women were shrouded in decadent evening gowns. The extraordinary thing was that all of them, despite their sickly appearance, were furiously chewing and swallowing the myriad varieties of food being produced in the infernal kitchen and served up by the white-gloved Cyclopes. But their voracity was mechanical: they ate with no pleasure or distaste whatsoever. It wasn’t long before I became aware of the close relationship between the music and the rhythm of the banquet, for as the orchestra’s crescendos mounted, the waiters became more frantic and the commensals swallowed faster and faster. And when music and banquet had reached a nightmarish tempo, Ciro Rossini, exultant in his livery, reappeared carrying a skeleton with articulated joints, which he then dangled over the banqueters, making it dance in the air over their heads.

— Gobble till you burst! Ciro shouted at them in a fanatical tone. How many lives do we have? Just this one! What are we, after all? This!

He shook the skeleton vehemently, then hurried off at the same trot as when he had come.49 But it was clear the diners were at the end of their rope. Some began to nod off, others fell face-down on their plates. And then the Cyclopes revealed just how nasty they really were: they shook the sleepers, pinched their noses closed, and forced them to keep on swallowing. When the sufferers at last fell under the table, another squad of Cyclopes picked them up like limp rags and carried them off to the back, while a new team of commensals, arranged in two lines, silently occupied the empty seats.

— Let’s go over there, Schultz said, pointing toward the Cyclopes who were making off with their human cargo.

But instead of following them, the astrologer got down on all fours and crawled under the table. Once again I imitated him — Lord knows how grudgingly! Once we got to the other side, we headed toward an area of gloom opening onto a new sector of this hellish place. We hadn’t gone far, when countless lightbulbs switched on above, piercing the darkness and projecting cones of light onto an endless number of operating tables. Alongside these, cyclopean surgeons attired in white aprons, masks, and rubber gloves were sorting and preparing their alarming instruments. Presently, the Cyclopes arrived bearing the surfeited banqueters, flopped them down on the operating tables, and roughly stripped them. Then, with diabolical zeal, the giants in surgical masks set upon those inert anatomies, subjecting them to implacable emetics, enemas, catheters, and needle-jabs. The horror of those bodies thus stripped naked, the fury of the operators, the violent reaction of the patients, along with the stench of viscera clogging the air: all combined to make me double over in an immense nausea.

— I’m not going one step further in this inferno! I shouted at Schultz.

Turning on my heels, I took off running toward the lighted area where the banquet was in progress, accompanied by Schultz, who fled no less urgently than I. But at the strip of semi-darkness, I stopped short. In front of me were one, two, three bizarre characters seated upon as many toilets and no doubt waiting to go back to the table. The personage in the middle was a middle-aged homunculus, scrawny, yellowish, and bald, swaying like a pendulum as he dozed atop his john, and gargling a sort of puerile snore. On his left, with a pensive air, sat a priestly figure who, in the land of the living, must have been very fat; now, however, his black soutane was gathered up around two skinny thighs. The third character, to the right of the homunculus, was neither asleep nor pensive; a dapper old fop, full of himself, he was looking this way and that with an air of offended dignity.

The gravity of those men contrasted so greatly with their indecorous posture that I turned to Schultz, bursting to unleash a choice remark. And I would have let him have it, too, had he not cut me short: the astrologer was quite upset about the toilet-bowl heroes.

— Shhh! he whispered. An unlucky encounter!

With one finger to his lips and the very image of stealth, Schultz was trying to tiptoe away. But he hadn’t taken three steps when the homunculus abruptly stopped snoring:

— Good afternoon, Schultz, young man! he purred, half-raising his right eyelid.

The astrologer stood stock still as if turned to stone.

— Don Celso, sir, he stammered. If at this grave hour it were possible for me…

— Hah! the homunculus barked mirthlessly. The past comes back to haunt you, as they say in novels. It’s a small world, young man! I can still see in my mind’s eye those three orchids on the buffet.

— What about her? asked a stunned Schultz.

— Three nuptial orchids! purred the homunculus. And the sweet little gold ring you put on her dainty finger. “I love you, yes, I love you!” Coo, coo! “Oh, forever and ever!” Of course. Little rich boys who sneak into honourable homes to trouble the sleep of virgins.

— Dearly beloved brethren! the priestly figure exclaimed in a supplicating tone.

— My apologies! stuttered Schultz. I was so young!

But the homunculus was swaying and snoring again. Seeing this, the astrologer turned to me beseechingly:

— What the ogre just said is a bare-faced lie! he revealed. Because I honestly did love her, I swear it.

— Who was she? I asked.

— The daughter of the ogre you see in front of you, who as usual has just nodded off again. Her name was Nora. Imagine braided hair of bronze, willow-green eyes, the bust of Minerva, the thighs of Atalanta…

— My brethren! the priestly figure interrupted again, unable to bring himself to cover his scandalized ears.

— … and a sensibility, concluded Schultz, that is unique to the girls of the Flores barrio. Because, as you are surely aware, girls from Flores are made from the wood of Stradivarius violins…

Quite alarmed by his madrigalesque exaltation, I gave him a few pats on the shoulder:

— Easy does it! I said. And for Pete’s sake, talk normal.

But the astrologer ignored me and pointed his index finger at the sleeping Don Celso.

— There you have the scourge of my first dreams, he growled. Ah, monster! I can still see him at the festive board on that unforgettable noonday.

Once again the homunculus opened his small sleep-filled eyes:

— Good afternoon, Schultz, young man! he gurgled. Where were we? Ah, yes! We were talking about three nuptial orchids and a poor, inconsolable bride. Don’t imagine, however, that you were the only good-for-nothing. And believe me, if they hadn’t dragged me away from the famous dining room in the nick of time, all my girls would have ended up as old maids. Do you remember the details?

— It was a glorious noontide, said Schultz in an evocative tone. We had just sat down to table, and everyone’s face was beaming with joy, for I had slipped a little gold ring on her dainty ivory finger. “I love you, yes, I love you!”

— Coo, coo! rejoined Don Celso in a sing-song voice. “Oh, forever and ever!” And three orchids on the buffet. Coo, coo!

— On my right, continued the astrologer, Nora was silent and smiling, smiling and silent. Oh, springtime! O youth! Farewell, farewell! On my left, her three sisters burned and sizzled and consumed themselves like three wedding torches. In front of me, their sweet mother (ancient jewellery, antique lace) looked me over with darkened brow, like someone wondering what the future might hold: her mother dear, burdened with years, jewellery, lace, and smugness (begging Don Celso’s pardon, he being here among us). And at her side, Don Celso himself, here among us, with his napkin tied round his neck and playing the gruffly good-natured father-in-law (ah, the monster!). And the gay sounds in the house, the festive smells wafting from the kitchen. Who was that couple walking in the garden? Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Abelard and Heloise! Romance has died. A tombstone! Place a tombstone on the grave of romance! With the epitaph: “Wayfarer, here lies a love affair.”

Caught between anger and embarrassment, I shook Schultz by the shoulder:

— Take it easy! I said. And speak naturally! Can’t you spare us that ghastly language of melodrama?

— Not to worry, he responded. Romance has died: now it has its tombstone and epitaph. Now comes the shameful part.

— Go ahead and say it, if you’re man enough! the homunculus challenged him.

— It isn’t easy, Schultz admitted. We had just sat down to table in profoundly sentimental circumstances, when they brought in the first course. Keep in mind my emotional state: Tristan and Isolde, Hungarian violins, and so on. Suddenly, I see how this gentleman drops his harmless demeanour and brutally attacks the serving platters, empties them, licks them clean. Around me I hear voices, throats being cleared; everyone was trying to distract me from that astonishing spectacle. In vain. Fascinated, my attention is rivetted on Don Celso, who chews and devours, sucks bones and slurps up sauces, displaying a gluttony I haven’t seen in even the worst beasts. And quaffing libations whose generosity and frequency were enough to make a Knight Templar blush.

— Gentle souls! whined the priestly figure at this point.

The dapper old fop, who had been disdainfully holding his peace, clapped utterly incredulous eyes on Don Celso.

— Him? he asked.

— You’ve got it, Schultz affirmed. And just think, if he climbed down off his pot, he wouldn’t stand two feet off the ground. Well, when there were no more delicacies to wolf down and no more platters to lick clean, I see how this gentleman closes his eyes, saws off a few snores punctuated by gaseous belches, and sinks at last into the lethargy of a boa constrictor.

Don Celso seemed to have been measuring and judging each and every one of Schultz’s words as if they had nothing to do with him. Now he gestured approvingly:

— Not bad, he opined. A certain Homeric influence in the style, which will no doubt become more acute when this narrator tries to depict me as a modern-day Polyphemous. But please go on, Schultz, young man. I’ll admit your gift for comedy is irresistible.

The astrologer continued:

— That first revelation of the monster was not long in making its effects felt. It was as if a deep chill had fallen over the dining room, freezing the laughter and wilting the voices. I looked at Nora and saw her shrivel up beside me like a dry leaf. The sisters sizzled no longer (three extinguished torches). Mother dear had closed her eyes and was slowly crumbling beneath mournfully opaque jewels and faded lace. But listen up, now! Just at that moment the second course was brought to table!

Schultz opened a well-calculated parenthesis of silence. I waited for the end of the story as one awaits punishment. The water-closeted personages held their breath, and Don Celso’s forehead was already inclined, as if anticipating an ovation.

— I won’t describe, Schultz went on, the variety and nature of the delicacies of the second service. I’ll just say that as soon as he caught a whiff of food, this gentleman, whom we left apparently sunk in the deepest Nirvana, instantly stopped snoring and swaying like a pendulum. His nostrils flared with delight, and he cautiously opened two incredulous eyes. Convinced at last that neither smell nor sight was deceiving him, he smiled at the serving dishes, at the commensals, at the room, at the world. Right away the monster attacked again, as voraciously as before, but this time shouting enthusiastically, inviting us with fervent harangues — the oaf! — to imitate him. Whether the second course lasted an instant or a century, I don’t know. All I remember is that finally the monster, wineglass in hand, struggled laboriously to his feet, as though about to make a toast. But alas! No speech issued from his greasy lips, but rather the first bars of an operatic romance. And all of sudden, without warning, the fool collapsed on the table, knocking over glasses and smashing plates. His stiffened fingers clutched at the tablecloth, and his mouth chucked up intermittent jets of grunt, vomit, and laughter.

— Merciful God! wept the priestly figure. Lord, your own image and likeness!

— Bravo! Bravo! applauded the homunculus.

— I got up from the table, concluded Schultz, ran out of the dining room and away from the house. I never went back!

Don Celso looked at him now with ineffable sadness.

— Yes, he said. And to sum up: three withered orchids in a vase. And a poor girl dead from a broken heart…

— Dead? cried Schultz. Dead?

— Dead from a broken heart for exactly eight days, Don Celso clarified. Until my friend Tosto, the pasta manufacturer, opened his heart and his chequebook.

The astrologer sighed with relief:

— Ah, that’s so much like her! he said. In her hands, life was like a music box.

— I’d say more like a strongbox, gurgled the homunculus as he dozed off.

The absurd conversation with the toilet-bowl types seemed to be over. The astrologer Schultz was just signalling that he wanted to get a move on, when the priestly figure addressed us elegiacally:

— My beloved brethren in Christ, should the pressing demands of your excursion allow you sufficient time to hear another story, close not your ears to the one I wish to relate to you now, motivated not by literary vanity, but rather by the desire that its lessons may instruct and edify you, and render you fruitful in the virtue I lacked there above. Peccavi tibi, Domine! Mea culpa!

— Let’s hear him out, Schultz said to me. There’s nothing like travel for getting an education.

— My dear brothers, continued the priest. By the grace of God, I was the parish priest of San Bernardo, in industrious and proletarian Villa Crespo.

— This gentleman is from Villa Crespo too, said Schultz, introducing me.

The priestly figure observed me briefly and then shook his head:

— No, he rejoined. He’s too young. I’m referring to the idyllic era in Villa Crespo, before it received the colour of Israel.

— Colour and odour, Schultz blandly interrupted him again.50

The priest smiled through his tears, and continued thus:

— Gentle souls who listen to me, the Villa-Crespian flock of yesteryear was the one Our Lord entrusted to me, that I might watch over it, care for it, and lead it to the eternal meadows. To Him must I account for each and every one of my sheep when their hour arrives, as did He Himself to his Heavenly Father. “Tui erant, et mihi eos dedisti, et sermonem tuum servaverunt.” In the vernacular: “Thine they were, and thou gavest them to me; and they have kept thy word.”51 And now ye shall see, my brethren, how I lost the Lord’s sheep! Among the seven capital sins laying siege to man and obliging him to do battle, the one that fell to my lot was gluttony, a gross vice which like no other lowers man to the obscure level of the beast. If it be true that every vice has its demon, the demon of gluttony had enthroned itself in my innards such that, the more I offered him, the more he demanded. The demon was always awake and orienting my energy, my memory, my understanding, and my will toward food, at all hours and places. In my parish there were innumerable sick people to attend, widows to console, orphans to succour, and needy persons to help. Nevertheless, far from approaching those abodes of tribulation according to the injunction of Canonical Law, I frequented the houses of magnates in Villa Crespo, above all on those festive occasions (weddings and baptisms) that traditionally end with a lavish spread. There I could be seen realizing such gastronomic feats as disconcerted not a few burghers, who gazed in astonishment, forks suspended in mid-air. To be sure, the fasts imposed by the Holy Church on her ministers are not excessive. Nonetheless, such was the ingenuity I devoted to sophisms, cunning arguments, and ways of cheating those fasts, that I could easily have written another Summa Theologica.52 I said mass only at dawn, racing through the Missal toward a toothsome breakfast. Oftentimes, in the late afternoon, the penitent souls awaiting my absolution behind the grill of the confessional received nothing more than the snores and burps of my laborious digestion. The rest of my day, which was a fair amount of time, I dedicated not to reading the Holy Scriptures, but to rummaging through rare and beguiling cookbooks for some unique recipe, some Byzantine delicacy I might concoct on my stove; the aromas wafting from my kitchen throughout the neighbourhood provoked mockery among the sated, blasphemy among the hungry. Thus began the scandal in the Villa (“Vae mundo a scandalis,” the Lord has said).53 My blindness notwithstanding, it did not take me long to notice how my flock was dispersing, how the faithful were being lost, how even those who just yesterday would seek me out now avoided crossing my path. The day came when, if they ran into me, the women rushed to touch wood, the children to touch iron, and the men, by way of a preventive spell, surreptitiously touched their testicles. Alas, my brothers! It was as though they saw in me the devil himself and not a priest ordained according to the order of Melchizedek.54 The worst of it was that the hosts of error, aided and abetted by my terrible negligence, began to set up their rostrums in my parish and to judge the Lord by the unworthiness of His servant. Ay! It was then I saw how the Lord was being crucified a second time in Villa Crespo! For the second time, before my eyes, He was insulted at the corner where the tannery stands, scourged and spat upon at Lombardi’s sawmill, crowned with thorns in front of the stable of Ureta the Basque, nailed to the cross on the banks of the Maldonado…

The priestly figure’s speech ended in a huge sob. Burying his face in his hands, he wept soundlessly for a few moments. By and by, he pulled from his soutane a green handkerchief and used it to staunch his tears and noisily blow his noise. His pain was so sincere that even Schultz seemed to hesitate, as though turning over in his mind a question of justice. But then the old dandy, who up to that point had hardly intervened in the conversation, gave vent to his fermenting anger:

— Very well, he said. We’ve just heard the extremely vulgar stories of two “gourmands.” It seems to me there’s some justice in their being thrown into a hell such as this — what incalculably uncouth cuisine, upon my word! I still don’t know what someone like me is supposed to be doing here, a man who has turned cooking into an art with a soupçon of science or a science with a soupçon of art.

— Pardon me, Schultz said to him. Do I perhaps have the pleasure of speaking with a “gourmet”?

— You said it, the old duffer replied. And I assume the inventor of this inferno’s laughable architecture must be some kind of bungler, a moron incapable of seeing the nuances distinguishing one case from another. If I had the chance to go back up above for just a minute…

— What would you do?

— Nothing, crowed the old boy. I’d just call up Macoco Funes, the senator, and have him close down this clandestine den of iniquity.

Schultz was about to give him the response he deserved and maybe uncover a third story, when two enormous Cyclopes came striding down upon us, single mid-brow eyes beaming left and right as though in search of something in the semi-darkness. The one in the vanguard soon spied the three WC heroes and with amazing ease plucked them from their thrones. He tucked the priestly figure under one armpit, the old fop under the other, and with one hand held Don Celso in the air.

— Back to the grindstone! he told them. You’re not gonna sit on the john all night long like a buncha broody hens!

Then he noticed Schultz and me observing him with curiosity.

— Seleucus! he grunted to his companion. What’s this pair of patsies doing here?

— Rubberneckerth, for sure, lisped the other Cyclops in response. Leave’m to me, Chrythantuth!

In other circumstances I might have laughed out loud hearing those names of Attic sonority applied to such characters. One was a cyclopean low-lifer from the suburbs. The other put me in mind of a day labourer I’d seen tending to ten heifers roasting on spits, on that day we lost the elections and the frock coats took power.55 But Schultz raised a head radiating authority and turned to face Seleucus:

— You be quiet! he said. I’m the captain of this ship!

— Oh yeah? Seleucus guffawed, looking down at Schultz from above.

— He’s a patsy! insisted Chrysantus. Seleucus, give him a black eye!

Fury had taken the place of hilarity in the countenance of Seleucus:

— Leave’m to me, Chrythantuth! he shouted. I’ll make thith crowbait gallop!

— You be quiet and do as you’re told! Schultz ordered him again.

— Crowbait! yelled Seleucus. Lemme at’m, Chrythantuth! I’ll put the reinth on him!

At this point the three personages of the privy all piped up at the same time:

— A phone call to Macoco Funes! threatened the old fop, wriggling in one of Chrysantus’s armpits.

— Gentle souls! implored the priest from the other.

— Good afternoon, Schultz, young man! rumbled Don Celso, who had been nodding and dozing in the monster’s fist and was awakened by the uproar. How’s your precious health? Heads up, eh! Your bronchial tubes get congested, heart failure, and salute!

But the astrologer stood his ground. Looking at both Cyclopes at once, he said with some bitterness:

— Despicable wretches! I did you the favour of rescuing you from the junk bin of Mythology, where you languished like old bits of bric-à-brac, and gave you a destiny much better than you deserve. And what do the arrogant little pups do in return? That’s the Devil’s gratitude for you!

— You lie, varmint! Seleucus boiled over.

— Let’m have it, Seleucus! Chrysantus egged him on. Blacken his eye for him!

Without further ado, the heartless Seleucus grabbed us by the lapels, hoisted us up, and crushed us against his giant thorax. We resisted in vain; the monster scarcely noticed our punching and kicking. He had turned on his heels and was carrying us God knows where. That was when we started shouting for help:

— Ciro! cried Schultz in Italian. A noi!

— Aiuto, Ciro! I yelled at the top of my lungs.

Before long we heard the wrathful voice of Ciro Rossini, begging, suggesting, and threatening:

— Santa Madonna! Leave them alone, they’re from the barrio! A little party in famiglia!

Unfortunately, Seleucus wasn’t getting the message. He accelerated to a lively trot and squeezed us even harder against his agitated thorax, which was rising and falling like the sea. Now, the Cyclops trots rather like a camel, and the rider who by consent or constraint mounts such an unusual beast suffers oscillations and changes of level that he feels with particular sensitivity in the diaphragm. Frightened out of our wits, almost suffocating, and subject to the infernal rhythm of that gait, Schultz and I were suffering even more discomforts. The monster was panting up a windstorm that lashed us and blew a nasty smell of garlic up our noses; and his armpits reeked of old sweat, goatish emanations, and exhalations from a lion’s lair. I can hardly say, therefore, how long our trip aboard the Cyclops lasted. All I remember is that suddenly Seleucus snatched us away from his teats and landed us beside what looked to me like the head of the banquet table. There, seated in a very high-backed chair, a lady was presiding over the feast.

The woman’s repugnant obesity was amplified by a sequin-covered evening gown bursting at every seam. She had a full-moon face, on one of whose two round cheeks thrived a very protuberant black mole. Her pug-nose, like a dog’s wet muzzle, was incessantly rising and sniffing; it was planted between two beady eyes that had trouble opening and seeing their way clear through the fat. Above her narrow, concave forehead rose a monumental hairdo adorned with mussels and prawns, pejerreyes and tinamous, sausages and blood puddings, asparagus, and bananas. A double chin joined her jaw to a non-existent neck; from there the contour-line soon took flight again to trace the formidable expansion of two bovine boobs, then dipped slightly where the umbilical region may have been, continued with increased brio to rise over the curve of an almost spherical belly, and finally plummeted, beneath the table, toward unknown though suspected depths. Massive and shapeless, the arms of that lady ended in two chubby little hands with short fingers sporting a gaudy ring on every last one of their phalanges.

Contemplating the woman, I understood that Schultz wanted to show me a personification of Gluttony. And I wondered if the astrologer was going to try to personify each and every one of the capital sins in his Inferno, though I doubted it (and with time my doubt was confirmed), taking into account his capricious genius, which rebelled against all symmetry. Meanwhile, the woman observed us for a moment and then turned to ask Seleucus:

— Officer, what are these young men doing here?

— Intruderth, answered the Cyclops. They rethithted a reprethentative of authority, and their paperth aren’t in order.

— Anything more?

— By your leave, I would thuggetht they’re involved with the counterethpionage of our wily enemy. Black market and New York gold…

The woman let slip a greasy guffaw.

— Officer, she interrupted him, I think you read too many detective novels.

Next she turned to Schultz and smiled at him with grotesque coquetry, holding out her hand for him to kiss.

— Never, Madame! the astrologer refused. I am the Demiurge of this inferno, and wisdom tells us: “Thou shalt not adore the work of thy hands.”56 As you know full well, with these thumbs of mine I modelled your jugs, your belly, your double chin, all of which I see have filled you with reprehensible pride.

— Insolence! screeched the woman, piercing Schultz with basilisk eyes. Officer!

— At your service! answered the Cyclops.

— Grab the Demiurge and boot him out of here!

Again Seleucus picked us up, and again we suffered the nausea of his trot. At last we seemed to emerge through an exit, and the Cyclops threw us outside like a couple of sacks. Sitting on the desolate ground, out of breath and dismayed, the astrologer and I looked back at the portal that had just ejected us: circular in shape, it was now closing in a centripetal movement like a gigantic sphincter.

VIII

We picked ourselves up off the ground. Schultz’s indignation over the offense suffered at the hands of his own creatures got translated into foul language hardly appropriate on the lips of a Demiurge. Swearing like a trooper, the astrologer went so far as to curse the hour he’d got the bright idea of taking me for a visit to that filthy eatery. Once his anger had subsided, and while we fraternally straightened each other’s neckties, he and I engaged in the following colloquy:

— Schultz, my friend, said I. How is it possible that your very own creatures do not recognize you as their creator?

— Not only is it possible, it’s common, he replied. Take the example of the immortal gods. What theological negation have they not received from men? What rebellion have they not put up with? What impiety have they not suffered? If you think about it, all of that is flattering to a Demiurge with any pride.

— Flattering? I protested, my kidneys still feeling the touch of the Cyclops.

— Let’s suppose you endow a creature with being, and you do so with so much plenitude that the creature, far from recognizing you as its first cause, imagines it exists for its own sake, free of all cause-and-effect relationships. Let’s suppose that Don Quixote, for example, denied the existence of Cervantes. Would not that exuberance of being, which Cervantes had given to his hero and by virtue of which the author finds himself denied, constitute the most pleasant incense a creator could receive from his creature?57

— Hmm! I observed. Theoreticians less dangerous than you ended up burnt at the stake, when the world was more prudent.

— Don’t confuse things, he rejoined. The Demiurge uses two hands: one of wool, which is the hand of Mercy, and another of iron, the hand of Rigour. If on the one hand he can look without anger upon the iniquity of his creature, he cannot on the other hand ignore the imbalance such iniquity introduces into the created order. Because justice is a necessity not even the gods themselves can escape. The Demiurge needs to re-establish the equilibrium broken by his creature, and he does so either with the hand of Rigour or with the hand of Mercy.

— And you, which hand would you use on the Cyclopes?

— I’ve got half a mind to go back there and put the boots to them! answered the still rancorous Schultz. Fortunately, he added, the next barrio of Cacodelphia will prove less unruly.

Without another word, the astrologer entered the new twist of his Helicoid, and I followed him through a gloom that quickly thickened so much that it felt solid. Lost in the blackness, we soon spied a light as though from a candle casting a faint, wavering circle of clarity before us. Drawing nearer, I observed that the light came from an oil lamp placed upon something like a courtroom dais, with two or three steps leading up to it. On the dais loomed someone of judicial aspect, his gaunt figure towering like a dark bird. Placing tortoiseshell spectacles on his rampant nose and twisting the cottony locks of his wig, he smoothed the leaves of a huge book lying open before him, around which fluttered anxious moths.

When we reached the dais, the judge stared at us without the slightest curiosity:

— How were the poor devils? he asked at last, his voice monotonous, indifferent, somnolent, expressing all the boredom of his office.58

The astrologer Schultz took another step forward:

— They were like the fox and the sheep, he responded. “Ah, madame,” said the fox to the sheep. “I’m going to eat your little lamb up, because I see he now has two teeth and a nice fat tail!” “Very well, Don Juan,” answered the sheep, “but tell me, are you not authorized to perform baptisms?” “Yes, ma’am,” said the fox, “by the priest of Huancacha.” “I’m glad,” said the sheep, “because, that being the case, you can baptise him for me before you eat him up.” Licking his chops in anticipation, the fox went to the river to fetch some water for the baptism. And then the sheep gave him a push, plunging him into the swift current.

Astonishment dawned in the face of the judge when he heard Schultz’s reply. He came down one step from the dais and asked again:

— How were the poor devils?

— They were like the woodtick and the roadrunner, answered Schultz. One day the roadrunner, proud of his fast legs, was razzing the tick. So the tick said to him, “Bet I can beat you in a race.” “You beat me?” snorted the roadrunner, splitting his sides with laughter. “Bet you ten bucks,” challenged the woodtick. “You’re on,” the roadrunner accepted. The day of the race came, and the two agreed that the first to reach the finish line and then sit on a cow’s skull waiting there would win the race. The two got lined up, and the roadrunner checked with his opponent: “Ready?” “Any time!” answered the tick. Since the roadrunner couldn’t see the tick on the ground, he asked her again: “Ready?” “Sure, let’s go!” she cried nearby. Then the sneaky tick hopped onto the tail of the roadrunner, who took off running like blazes. When he got to the finish line, the roadrunner, thinking he was the winner, went to sit on the cow-skull. But the tick shouted in warning: “Hey, pard’, don’t crowd me, I got here first!”

Even more astonished, the judge descended another step:

— How were the poor devils? he asked once again.

And Schultz replied:

— They were like the farmer, the tiger, and the fox. The tiger said to the farmer: “I’m gonna eat you up, oxen and all.” And the man begged him: “Don’t eat me, Mister Tiger, I’ve got a lot of mouths to feed!” “Save your breath,” responded the tiger. “I’m gonna eat you anyways.” But the fox, who had been listening to them, hid in the tall grass and in a harsh voice shouted to the farmer: “Hey friend, you seen the tiger around here by any chance? Me and my dogs is lookin’ for him.” The tiger, thinking a hunter was on his trail, flattened his belly to the ground and said to the man: “Tell him you haven’t seen me!” “No, sir, I haven’t seen no tiger.” “Whadya mean, you haven’t seen him?” the fox called out again from his hiding place. “What’s that layin’ on the ground over there?” “Tell him it’s beans,” ordered the tiger. The man obeyed: “Sir, they’re beans I brought here to plant.” “If they’re beans,” said the fox, “then put them in that sack you got there.” “Put me in the sack!” the tiger ordered again. So the farmer put the tiger in the sack and said: “Done, sir.” “My friend,” insisted the fox, “tie the sack up good n’ tight, so the beans won’t spill out.” “Tie up the sack!” whispered the tiger to the man. The farmer obeyed, tying the sack with a leather thong. But the fox cried out again: “Look here, my friend, that sack is kinda lumpy. Give’er a knock with the head of the axe and soften’er up a bit for me.” The farmer grabbed the axe and pummelled the tiger until he’d killed it.

No sooner had he heard the astrologer’s third response than the judge descended the third and final step, and beckoned us to follow him. We instantly obeyed, and while the judge was leading us around the dais, I asked Schultz in a tiny voice:

— Tell me, what poor devils was that shyster referring to?

— He was referring to those who sharpened their claws on the mordant stone of avarice.

— And what meaning is there in that mishmash of little fables you’ve just fed me?

— Tomorrow’s researchers, the astrologer pronounced modestly, will bust their butts trying to dig out the admirable meaning hidden in those little fables.59

I made no further response, because our guide was now pointing us toward an open hatchway alongside the hind edge of the dais. We entered the hatchway, Schultz in the vanguard and I in the rear, and went down a few squeaky stairs. The trapdoor closed above our heads. Suddenly a deafening clamour assaulted my eardrums. Meanwhile, my eyes were adjusting to a yellowish light, glacial and dense, that seemed to fill the entire area as far as the horizon.

— The Plutobarrio, Schultz practically shouted into my ear.

I could hardly hear what he said, for the din exploded with greater violence, in a strange chord of triumphal shouts and sobs, blasphemies and idiotic laughter, curses and songs of joy, all of which caused the structure of that Inferno to shudder and shake, down to its smallest nuts and bolts. But, on the other hand, I could now make out the irascible multitude shouting and pushing and shoving each other before us in a kind of vast arena or battlefield, which was ringed by a belt of ruined factories, broken smokestacks, truncated skyscrapers, and crumbling mansions. Everything my eyes took in, plafond and ground, city and men, faces and clothes, was tinted the same hypocritical, shitty yellow I just mentioned — a colour that could not hide its falsity, a trinket-like colour of gilded brass. Only later did I find out that Schultz, when he used it in his Plutobarrio, was trying to suggest the notion of corrupt gold, gold that betrays its destiny, gold in a state of mortal sin. Nevertheless, I still couldn’t make out what kind of activity occupied the Plutobarrians in that circus; they scurried hither and thither raising a cloud of dust that blurred their movements. The dust cloud, too, had a yellowish tint that again suggested the presence of the ignoble metal, but in the subtle state of filings.

— What are those people doing there? I asked Schultz. From here it looks like a rodeo of unruly young bulls, or a battle of wild dogs, or I don’t know what.

The astrologer said not a word, but led me by the arm to the very edge of the ring. From there, through the dust cloud that by now was irritating our nostrils, I could see men struggling in a melee so fierce and brutal, it immediately put me in mind of the time we Racing fans took it to the fans of San Lorenzo, on our home turf, the day a certain bloody-minded referee tried to disallow a goal scored by our victorious jersey. The crowd before us now was a mixture of businessmen (capacious Perramus coats^60 and fat cigars), heroes of the Stock Exchange (sporty suits and congested faces), merchants in stiff tuxedos or impeccable workcoats, directors of companies, and alchemists of speculation. Now I saw clearly that they were all running, colliding with one another, falling down in the yellow dust, getting back up like automatons to return to the struggle, in the midst of a hurly-burly of bonds, banknotes, securities, and shares that a great, erratic wind swept and swirled over the ground according to no other law than its own caprice. Some men snatched at them in the air; others picked them up from the ground; they fought over them, pushing and shoving, shouting and punching; they filled their wallets, pockets, and hats with grimy bits of paper that came flowing in from the four points of the compass. I suddenly noticed that the most frenetic among them were devouring their harvest of paper on the spot. When they got to the point of choking, they activated some spring-loaded lever hidden in their abdominal region: the metallic click of a cash register was then heard, and luminous numerals flashed across their foreheads, indicating the sum-total swallowed. The less greedy among them carted their booty off, defending it tooth and nail, until they got to the centre of the circus. There, demonic, pen-pushing cashiers, all a-buzz behind the bars of tellers’ booths, were accepting bank deposits, counting papers, and making out receipts with agile fingers and glacial expressions. Receipt in hand, the depositors checked the total, and then fell into a trance-like state, only to emerge moments later to return to the fray, exclaiming: “Six figures! Seven figures! Eight figures!”

As I watched those wretches at their arithmetical games, I tried to recognize some familiar face. But their physiognomies were all amazingly alike, wearing the same grimace in identical madness. And though I was able to pick out Polyphemous, the crafty beggar of San Bernardo, from among the harvesters, it was only because he was still clutching his unstrung guitar in his descent into hell, even as the multitude knocked him and spun him about like a top. Amid all the caterwauling, I thought I could hear him proferring his usual blessings as he lined the bottomless soundbox of his vihuela with paper bills.

— Curious! I said to Schultz, pointing to the buffeted figure cut by Polyphemous. Seeing that beggar here among the filthy rich…

The astrologer didn’t answer, for at that moment he was accosted by a voice declaiming from somewhere nearby:

— Citizens! Hey, citizens!

I turned in the direction of the voice, and only then noticed that beside us, half-hidden by the dust cloud, there rose a very high chair, similar to the ones used by the judges of tennis matches. A personage swollen with solemnity was sprawled in the chair. Looking at his face, I recognized the collector Zanetti, but in his Sunday best, wearing a red tie and a wide-brimmed hat à la Alfredo Palacios. Through a set of opera glasses held in his right hand, he gazed insistently upon the circus plutocrats. His left hand brandished a tightly folded copy of La Brecha, red with libertarian ink. Trousers rolled up to his knees, the collector Zanetti was soaking his martyred feet in a porcelain basin, the vulgarity of this operation in no way diminishing, however, his solemnly haughty demeanour.

— I know this man, I told Schultz. And, unless I’m mistaken, we’re in for an earful of literature.

Seated upon his high perch, the collector Zanetti was getting impatient:

— Citizens and workers! he again bellowed. If you use your intelligence and study the precise meaning of the operation these bourgeois are applying themselves to, you will quickly realize how abysmally stupid they are. Let me explain why. These bourgeois pigs, with all their money, can no longer add a single exquisite dish to their feasts, nor another link to the very long chain of their fornications, nor one more luxury to their motley mansions, nor another tint to the already baroque fabric of their concupiscence. And yet, they keep piling up gold that can’t buy them anything more. Their gold is reduced to abstract figures. It can only take the fleshless form of an ascending arithmetic progression, recorded in monumentally forlorn bankbooks. Comrades, are we not in the presence of a ridiculous madness? Doesn’t it make you want to laugh hysterically?

We did not respond at all, and the collector then threatened us with his copy of La Brecha:

— Answer me, or I’m coming down there! he called to us, his heels wiggling in the basin.

Schultz frowned with incipient indignation. But he hadn’t forgotten the ugly behaviour of the Cyclopes, and he answered prudently:

— Yes, sir. We feel like laughing like crazy.

— So go ahead and laugh! Zanetti ordered us from on high.

Schultz forced a loud and theatrical guffaw, which in spite of its falseness did not entirely displease Zanetti.

— Now you! said the collector, training his opera glasses on me.

I laughed in turn, without mirth. But Zanetti must have been satisfied, because he went on to shout:

— Have you laughed, comrades?

— We have laughed, Schultz and I answered as one.

— And you’ve laughed like perfect idiots! he scolded, throwing his copy of La Brecha in our faces. Because the abstract numbers those bourgeois pigs are accumulating to no purpose are, at bottom, nothing more than the hidden bread of those who go hungry, and the invisible roof of those who suffer the elements, and the stolen overcoat of the destitute, and their elemental pleasure being snatched from the wretched. And this being the case, comrades, don’t you feel you should be weeping and wailing like heifers?

— Precisely, Schultz admitted, that’s just what we’re feeling now.

— So, weep! Zanetti now in a rage enjoined us.

But neither the astrologer nor I was about to shed the required tears. Slipping away under cover of the dust cloud, and deaf to the sublime insults Zanetti threw after us condemning our flight, we ran at a trot until we reached the ruined buildings which, as I said, bordered the circus of the plutocrats. There we had to slow down to a tortuous walk, for we had just entered a gigantic shed, where rusty old iron was piled up everywhere in a veritable slag heap: abandoned locomotives, blown-out boilers, rust-eaten rails and cogs, all impeded our passage and forced us to make irksome detours. We might have wandered infinitely through that sad labyrinth of wornout materials, had the astrologer Schultz not found the way out. On his right, he saw a high pile of horizontal trunks and he began to climb it. Hopping from trunk to trunk, and ignoring the rats that scurried off squealing almost between my legs, I followed him all the way to the top of the pile. From there I could view a scene whose general features looked familiar. It was a vast lumberyard full of stacks of logs, rounds, and rough-hewn timber; above them, a black crane extended its gallows arm. At the back of the yard rose an industrial building; its walls were cracked and split, its skylights broken, its windows blind, its roof caving in. Ten paces ahead, a crumbling smokestack seemed to totter on its brick footings. Silence, cold, and a sense of abandon seemed to ooze from the ruins like sweat from a dead man.

We went down into the yard. Approaching the front gate, we saw a man leaning against the base of the smokestack. He was sweating and panting as if he had been running, and as he stood there his eyes darted left and right like those of a hunted animal. I recognized him instantly, for countless times in Villa Crespo I had chanced upon that industrialist of exuberant backside, narrow shoulders, spherical belly, short legs, drooping mustache, and cascading double-chin. Seeing how agitated he was now, I called to him mildly:

— Señor Lombardi!

But when he heard me, the man gave a start and took off running toward the building.

— He’s the boss of the sawmill, I told Schultz.

— Ah! he rejoined. Is he not the gentleman who used to pass by the San Bernardo church? The one who would raise his hat and pretend to scratch his neck so as not to let on he was saluting?

— The very one.

Without another word, the astrologer and I took off after the fugitive, giving chase until we caught up to him just as he was entering the engine room. Then, giving up flight, Lombardi turned a panic-stricken face toward us:

— Shhh! he ordered us. They’re over there! They’re planning to blow up the sawmill.

— Who? Schultz asked him.

— The one-armed man and the stoker! shouted Lombardi. The boiler is about to explode, and they keep on shovelling and pouring the coal into her! Just look at the needle on the pressure gauge! The motor’s screeching and the gears are grinding! They want to blow up the sawmill! The one-armed man is the ringleader!

I looked around and noted the same state of abandon and the same cold silence as out in the yard. The motor was literally dissolving, eaten by rust. Old cobwebs covered the regulator, the flywheel, and the arm of the piston. Lacking both glass and needle, the pressure gauge eloquently summed up the state of disrepair. But Lombardi continued to shout his alarm. All of a sudden, as though expecting an explosion, he covered his ears with his hands and started running again. We pursued him through dismantled workshops until he reached his dusty desk and plopped down on a chair.

— What do you want now? he muttered, finding himself hemmed in between his filing cabinet and his cashbox.

I turned to Schultz:

— It’s Don Francisco Lombardi, honour and decorum of industrial Villa Crespo.

— Ah! commented Schultz. Isn’t he the gentlemen who used to confess every Saturday, took communion every Sunday, and went back to the sawmill every Monday greedier than ever?

Lombardi reminded him acidly:

— Don’t forget that every Sunday at Mass I threw three pesos into the collection bag.

But he quickly recovered his attitude of alarm and, looking around uneasily, asked us:

— The one-armed man hasn’t followed you, has he?

— Look, I assured him, there isn’t a soul in the whole sawmill. Who is the one-armed man?

— A vengeful type! whimpered Lombardi. His arm got cut off on my circular saw, and he demanded the insurance he was entitled to. I denied it, declaring before the authorities that the man had got himself mutilated because he was notoriously drunk at the time.

Lombardi was suddenly silent, no doubt having seen the expression on our faces.

— Oh! he exclaimed a moment later, don’t look at me like that! I know very well nine hundred pesos wasn’t a lot to pay for a man’s arm! Now I’d give him the whole sawmill. I’ve offered it to him countless times. But the one-armed man won’t accept!

He was silent again for a moment and then voiced his worries:

— Tell me, he asked in a shaky voice. Are you sure the old man hasn’t slipped in behind you?

— What old man? I inquired.

— The stoker. I threw him out of the sawmill when he could no longer lift a shovel. Forty-six years at the boiler had consumed his eyes, dried out his body, and had his nostrils constantly dripping yellow mucous into his mustache. But can he ever handle a shovel now! He’s the right-hand man of old One-Arm! You look at me again with hard eyes? Listen, you’re in for a big disappointment if you think I’m a bourgeois scared out of his wits. It isn’t the catastrophe itself that’s wrecking my nerves. It’s the way they’ve got me worrying and waiting for an explosion they just won’t stop crowing about! And I’ll tell you something else: what’s really giving me sleepless nights is a disturbing idea… hmm!

He stopped talking for a moment and looked at us with perplexed eyes. So I ventured to suggest:

— It can’t be easy to put into words.

— It’s an not an idea easy to grasp! Lombardi rejoined aggressively. Never mind, just listen: up in the rafters of the sawmill, I have a hiding place the stoker and the one-armed man don’t know about. There, where my only company is a grey mouse and two resident spiders, I’ve been able to have a good long think. And I’ve come to the conclusion there is such a thing as immanent justice.

— Good! Schultz interrupted, as though encouraging him.

But Lombardi looked at him with severity.

— Your approval means nothing to me, he said. Are you surprised to hear me talk like this? I went to school, too. Or do you take me for an ass loaded with money? Hmm! Anyway, I haven’t said anything special yet. Now comes the hard part. I already mentioned a troublesome idea that’s been keeping me awake nights, ever since I started thinking, up in the rafters, about what I did to the one-armed man, the stoker, and all those people now rising up against me. Oh, don’t think I’m talking about ordinary claims, like eight-hour days or minimum wages. Trifles! At bottom, do you know what I did to those poor devils? I robbed them of their human time! Do you understand?

He fixed us with an inquistive gaze and shook his head, visibly skeptical:

— You don’t get it at all! he groused. When I say I robbed them of their human time, I mean their time for singing, laughing, contemplating, and knowing. And that’s where the great theological mischief comes into play! Because by robbing them of all that, I’ve robbed them perhaps of that special moment, the unique opportunity even the lowliest man has a right to: the chance to look in peace and quiet at a flower or a skyscape, hear without anxiety his children laugh and his wife sing, and so discover that life is hard but beautiful, God-given by a good God…

At these last words, the solitary of the sawmill let his brow fall to the table. He wept face down for a moment; then his sobs faded into absolute silence; and the silence was at last broken again by laboured snores in 2/4 time. Lombardi was now sleeping.

Schultz and I crept away from the desk on tiptoe, went out to the sawmill yard, and contemplated again the desolation there. Then we continued on our journey, still beneath the aureate luminosity, which by then seemed less like light and more like the incandescent ash of dead and cremated gold. We had to pass through more factories, foundries, spinning mills, and washing plants. Among their ruins wandered frantic men who hid when they spied us, as well as meek figures lost in thought who paid us no attention. By and by, we came to a kind of hill covered with the unfinished buildings of an urban housing development under construction. There were scaffoldings and heavy machinery; bricks and bags of cement were stacked here and there. And yet we didn’t see any architects or building contractors or construction workers, and it all gave me the impression of things stillborn. The first building was a mere skeleton of reinforced concrete: an enormous cage, an outline of ten floors and twenty apartments.

— In this cement cage, Schultz told me, lives quite a nasty old bird from Saavedra. I’m surprised he hasn’t sung yet.

He looked up at the top of the building, and I did likewise. Just then, we heard commands being shouted up there, the rebukes and threats of an angry man. Then we saw him come tearing down the concrete stairway linking the various storeys. At each floor he paused to bawl insults at invisible workers, his voice ragged and shrill, his fist raised. When he got to the ground floor, he rushed up to us, pouring sweat, and asked:

— Are you the new architects?

He was a big man who looked like a cross between a greyhound and a walrus, sour-faced, his skin tone excremental. His clothes were incredibly slovenly, and he stank like a porter at the spring equinox, house-moving day.

Adopting a ceremonious demeanour, the astrologer turned to me:

— Allow me to introduce to you Don Abel Sánchez de Aja Berija y Baraja, man of means, pioneer, self-taught man, and other boastful titles in the same vein, which he is wont to recite at bars, should someone stand him a drink (otherwise, he does not indulge).61

— Drop the Berija y Baraja bit! shouted Don Abel, surprised and indignant.

— This man, continued Schultz, displays a lyrical virtue rare in our time. He has been devoting himself to the difficult mission of providing chambers for his fellow citizens. To that noble end, he has erected in Buenos Aires thirty apartment buildings, with twenty suites apiece, wherein his fellow citizens may enjoy a veritably paradisal existence, if only they pay an exorbitant rent. The dawn of his vocation, though obscure, is nonetheless honourable, for it stems from Don Abel Sánchez’s past practice in the traditional conventillos where — as recorded in the archives of the Justice of the Peace — he performed a great many altruistic deeds, such as throwing out orphans, widows, and the destitute who fell behind in their ludicrous monthly rent.

Don Abel stomped one foot on the ground:

— Enough of the irony, already, he grumbled. I am a man who…

But Schultz ignored him:

— It should be acknowledged, he added, that the twentieth-century winds of change did not catch him unawares. No sooner had he breathed in the novisecular breeze than he demolished his tenements and set about speculating in cement.

— Enough chit-chat! Don Abel interrupted again. I demand that you tell me whether you two are the new architects or not.

— What if we are? Schultz responded.

— Then, he shouted, why are you standing there like a couple of oafs? This building needs to be finished right now. I’ve already kicked nine architects off this job.

— Why? I intervened.

Don Abel’s sour face flushed with fresh anger:

— They wanted to put only twenty apartments in ten storeys! he exclaimed. I told them forty. Thank God, we can still put things right: the plans have to be corrected.

— Listen, Schultz rejoined. Do you want to put up a building fit for men or for rats? Have you forgotten the human body, too, has its dignity?

— I was educated by priests, Don Abel hypocritically refuted. And they taught me to humiliate the body.

— The human body! Schultz went on. The residence of the immortal spirit! The dwelling, albeit transient, of divine Psyche!

Don Abel inflated his thorax, and I saw something stir in his eyes, a fanatical gleam that gave me a glimpse of the true physiognomy of his demon.

— Did I say otherwise? he retorted heatedly. In all my apartment buildings, didn’t I sacrifice the bedrooms, the dining room, the living room, and the office so as give more space and luxury to that temple of bodily dignity known as the Bathroom? Haven’t I seen half the city fall into ecstacy at the sight of my built-in bathtubs, my aerodynamic bidets, my fashionable toilets? Did I not have full-size mirrors placed in front of my bathtubs so my tenants could admire every last detail of their intimate operations?

— Yeah, sure, Schultz admitted. And I hope the city shows its gratitude and honours you with an equestrian statue: Don Abel Sánchez de Aja Berija y Baraja mounted on a gigantic bidet cast in bronze.

— I told you to drop the Berija y Baraja! Don Abel protested again.

— I have no intention of filching your glory, Schultz growled. But don’t try and deny you’ve stolen from people their portion of air and their ray of sunshine.

— In exchange, I gave them a garbage incinerator and central heating.

— Which barely works, muttered Schultz. And besides, what about the children? Can children live in that cement cage?

The autodidact’s mouth fell open and stayed open for good while, as if he’d been left speechless.

— Children? he exclaimed at last. But, sir, do you think we’re still in the Middle Ages? Children!

He turned his gaze from me to Schultz, seemingly turning over an idea that didn’t quite fit into his skull. Next, he looked at the unfinished building: the autodidact’s face reflected the oblivion to which he was already consigning us, then deep attention, then calculation, and finally indignation.

— What are those fools up to there? he bellowed threateningly toward the heights. Those servants’ quarters should be narrower!

Furious, he tore off up the stairs. He again ran from floor to floor and hopped from scaffolding to scaffolding, brandishing his fist in the face of phantasmal workers and vociferating among the bars of his cage.

We didn’t climb the hill; nor did we visit any other building of the many that were going up there. Cutting to the left, we entered a barrio very disagreeable to the sense of sight. Full of anthropomorphic constructions, the zone was swarming with people who had been brutally twisted into numerical forms. Someone had wrenched those human bodies so violently that even today I seem to feel back pains just thinking about the hominids shaped as the number 3. And I say “swarming” with human numbers, because they really were filing in and out of the anthropomorphic premises like ants, a double line of them packing the most absurd materials on their backs. In spite of my repeated questions, Schultz told me nothing about this barrio. The buildings were starting to thin out, when we were stopped by a very high wall of vegetation. It rose before us like a living fence woven of thorny branches, privets, and creepers. We picked our way through the vegetal rampart, and when we came out on the other side, my eyes beheld the saddest garden they’d ever seen.

Deformed trees stood there with trunks of gold-coloured metal, leaves of yellow brass, and flowers of chocolate paper. The same tackiness could be observed throughout the garden: in the shrubs and grass, in the wasps and butterflies fluttering listlessly among the dead calyxes, and even in the gigantic mushrooms, which took flight like a child’s balloon at the mere brush of one’s foot. The place was thick with wingèd figures of Mercury and revolving effigies of Fortune cast in wax or soap, according to the norms of the most outrageous kitsch. Nevertheless, my curiosity was soon attracted by a big villa hulking in the middle of the garden, whose sorry, peeling frontispiece matched the rest of the buildings in the Plutobarrio. The astrologer had me walk around the outside of the mansion, and I saw that each of the four facades was in a different style. The northern facade was Egyptian, the southern Greek, the eastern medieval, and the western Renaissance.

— The architect who designed this mess, I told Schultz, had his head in one godawful muddle.

But the astrologer put his index finger to his lips and ordered me to keep my ears peeled. Listening closely, I noticed that from inside the palace, as though filtering through its cracks, came the sound of music played on exotic instruments; its slow monotony reminded me of the Oriental strains in the Café Izmir, or of certain Hebraic laments I’d heard at night on Gurruchaga Street. And given the mansion’s apparent state of long abandon, fear stirred within me at the thought that it was haunted only by such music. At this point Schultz took me by the arm:

— Let’s go in, he said, pointing to the Greek facade.

We passed between two columns to a monumental door, which my guide unceremoniously pushed open, causing it to creak harshly. A new wave of fear would have held me back, had Schultz not given me a violent shove to the shoulder and propelled me, tumbling and staggering, inside the house. When I regained my balance, I found myself in an enormous hall and in the middle of a circle formed by couples dancing like automatons to the aforementioned music; wordless and expressionless, they danced beneath immense chandeliers in whose crystal teardrops, chipped and dirty, the light guttered and died before it reached the floor. The phantasmagorical dancers, ladies and gentlemen alike, wore rigorously formal attire: men’s tailcoats alternated with the uniforms of military officers and diplomats; the tulle of young ladies, with the satin of matrons. But all of their apparel and adornments, shamefully rumpled and tattered, ravaged by moths, were crying out their antiquity and ruin. As I observed this, I was struck by the disquieting suspicion that those poseurs had been there dancing nonstop for the past half century.62 I looked around for Schultz and found him behind me.

— Look at the orchestra, he told me, completely unperturbed.

Only then did my eyes take in the entire room. As I said earlier, it was an immense hall which, according to my reckoning and despite all logic, must have taken up the whole building. The orchestra, installed in a theatre box off to one side, was made up of twenty musicians decked out in gaucho-style chiripás made of satin, wildly embroidered jackets, multicoloured kerchiefs, and accordion boots. It was impossible, however, to identify the noble son of the pampas in those musicians of Hebraic nose, gold teeth, thick glasses, and wan complexion. Moreover, instead of the bandoneón or guitar, their hands held the psalter, trumpet, cymbal, bagpipes, and drum; with these instruments they were playing the lugubrious air we’d already heard from outside, but which had now assumed the tempo of a very slow waltz, to whose strains the dancers seemed to be spinning eternally.

I was watching the scene in amazement, when an official with the greenish face of an actor introduced himself to us. Judging by the megaphone in his right hand, he was playing the role of an announcer.

— Don Moses Rosenbaum is on view, he announced. This way, gentlemen. The cloakroom is on your left. Our show will commence right away.

He led us among the dancing couples until we came to a red curtain, the first of a series that seemed to conceal several stages around the room. I looked at Schultz and saw curiosity in his eyes, but I didn’t have a chance to speak to him because our announcer was preparing to speak into the megaphone.

— Your attention, please! he shouted in a falsetto voice.

The dancers stood stock still on the spot, the music stopped, and the curtain went up to reveal a scene in which the characters acted like puppets as soon as the announcer started to speak:

— Ladies and gentlemen! said the man with the megaphone (his voice of a hoary old rogue recited in a liturgical style, his tone rising and falling according to the exigencies of the text). You are about to witness a tragicomedy which, though contemporary, possesses an antique quality verging on the mystical. The first scene takes place, as you can see, in the parlour of a tenement house on Warnes Street, where a gathering of people stirs excitedly; drinks in hand, carefully circulating amid sewing machines and piles of overcoats, they are celebrating the circumcision of the twelve sons whom Don Moses Rosenbaum owes to the magnificence of Jehovah. Ladies and gentlemen, look to the right and see how the rabbi, anointed with the oil of wisdom, counts the product of his difficult art! And look to the left at Don Moses Rosenbaum himself (stuffed into his lustring frock coat and holding the cane which, according to him, has been passed down by his ancestors): he is the hero and martyr of our story. His eyes, at once festive and attentive, seem to bless the guests and watch every move they make, lest they make off with some utensil! Ah, ladies and gentlemen, put your hand on your heart and tell me: do you not feel you are in the presence of a scene straight out of the Bible? Me neither.

The announcer fell silent, the curtain came down, and we applauded coldly. Then, as the orchestra took up the same air as before but now in foxtrot time, the dancers began to dance again. Meanwhile, the announcer led us before a second stage.

— Your attention, please! he cried again.

Orchestra and dancers halted once more, and the curtain went up to reveal a second tableau:

— Gentlemen, recited the announcer. As you will recall, we left Don Moses Rosenbaum in a humble tenement house on Warnes Street. Look at him now in the book-filled study in the mansion he’s built overlooking the gardens of Palermo.63 Ah, if you could look through the picture windows of his study, you’d see the cheerfully fuming smokestacks of his factories! But tell me: who are those twelve unanimous lads who have their twelve identical noses buried in as many books, atlases, and guides? They are the twelve sons of Don Moses Rosenbaum training to do battle by studying codes, itineraries, statistics, and languages! See how the proud father looks at them, as he scratches his beard gone grey, which releases not dandruff but powdered benevolence! And answer me this: doesn’t Don Moses look to you like a man who has realized his ambitions? Yes? Well, look out, then! Because Don Moses Rosenbaum, despite his satisfied air, already has one eye on the wheatfields by the coast and the other on the cattle herds in the south, one ear on the quebracho forests in the north, and the other ear on the mineral deposits in the west; his right nostril is already sniffing at the winepresses of Cuyo and the left nostril smells the sugar mills of Tucumán.64 But, hey there! What’s happening now? The twelve lads have just got up! See how they follow Don Moses’s nervous index finger as it traces routes on a map. Now they take out twelve identical suitcases, they put on twelve selfsame raincoats, and they head off in the twelve directions of the Argentine Republic! Curtain.

A new round of cold applause was heard as the curtain descended. The dancers moved to the sempiternal music, which was now assuming the form of a tango. And again the announcer stopped them with his liturgical drone:

— Gentlemen, he said, the curtain has just risen to reveal a third scene to your astonished gaze. You see the interior of a temple. Look at the twelve sons of Don Moses Rosenbaum, all standing by the baptismal font in the presence of grave witnesses who apparently have their foreskins intact, and receiving the redemptive water the way a person might take a dubious cheque! One thing’s for sure: the twelve lads wear their morning coats quite stylishly (take away a couple of the rings burdening their fingers, and they would be perfect). Now turn your eyes to Don Moses Rosenbaum and see how he sneaks a sidelong glance at the Crucified One. Did you catch it? Well then, that glance has got some pedigree: it’s two thousand years old. And you will ask me now, what angel or demon is at work on this tribe? My response: hmm, this business is making me very uneasy.

The man with the megaphone stopped talking, and the dancers repeated their routine, breaking off when the fourth scene was unveiled:

— Ah, gentlemen! recited the announcer. If you now see me waving, practically in your faces, the ever-sweet torch of Hymenaeus,65 do not think my heart exults with pleasure. Voilà the fourth scene! It’s the altar of a basilica: the twelve scions of Don Moses Rosenbaum are contracting marriage with as many young ladies from our high society. Aristocrats come down in the world, ruined families, illustrious lineages gone bankrupt, none have hesitated to sacrifice their finest buds for the sake of Mammon, if we may so rename Don Moses Rosenbaum, who stands by the altar sweating anguish (just look at him!), eyes popping out of his head, ears peeled, nostrils flared in order to ensure that the candles are burning properly, that the incense is the one agreed upon in the contract, that the organist isn’t skimping on the semi-quavers. But hell’s bells! Have you not just noticed the light has grown dimmer? It was Don Moses Rosenbaum who, on the sly, has just blown out the flames in the candelabrum. The wretch just can’t help himself! Ah, gentlemen, do not think my heart overflows with pleasure just because you see me lighting, almost under your noses, the not-always-so-sweet torch of Hymenaeus!

The announcer headed for the fifth stage, as dancers and musicians resumed their roles. Then he brought the megaphone to his mouth, the curtain rose, and silence fell:

— Well, gentlemen, said the annoucer. Here we are before a scene evoking, with no stretch of the imagination, the scandalous times of Babylon. See the banquet hall, soon to be stained before your very eyes by the violent hues of saturnalia! Who are those hosts, in their magnificence seeming to revive the bygone days of Asia? They are the twelve sons and the one hundred and forty-four grandsons of Don Moses Rosenbaum, now celebrating the splendour of their house! Splendour, did I say? Just look at those women! Are they not as beautiful as pagan goddesses? And in their refinement, is there not that painful je-ne-sais-quoi we sense in a flower at the moment preceding its demise? And look at those men! Are they not modelled on Ganymede? And does one not divine in their Byzantine elegance something ineluctably final? Gentlemen, heed my words: I have no wish to pass for a prophet, but I sense an invisible autumn descending upon this house. What does it matter! The wine flows in abundance, though without joy; the bacchanal now begins, and they are going through the motions without enthusiasm, as in a cold ceremony. But pay attention now! Do you not see that old man, wild-eyed, scruffy-bearded, unsteady on his feet, the one making his agitated way among the guests, the one nobody notices? Why, it’s Don Moses Rosenbaum! He has exhumed his ancient lustring frock coat and his astrakhan hat. See how his crazed gaze wanders over the banquet table! And observe how, in the face of such devastation, he tears tufts from his beard, weeps without a sound, raises his arms toward the ceiling, as though trying to prop it up? Great God, what’s he doing now? In his madness, the poor wretch has started gathering crumbs from the tablecoth, righting toppled glasses, and salvaging the spilled wine. But no one sees or hears him, and around him the debauchery intensifies. Look out, now! Ah, just as I feared! Don Moses Rosenbaum is standing still at last: he has torn a lapel from his frock coat, a savage shout bursts from his lips, and he flees… Heavens! But where? Up and over the footlights!

Here the announcer hesitated in momentary confusion, as if something unexpected had happened. Then he began to vociferate, sans megaphone now:

— Hey, Don Moses, the exit is backstage! Come back here to the stage, Don Moses! What the heck, this isn’t some avant-garde theatre!

But his clamorous entreaties were in vain. The curtain had just come down on the bacchanal, and the musicians were trying to cover up the glitch by playing con brio the same old tune, tricked out now as a River Plate folk dance, while the dancers, lashed into a sudden frenzy, went round and round, stamping their feet like madmen, laughing and shouting, waving white-and-blue kerchiefs.66 Meanwhile, Don Moses Rosenbaum was crossing the room in the direction of the announcer:

— Wastefulness! he cried, pointing at the orchestra. There’s two harps and three bagpipes too many!

Barging through the circle of dancers, he ran toward the back of the room. But before exiting, he flipped a switch and turned out half the lights.

— Let’s follow him, Schultz hastily told me.

We reached the back door and entered what seemed to be a backstage area, with its gridiron, props, and drop cloths; we looked around among them for the fugitive, but in vain. We were eventually drawn by some light leaking underneath a door. Approaching, we pushed it open and saw what looked like a sixth stage, at the centre of which stood Don Moses Rosenbaum, as still as a plaster statue: a glaring spotlight illuminated his bust, highlighting his arid eyes, his rampant nose, and the hard lines of his mouth, which opened to hum the same lugubrious air the orchestra had been playing, but now restored to its true tonality of malediction or elegy.

Leaving him to his terrible solitude, we left the mansion by way of the Egyptian facade. Up until then I had seen or heard so many images, persons, scenes, musics, and voices, all jouncing in such a crazy tangle, that they began to swamp my memory and overwhelm my imagination. On top of it all, there was the travel fatigue, for my bones could not fail to know that, if Schultz’s Helicoid was generous in fantasy, it was hardly so when it came to convenience of passage. No wonder, then, I showed faint interest when the astrologer, still fresh as a rose, drew my attention to some geometrical constructions lined up along what looked like the last stretch of the spiral. These were great cylinders, cones, spheres, ellipses, and cubes, all painted red, yellow, and black (the devil’s liturgical colours); the vividness of the colours might have retained my attention, had it not been on the wane.

— In this place, Schultz told me, there suffers a notoriously nauseating subspecies of humanity. It includes all those intermediaries, hoarders, and other such pests, who wedge themselves between the producer and the consumer, plundering both parties by means of a subtle chain of speculations, traps, ruses, and sleight of hand. You’ll see them in that red cylinder, up to their crotches in slime and covered with leeches.

— Very equitable, I yawned.

But I refused to enter the red cylinder, and started walking toward the exit.

— This yellow cone, Schultz insisted as he drew even with me, is inhabited by those who react with alarm to a bumper crop and, being anxious to keep prices usuriously high, have burned silos brimming over with wheat, thrown tons of fruit into the Paraná River, and dumped wine into the sewers of Mendoza one year when every burro in the province got drunk contra natura.

Despite my fatigue, Schultz’s words made me pause for a moment beside the yellow cone.

— Look, I told him, my ancestors were enthusiastic drinkers (sometimes I wonder if my family tree mightn’t be a grapevine). And I think they’d all enjoy seeing, through my eyes, the torments being suffered here by those profaners of wine.

— I’ve put them in a winepress, said the astrologer, pushing his advantage, where they eternally stomp rotten grapes to the sound of a sour, screeching, diabolical fiddle being scratched by a one-eyed fiddler from the province of San Juan, Vargas by name; day and night, standing on a keg in a state of demonic possession, he plays his moronic Malambo de la Cabra Tetona.67 Come and see!

But I was dying to get out of that turn of the spiral:

— No thanks! I answered. I don’t like solo fiddle music, and I can’t stand one-eyed men.

I took off in flight at a quick pace. Schultz kept up with me and charged again:

— In that black ovoid, he said, are the shopkeepers equipped with long fingernails and a short yardstick. Go on in and you’ll see them weighing an infinity of faecal materials, in scales as false as their smiles.

— Not now! I refused again as I took the final bend at a trot.

Schultz trotted alongside and, relentless as a horsefly, buzzed into my ear:

— Don’t miss out on the best part of the suburb. Let’s go inside that cube, and I’ll show you the misers of comedy and literature: the ones who failed at music because they refused to give it so much as a rest, those who stayed on their feet because their legs refused to give way, those who brushed immortality because they refused to give up the ghost, and those who refused to give even a tinker’s damn. And those keepers so devout that they kept the sabbath every day, or those who adored only an angel called Keepsake. And those thrifty ones who went mute for the sake of not wasting breath on conversation, those on whom jokes were wasted, and who never wanted for not wasting, nor could ever be dubbed Waster. And those who…68

— Enough, already! I shouted, speeding up to a full run.

But Schultz in turn increased his pace and, swift as a greyhound, soon caught up with me:

— Listen! he panted. I’ve put them all in filthy chicken coops and settled them in revolting nesting boxs, where they cluck and brood over their bags of gold, snivelling with fever, rheumy-eyed, flea-bitten, flatulent, and reduced to utter decrepitude.

We were going along like this — with Schultz describing and me whinging and both of us running hell bent for leather — when I saw the exit door up ahead. Being the work of misers, and for the sake of not giving an inch, the door narrowed and shrank the nearer we drew. I made a dash for it, determined to get through the door no matter what, even if I had to dive through the keyhole. But just then I felt myself caught by someone who pushed me roughly toward a table that looked right out of some police station. In front of the table was a hard bench, and my captor forced me to sit down there. The astrologer Schultz, likewise captive, was soon sitting beside me. Only then did I see not only the two raving lunatics who’d hunted us down, but also a man behind the table who seemed to be observing us attentively, even as he adjusted on his cranium a gaudy brass crown.

— What’s this pair doing here? asked the man with the crown at last.

— Fugitives, answered the two lunatics in unison. They were only ten yards away from the exit.

— They lie! shouted Schultz, getting up from his seat.

A strong light was raining down on us from above. The astrologer sat down again and looked at me. And I looked back at him. Then the reason for our capture became obvious: looking at one another by the light of the beacon, we realized we were covered with the yellow dust so abundant in the Plutobarrio; without a doubt, we looked exactly like the rich slobs who inhabited the place.

From that moment on, my memories are confused. My accumulated fatigue, plus the exertion of my last run and the tempting invitation of the bench all plunged me into a lethargy that made it impossible to keep my eyes open and no doubt had me snoring before long. Even so, I retain a vague memory of what happened before I fell completely asleep. First, Schultz turned to the man with the crown to declare that, “being who he was,” he enjoyed right-of-way through that inferno. To which the man with the crown answered: “You’re a liar and a yellow-bellied coward.” And Schultz, more offended by the overly familiar form of address than by the insult itself, asked him “since when had they been eating mazamorra from the same plate.” Only later did I hear from Schultz how the incident ended. The crowned man turned out to be King Midas, the famous plutocrat now fallen on hard times, and he demanded that Schultz undergo questioning to prove he wasn’t a fugitive if he wanted to get out of that spiral with weapons and baggage intact. Schultz accepted and took an exam which, as he later assured me, resulted in an exemplary display of pedantry on both sides.

— Do you think, Mr Midas had asked him, that the iniquities and depradations committed by the so-called bourgeois class, or third estate, warrant its being amputated from the social body?

— No, sir, Schultz had answered. Because by calling it the “third estate,” we are already saying it belongs among the others and in third place. Now, every class or estate is an organ with a distinct but equally necessary social function; and if we were to eliminate a given class, we would be left without one of those functions.

— Tell me what the third estate’s function is.

— To produce material wealth, said Schultz. And let us now recognize that the ugly bourgeois have been born with this vocation: they discover sources of abundance where most people wouldn’t see so much as a blade of grass.

— That sounds rather like praise, Mr Midas came back. So what are we to reproach them with?

— I do not want to insult your intelligence, Schultz replied, by reminding you that when a bodily organ, the stomach for example, fulfils its function, it does so for the good of the entire body, because the continued health of the former depends on that of the latter.

— A comparison as old as the hills! Midas rebuked quite scornfully.

— It’s old but still valid, Schultz shot back. Because if the bourgeoisie is the organ that innately corresponds to the economic function, it ought to fulfil its role for the benefit of the whole social body.

— By what law?

— Many, said Schultz. Would you admit the bourgeois are human?

— Hmm! growled the crowned man inconclusively.

— If they’re human, Schultz argued, they are subject to the great Law of Charity or Loving Intelligence; and they ought to obey it voluntarily by making sure the wealth resulting from their vocation gets to all those among us who do not have it.

— But they don’t obey that law, said Mr Midas. Therefore, they are not human.

— Let’s say they’re stupid brutes, persisted the astrologer. Even so, they would obey the instinct for self-preservation by assuring that material goods are distributed throughout the social body to fortify it. Because the preservation of one organ is subject to the preservation of the total organism.

— Enough of the organ, already! Mr Midas grumbled again. The bourgeois don’t follow the instinct of self-preservation, either. Therefore, they are not even brutes. What are they, then?

— There’s the rub! sighed Schultz. Every social estate or class has a virtue and an opposing vice. If its virtue prevails over its vice, the class will act justly. Otherwise, it won’t be long before its vice will lead it downhill into iniquity. In the third estate, the virtue of producing wealth is opposed by a fatal tendency toward selfishness and usury. That’s why Brahma (be he a thousand times praised!), who understood that the bourgeois, left to his own devices, would obey no law at all, placed him in the third rank of the hierarchy, so that the two upper estates might rule over him with a firm hand.

— Balderdash! Mr Midas said at this point. Take a look at the present city, and tell me the bourgeoisie is in third place!

— What? Schultz asked. Do you find it placed in another position?

— Right up there in first place.

— That’s what I was driving at! the astrologer then exclaimed. If the third estate is now the first, it means that, in the course of History, a double usurpation has been committed.

Schultz recounted to me later that only at this point did the man with the crown look at him with some respect.

— Fine, Mr Midas said. Tell me with grace, concision, and brevity the story of both usurpations.

— It is known, expounded the astrologer, that Brahma (be he a thousand times praised!) arranged humanity in four classes, estates, or hierarchies. The first is that of Brahmin the metaphysician, who, because he knows the eternal truths, exercises the very subtle function of leading all men in the ways of earth and heaven. The second is the estate of Kshatriya the warrior, whose vocation is for worldly government and military defence. The third is that of adipose Vaishya, the bourgeois, who has the function of creating and distributing material wealth. And fourth in the hierarchy is the estate of sweaty Shudra, who was born at the feet of Brahma (be he a thousand times praised!). When all four classes remain faithful to their vocation and stay in their place in the hierarchy, human order rules, and justice assumes the form of a bull firmly planted upon his four pins.

— Whoa there, mister! said Midas. Spare me the metaphorical ballistics!

— But alas! continued Schultz. Errare humanum est. Et nunc, reges, intelligite: erudimini qui judicatis terram.69

— Sir, I beg you! Midas reprimanded him again. State your case in straightforward language. Have you forgotten you are addressing the general public?

— I was saying, said Schultz sententiously, that all good things come to an end. Just when the going looks good, somebody’s gotta upset the applecart, because there’s always one bad egg, and that’s just the way the cookie crumbles… Anyway, let’s imagine the four classes in their proper hierarchy and in peace — O fruitful Harmony! O even-keeled Jubilation! But, then what happens all of a sudden? The battle-hardened Kshatriya throws the stone of scandal.

— What? How do you mean?

— Kshatriya’s essential virtue, answered the astrologer, is that of worldly governance and defence of the state. His corresponding vice is the sensuality of power, the pride of arms, the thirst for conquest. That’s why he is subordinate to Brahmin the metaphysician, who gives him prudent advice: “Don’t be getting out of line now,” and “You went a little overboard there,” and “Don’t forget you’re going to have to answer to the good Lord up above for the shenanigans you get up to here below.” But the time comes when Kshatriya just can’t help himself any longer. Fed up with the old man’s scolding, he decides to bushwhack him. So he goes ahead and rebels against Brahmin, robbing him of the top spot. And to pull it off, he’s had the help of Vaishya the bourgeois, who also had it in for Brahmin, because the old codger had become a real pain in the neck with his boring sermons about greed and so on.

— Accurate in substance, approved Mr Midas, though vulgar in form.

— Don’t forget I’m addressing the general public, Schultz reminded him venomously.

— So be it. We now have Kshatriya in the first position. What happens next?

— Alas! replied Schultz. With nothing holding him back now, and in thrall to his evil inclinations, Kshatriya soon shows his dark side. He started out as a hero of noble and amorous chivalry, and he ends up as an unjust conqueror; from an equitable king, he goes to being a despot; his former austerity gives way to overweaning pride; and his heroic nudity is at last clothed in the rich and heavy overcoat of worldly vainglory. Of course, all that luxury costs a mint! And where does Kshatriya turn for money, if not to the affluent Vaishya? But Vaishya the bourgeois professes a tender love for his doubloons; teary-eyed, he watches the increasing haemmorrhage from his pockets. And he weepily says to himself: “That’s what I get for helping out that tinpot general!” Time goes by, and Vaishya stops crying and thinks to himself: “If Kshatriya, with my help, could pull a fast one on Brahmin, couldn’t I do the same to him, if Shudra helped me out a bit?” It’s a tempting idea, and the more he turns it over in his mind, the more Vaishya gets to like it. Finally he enters into talks with sweaty Shudra, promising him all the tea in China; and when he sees he’s convinced, he waits for the right occasion. Meanwhile, pardner, you oughta see what a sorry pass Kshatriya has come to! Sick and tired of battles and honours, he lives now in his palace. He’s turned into a night owl, a party animal, a pretty-boy. What with champagne and women all the time, he’s completely lost it. Instead of a military helmet, he’s got a curly wig on his head. Wars don’t mean a thing to him any more; instead, he’s crazy about dances and carnivals. In short, my friend, a pathetic shell of a man! And Vaishya never takes his eye off him; as soon as he sees him weak and effeminate, he starts by needling him, then gets him riled up, and ends up cutting his throat just like that. Since then, Vaishya has been master of the situation and grows fat in the first rank of the hierarchy, quod erat demonstrandum.

— Not bad, said Mr Midas at this point.

Then he added venomously:

— Though your account seems influenced by recent readings of a certain Gallic metaphysician…70

At those words, the astrologer turned visibly red, not with embarrassment, as he told me later, but out of righteous indignation.

— Look here, sir, he stammered. If I used someone else’s schema, and nothing more than a schema, I have on the other hand fleshed it out in quite an original fashion. Moreover, my own contribution is coming up.

— Hmm! said the crowned man. There’s more to come?

— I have yet to get to the heart of the matter, replied Schultz. Do you really think I would have taken on Vaishya if that slob of a bourgeois had limited himself to hogging the community’s nickels and dimes?

— What other offense do you hold against him?

— That he has universally imposed his gross mystic cult.

— Explain youself, sir, explain yourself, grunted the man with the crown.

— Old Brahmin alone, Schultz explained, possesses the true mysticism, the one all men should follow, each according to his limitations. But Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra all have there own mystic cult as well, a private cult that each derives from his own inner inclinations. Thus, for example, Kshatriya worships the heroic as figured in its two values: honour and valour. The mysticism of Vaishya is an acute pragmatism that tends to glorify matter and the material in its single cypher — gold. Shudra, for his part, worships the manual work of trades and their techniques. When the four classes are in their proper order and act in fairness, the three particular mystic cults, responding symbolically to the universal mysticism, are three different human attitudes or forms of prayer addressed to the same Absolute. It is then that Brahma, in satisfaction, smiles a ninety-degree smile.

— Amazing! Mr Midas practically yawned.

— But, concluded Schultz, as soon as an inferior class usurps the first place in the hierarchy, it imposes its particular mystic cult on the world, universalizing that cult and thereby traducing all values accordingly.

— For example?

— During the reign of Brahmin, emphasis is placed on the religious aspect of life, and the scale of human values is constructed on a spiritual basis. When Kshatriya rules, emphasis shifts to the political, and man is measured by his nobility, honour, and valour. Now that Vaishya has taken over, the economic aspect is all-important, and man is measured by his cheque book. Brahmin used to say: “In the beginning is Being.” Then Kshatriya said: “In the beginning is Action.” Now Vaishya says: “In the beginning is Matter.” Brahmin waged wars that were religious crusades, and Kshatriya waged imperial wars. Now Vaishya makes war for economic reasons. As for the domain of art…

— That will suffice, interrupted the crowned man. If my memory serves, we left Vaishya in charge of the situation. Now describe for me how he imposes his mysticism.

— As I said before, obeyed Schultz, Vaishya’s mysticism tends to glorify gold. But Vaishya is not totally bereft of theological notions, and when it comes time to impose his mystic cult, he says to himself: “Gold is my god, and because it is a god, it must be made invisible.” Just like that, Vaishya shuts up his gold in underground vaults and steel-plated chambers. But then he muses: “Since the faithful won’t see my god, they should at least see him in images.” So he creates banknotes and offers them to the parishioners for their veneration. Vaishya still isn’t satisfied; he turns to the respectable Dame Architecture and tells her: “Thou who hast raised cathedrals for Brahmin and fortresses for Kshatriya, build thee now a temple to my god.” Respectable Dame Architecture obeys and builds a monumental Bank over the grave where Vaishya has buried his gold. Then Vaishya the bourgeois declares himself Supreme Pontiff of his god, and between his god and the faithful he inserts an army of priests in lustrous sleeves. Finally, recalling that Brahmin had a sacred liturgy and Kshatriya a chivalric liturgy, Vaishya, not to be outdone, invents an elaborately detailed banking rite, of which you are no doubt aware.

— No, unfortunately! said the examiner. And believe you me, I’d give half my crown to see that animal Vaishya officiating at his rituals.

— It wouldn’t be so easy to see him, answered Schultz. Because Vaishya, as pontiff, reigns in a Vatican of cement; there, cigar in mouth, he is pleased to dictate financial encyclicals to stenographer priestesses as beautiful as the houris of paradise. Having envied the splendours of Brahmin and Kshatriya, the rascal hasn’t come up short when its comes to ostentation. But in his fundamental vulgarity, he makes profane use of everything. For example, he had his dining room chairs upholstered with the old and gilded chasubles of Brahman. Envying Kshatriya’s crowns and noble coats-of-arms, Vaishya now has them engraved as trademarks on his manufactured goods — bars of soap, toilet bowls, woollen goods, and other trinkets. On Vaishya’s desk can be seen two rare incunabula, luxuriously bound, but if you open them you will find that pages have been cut out to create hollows where Vaishya hides his cigars and bottle of whisky. With the parchment from a medieval antiphonary, Vaishya had lampshades made for his bedroom. And…

— Okay, enough! said Mr Midas at this point, laughing for the first time.

And Schultz later recounted that only after that moment did the crowned man put aside the stiff demeanour of the examiner. But he spoke again:

— It seems to me unlikely that Vaishya the bourgeois could have imposed his mysticism merely by deifying his gold, raising a temple in its honour, and giving it a liturgy.

— Don’t forget, retorted Schultz, that Vaishya is a born producer of material wealth, and that ever since he has risen to power, he has absolute discretion as to how wealth is distributed. It wasn’t long before courtiers and sycophants came crowding round him. And Vaishya, who has held his tongue for centuries, now gives it free rein: “Gentlemen, for my part, I confess I’ve never swallowed Brahmin’s metaphysical chatter. He’s been frightening us with that bogeyman of a God. But we’re grown men now, so enough of the smoke and mirrors. As for the immortal soul, the doctor who takes care of my stomach tells me he’s searched for it in vain, scalpel in hand. What are we left with, then? We’re left with one single world, one single existence, and one single body to make use of. Let us sit down, then, at the banquet of life. But remember, my god alone pays the bill, and I am the Supreme Pontiff of so amiable a god. And as for Kshatriya, don’t believe a word he says: his cult of living dangerously is unhealthy and goes against the principles the goddess Reason has recently dictated to us. But, if the military type obstinately persists, let’s leave him be: he may come in handy some day when our competitors challenge us for market advantage somewhere.” Thus speaks Vaishya, the bourgeois.

— I can just hear him! exclaimed the man with the crown.

— Afterward, Schultz concluded sadly, there will be philosophers, political theorists, and economists to give Vaishya’s ideas a literary style. And so will be spawned endless varieties of naive realism, historical materialism, hedonism, and so on and so forth.

— And what end lies in store for Vaishya? asked the examiner.

— I’m no prophet, answered the astrologer. But his end may come in two possible ways. Recall that Vaishya, when he needed Shudra, promised him the earth. Well, then, far from keeping his promise, Vaishya has subjected him to a regime of servitude such as Shudra had never experienced before. So it would be no surprise if Shudra were to rebel and bushwack Vaishya in turn. It’s also possible that Kshatriya, reformed through penitence, may remember his vocation and restore the primary order of things. However it may turn out, Brahma will decide, and that is well.

With this pious reflection, the astrologer Schultz concluded his examination. And, as he still tells anyone who will listen, Mr Midas warmly congratulated him. Then, again with great warmth, the man with the crown enjoined the two raving lunatics to give the gentleman awake (Schultz) and the entity asleep (me) an honourable exit from that circle of hell. The two raving lunatics obeyed the order no less warmly.

And if I’ve added this long examination to my account, it is because Schultz, in his infinite modesty, has assured me it sums up the greatest wisdom ever uttered in the philosophy of history.71

IX

Reader, my friend, if I had to justify the drowsiness that came over me in the fourth circle of Schultz’s inferno, I should remind you of a hundred illustrious precedents recorded in as many infernal excursions. Alighieri, being who he was, slept quite a bit in the descent he made. If the metaphysical character of his journey allows us to assign a symbolic value to that bard’s siestas, we can say that Alighieri slept in the proper place at the proper time. Less fortunate than he, I made an infernal descent without theological projections. I didn’t sleep when I should have, but rather when it was humanly possible to do so. How lucky are you, reader! For, having no metaphysical obligations or any cares whatsoever, you can cop a snooze on any page at all of this, my true story!

When Schultz finally shook me awake, and after I’d observed the ritual of yawns announcing our resurrection into this three-dimensional world, I found myself at what must have been the threshold or vestibule of the fifth circle of hell. I remembered then the enterprise in which Schultz had embroiled me, and I could not hide my dismay.

— What a pity! I said, turning to the astrologer. I dreamed Franky Amundsen and I were in the basement of the Royal Keller, drinking a nice big glass of Moselle. So vivid was my dream, I’m not sure which has more reality — this ludicrous Helicoid or that glass of wine I was savouring in the cellar.

— They’re two planes of one and the same reality, answered Schultz. And you, through one of the many manifest forms available to your being, really did drink that glass of wine in the cellar. Consider it drunk. Now let’s see what we can do about this doggone dragon.

Alerted by his last words, I stifled the objection already on the tip of my tongue, whose parched state was the strongest possible argument against the astrologer’s theory. And since the nap I’d just emerged from had restored my corporeal strength and refreshed my senses, I took a look around, determined to explore every nook and cranny of what remained to be seen in Schultz’s Helicoid. We were in front of a greyish wall, of uncertain height and bathed in a kind of watery light as in a wood or a grotto. The first thing that attracted my attention was a revolving door with three leaves, like the ones they use in big stores in wintertime. It was set into the wall and probably led from the hall where we were now to enter the fifth circle of hell. I must say that such a door, so extraordinarily situated, looked to me at the time to be out of place and even ridiculous. But I didn’t have time to voice this observation, for I was suddenly startled to discover an unusual animal standing beside the door and watching us closely. It was shaped like a dragon, but a dwarf dragon, pleasant to look at and without the trappings of terror we usually attribute to that species of beast. Its body was clean of the legendary sliminess and stench; instead it shimmered in cool, lustrous shades of majolica. Moreover, its body was covered with eyes all the way to the tip of its tail, not in some parodic imitation of Argos, but rather as the expression of some decorative penchant. The most noteworthy aspect of the monster, however, was its snout. It was enlightened by two little eyes quite without cruelty, though they sparkled mischievously, and by a large mouth smiling toothless and fang-free from ear to ear. All of which, in my judgment, showed this was a happy dragon, a decent sort. So, the animal was watching us and smiling at us; at the same time it was gently wagging its tail, not without jiggling a bunch of olive-green faecal marbles tinkling like glass beads as they bounced against one another. Now, one thing I knew for sure was that every good dragon is meant to guard some forbidden portal; and this dragon, I knew too, was Schultz’s totemic animal.72 In a state of indecision, I turned to the astrologer to ask him:

— What are we supposed to do with this creature?

— If you’d paid more attention to your classics, he answered, you’d know that in cases like this, facing a dragon, you’ve got to make it fall fast asleep.

He looked around, suddenly anxious:

— Son of a bitch! he groaned. Where did I put my arsenal of hypnotics?

He dashed off toward a corner of the vestibule. Before long, he was back with an armful of fat books, pamphlets, and newspapers, which he dumped on the ground. From the pile he picked out the material he thought most apt, then squared off in front of the dragon and started to read aloud excerpts from what I recognized straightaway as Argentine literature. But the beast (it must be said in fairness) showed every sign of taking the punishment very well and didn’t so much as bat an eye. Observing which, the astrologer told me:

— This is one heck of a tough customer. Your turn. Recite some of your poetry for him.

Doing as I was told, I showered the dragon with a terrific flood of metaphors, and was lucky enough to see the monster’s eyelids droop for a moment, as if an irresistible torpor had overcome it. Unfortunately, the beast didn’t take long to recover; it smiled at me with the utmost tenderness and wagged its tail in a show of delight. Then Schultz, getting impatient now, decided to resort to extreme measures. Facing off against the smiling dragon, he read out the ninety pages of the Code of Mining Regulations, every last Fernández listed in the Telephone Directory, the recorded Minutes of the parliamentary Chamber of Deputies, three editorials from La Prensa,73 the Digest of Public Instruction, a Dissertation by the Council of History and Numismatics, and the Balance Sheet of the State Railways. By God, those readings soon took visible effect! Down at the mouth, yawning cavernously, eyes drooping and muscles going slack, the dragon stopped smiling and fell into a deep lethargy. Schultz prodded him with his foot a few times. Seeing the dragon remain absolutely still, he shouted with unnecessary urgency:

— Head for the door! Through the door!

I hopped over the sleeping animal and charged the revolving door, setting it into a quick spin that sucked me through until I was thrown inside the new segment of spiral. I had yet to find my footing in the new place, when a brutal gust of wind struck me full in the face and knocked me against the wall. My broad-brimmed hat flew off (alas, forever!), and my hair was blown into my eyes. Blinded, staggering, I nevertheless heard Schultz’s voice calling to me:

— Grab hold of the rope!

I groped around for it, but wouldn’t have found it without the astrologer’s help. Following close behind me, he hadn’t forsaken for a single moment his duties as presenter and guide. Only then, clinging to the rope and buffeted incessantly by the wind, was I able to make out the general contours of the fifth circle of hell. It was an arid plain extending apparently to the horizon. In the air or atmosphere or sky above it, there were human beings in the form of balloons, feathers, kites, and other such flying objects. They were all gliding above the plain, rising or falling, driven hither and thither in continuous agitation, on the wings of conflicting cross-winds.

— Not a bad set-up for Sloth! the astrologer told me. The wind blows day and night over the plain from the four cardinal directions. Each of the four winds must blow to its right, sweeping across a ninety-degree arc, so the lazy slobs in this place never get a single moment’s repose.

He abruptly stopped talking and seemed to listen for something in the distance. Then he shoved me back against the wall, and he too stuck to it like a barnacle.

— Watch out! he shouted. Here comes the South Wind, hell-bent for leather!

The astrologer’s cry of alarm wasn’t even out of his mouth, when I saw the Pampero running full speed toward us. His bronze body was naked, his virile organs hanging loose and jouncing, thorax palpitating, beard tangled, and hair blooming in a riot of blue thistles and pink flamingo feathers that waved in the breeze. When the giant blew, his cheeks puffed out and his eyes bulged. So beautiful did I find the image of our country’s national wind, that I was on the point of crying out, like the poet:

Audacious son of the plain

and guardian of our native soil!74

He rushed past us, making the earth tremble beneath his heels. As soon as he’d gone by, Schultz had me cross the Wind’s narrow racecourse. Not letting go of the good old rope (which no doubt circumscribed the entire infernal space and ramified into an interior network for the use of travellers), we entered what the astrologer, with utter sang-froid, declared to be the Zone of the Homokites. In that segment of atmosphere, tethered to the ground by lengths of strong twine, innumerable human sketches assumed diverse forms of the children’s kite and were pitching in the choppy breeze, now rising toward the zenith, now precipitously plummeting, their multicoloured streamers snapping festively and their rag-tails gaily wagging. As I watched their capricious evolutions, two of those human kites, whose lines seemed to have crossed and become entangled, described a vertiginous descending curve until they smashed into the ground at our feet. They got up right away, laughing uproariously, hugging one another, with their streamers intertwined. They were two types of kite: one was a very skinny papagayo or “parrot,” the other a fresh-faced octagonal bomba or “bubble.”75 The papagayo laughed in a deep trombone tone; the bomba laughed in the high-pitched timbre of a clarinet. Once their hilarity had calmed down, both papagayo and bomba took a look around them. When they saw us, they erupted in fresh gales of laughter.

— Well, if it isn’t himself! said the one with the clarinet-laugh, in a clarinettish squeak.

— The sorcerer of Saavedra! exclaimed the one with the trombonelaugh, in a trombonish profundo.

I had no doubt the homokites were referring to the astrologer.

— Who are those two happy cartoon characters? I asked.

— The duo Barroso and Calandria, answered Schultz. Two budgetivores from Public Works. A hundred and ninety pesos a month, which…

— Hey, sorcercer! interrupted Barroso the papagayo, still laughing. Gimme a tip on next Sunday’s horse races!

The astrologer, dolefully severe, looked from one to the other:

— That’s you all over! he said to them. Race-track rats and dance-hall bums! And owing money to everybody and his uncle!

— C’mon buddy, whined Calandria. Life’s short, ya gotta enjoy it while it lasts.

— Without darkening the door of the office! Schultz kept on scolding. Hanging out day and night at the Café Ramírez in Saavedra, giving the tailor the slip, and putting enough grease in your hair to leave an oilslick behind you. Getting into slugfests at soccer games. Sneaking into dances without paying at the Unione e Benevolenza.76

— Sometimes we forked out! protested Calandria.

— Sure, conceded Schultz. But first you spent an hour loitering in the dance-hall vestibule, taking a good look at the feminine contingent going in, so as to decide whether it was worth the price of admission.

Barroso the papagayo grimaced with his green and pointed face:

— Buddy, he said to Schultz, his sad eyes pleading for understanding. What would you do with a hundred and ninety a month?

— Our country, envy of the world, answered Schultz, is awaiting the new energy, the manly spirits, the vigorous muscles of her young people, ready to yield the mineral gold of her mountains, the vegetal gold of her wheat-fields, the animal gold of her flocks, the gold…

— Layin’ it on kinda thick, aren’t ya, buddy? warned Calandria.

— Buddy, intervened Barroso, you gotta be puttin’ me on. Since we were kids in school, they taught us to keep our fingernails clean, our shoes shined, our hair slicked back, and our overalls spotless. That was supposta be the ideal of every good Argentinian. And if we showed up any other way, old Sarmiento’s picture in the principal’s office was gonna get mad. Ya catchin’ my drift? Then they stuffed our noggins full of geography, history, natural science, math, civics, grammar, and I don’t know what-all. Of course, it all went in one ear and out the other. But some of it stuck, and we thought we were educated. Now, tell an educated guy with clean fingernails to get serious about any job at all! No, buddy, that’s not gonna go over real big. When we got out of school, we looked at ourselves in the mirror: our overalls spick ’n’ span, hands looked after, decent handwriting, and a few shavings of science. We were the unmistakable type known as the National Employee!

At this point Barroso went silent for a moment, and Schultz took advantage of the pause to confront me:

— You are a pedagogue. Look at your work!

— Mea culpa! I moaned through clenched teeth.

But Barroso hadn’t finished:

— The school system turned us into paper-pushers, he grumbled at last. So I said to my buddy here (pointing at Calandria): “Buddy, I says, we’re gonna be national employees.” And buddy answered me back: “You’re on, bud.” And after that I said to myself: “Look, bud, if you don’t get into politics, you might as well call’er quits.” Without a second thought I grab buddy here, we show up at the Committee, they give us a pail of paste, and we go out to put up bills.

— Remember, buddy? interrupted the bomba. Remember how we duked it out with the conservative Long-Ears?77

— We were earning merit points, observed the papagayo with severity. Where was I? Oh yeah, so we won the elections. A few days later we went to see the Senator, and I said to him: “Fellow party member, sir, buddy and me have gotta be national employees.” And he said: “Not another word, my fellow party member; as of now, you and the other party member are on for one hundred and ninety pesos a month in Public Works.” We stuck pretty close to the Senator; you might say there was a lotta poster paste between us!

The papagayo said no more. Schultz had been listening without much interest, and now he responded:

— From what I can gather, you want to get off the hook by pleading a brand of fatalism I’m not about to tolerate in this prodigious tenement house. After all, you could have taken up the cobbler’s knife and strap from your old man, now dead and gone.

— But buddy, were you born yesterday? rejoined Barroso. Take up the shoemaker’s trade, when a guy’s studied hydraulic electrolysis?

— And you, added Schultz as he turned to Calandria. You could have easily gone to work up on the scaffolding like your father.

— You got your head screwed on right, buddy? retorted the bomba. Who’s gonna go up on the scaffolding, when he knows Pythagoras’s theorem?

The two of them began shaking each other by the streamers and singing a song punctuated by hiccups of laughter:

At the end of a straight line segment

at that point in particular

construct on said line segment

a perpendicular.78

— Look at your work! Schultz told me again, saddened.

Then, taking up both kites, papagayo and bomba, he disentangled their lines and let them fly once more, paying out all the twine.

— So long, buddy! Barroso shouted from the heights.

— Hey, bud! laughed Calambria as he swerved. Don’t take yourself too seriously!

Still hanging on to the rope and struggling against violent winds, we entered the Sector of the Homoglobes or balloon-men. In that portion of atmosphere, at just about six feet above the ground, floated a multitude of rubber men inflated to bursting point. They blew around in the wind in a grotesque contredanse, heads butting together and bellies bouncing off one another, all the while keeping up their ridiculously grave demeanour, their cold and solemn expressions. Those swollen figures were apparently engaged in monotonous dialogues, for we caught snippets such as: “Yes, doctor” and “But, doctor!” and “Evidently, doctor” and “Likewise, doctor.” Not without difficulty, the astrologer and I were wending our way through that cloud of floating bodies, their rubber feet grazing our heads, when, quite without knowing how, I lost my balance and fell against a soft, spongy mass. Getting back on my feet right away, I realized I’d just run into a partially deflated homoglobe lying on the ground, showing no signs of life. With infinite care, Schultz gathered up that flaccid rubbery casing, methodically found the balloon’s beak, and untied the string strangling it shut. Then, raising the beak to his lips, he painstakingly blew into it. As the homoglobe recovered his air, I noticed he was no different from the others: the same solemn face, the same ceremonious morning coat, the same tubular top hat. Only one thing set him apart: his right hand clutched an enormous blue pencil, his left hand a red one.

As soon as Schultz finished his insufflatory task, the homoglobe, his pompousness restored, clapped an empty gaze on us:

— This is an act of disrespect, he said without a trace of emotion. Do you people know with whom…?

He seemed to remember something, because instead of concluding his sentence, he laughed slightly:

— No, he said. Pardon me! I was forgetting I am no longer a Personage.79

Meanwhile, the figure he cut — the two pencils, in particular — jogged something in my memory:

— Doctor, I said to him. Have we not met before? Your blue pencil brings back a sad feeling.

— It’s quite possible, he replied. Your face may have been among the thousand that filed through that dreary anteroom. Perhaps with this very pencil I wrote down your name and your sentence, along with those of a thousand other wretches.

— And how did you come to be in this place?

— It’s a long story, answered the homoglobe, and I’ll tell it if you wish. But it is not good that you have inflated me again. It is uselessly cruel.

He gathered himself for a moment, as if to organize the voices already surfacing in memory. Then he said:

— This tale might be titled “Invention and Death of a Personage.” I do not know if History, too, has its four seasons. What’s certain is that our country, after having flowered in the springtime of its military heroes and borne fruit in the summer of its civilian founding fathers, today languishes in the imbecilic autumn of its Personages or Poseurs. The Hero was a chieftain, a leader; the Personage is a bureaucrat. Current opinion notwithstanding, my view is that, to form a Personage, an illustrious family name does not suffice. True, the old Oligarchy produces them by the truckload, in order to give at least some “official” life to its otherwise lifeless, dessicated scions (because, if you think about it, the Personage is not a “real entity” but rather an “entity of reason” invented by someone). But what constitutes the essence of the Personage is precisely his lack of essence, an absolute void, an internal desolation enabling him to assume all shapes and imitate all attitudes. A well-concocted Personage can be the Treasury Minister today and Director of Aviation tomorrow, without becoming one thing or the other — neither man nor beast. For, strictly speaking, the Personage is “nothingness” in a plush top hat. I won’t deny that this astonishing condition is often produced congenitally; hence, the born Personage, the direst of its variants. Ordinarily, however, the Personage is constructed on the basis of methodical self-destructions. The Mystic and the Personage are alike in that both destroy what is human in themselves; but where they differ is that the former prodigiously reconstructs himself at the “hearth of divinity,” while the latter does so no less prodigiously at the “hearth of officialdom.” Under the dry shell of the Personage, then, nothing must remain that is alive, sensitive, or moist; only after denying and betraying himself does the Personage achieve the exquisite virtue of denying and betraying everything. Gentlemen, this brief Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene of the Personage may help you understand my drama.

The Personage gave us a sad smile, which then twisted into a sort of prideful arc:

— I come from an illustrious family, he told us. My great-grandfather, Colonel X, was among the 120 lads who rode with General San Martín on his famous cavalry charge at San Lorenzo. Pushing the “Goths”80 back at sabre-point, he had his horse rear up at the very edge of the ravine; and in that instant of precarious balance, his exalted gaze took in, all at once, the waters of the Paraná River, the Spaniards’ ships opening fire, the fields damp with dew, the dust of the combat, the spires of San Lorenzo,81 and the immense blue expanse tinged by the dawn light. Later, he crossed the Andes with the Great Captain, made landfall in Peru with Arenales,82 returned a hero from Ayacucho,83 and died on the battlefield during the civil war.84 Like many of his comrades in glory, his life was like an archer’s bow tensed to the breaking point: for them, the Patria was not a mother or even a bride; she was their newborn daughter, whose childhood would continue beyond their deaths.

”With the same sense of urgency characteristic of the epoch, my grandfather followed in his father’s footsteps and pursued the soldier’s vocation. However, his martial temperament was joined to a saturnine nature which instilled in him a deep attachment to the land, a love of solitude, and a cult of silence. He must have been strangely fascinated by the pampa of the native Ranquel people, for, without allegiance to any political stripe (a rare thing at that time), my grandfather participated only as an expeditionary in the Desert Campaigns.85 Not that he recoiled from the brutal clashes with hostile Indian raiders, but he nonetheless preferred military exploration, looking not with the eyes of a conquistador but those of a lover at the terra incognita as she was unveiled before him; he preferred the encounter with the wilderness, whether it smiled upon him benevolently or gesticulated in anger. In that immensity of clover, grass, reeds, and marshes, my grandfather settled at last and called his ranch La Rosada, “The Rosy One,” a smiling name at odds with the military stiffness of its building and the army-like discipline imposed on his ranch hands, all of whom were gauchos, ex-bandits, or former soldiers being won over by the nascent idyll of Peace.

”When my grandfather died, his nine sons divided up La Rosada. There was certainly enough for everyone in that spread, whose original measure was “the distance a man on horseback can gallop from dawn till dusk”! My father, being the firstborn, kept the farmhouse and out-buildings for himself. He was one of those exceptional men who felt as at home in the wild, bringing down ostriches with boleadoras, as they did attending the Paris Opera. Under his management, La Rosada knew its best days. The Scottish bulls, the Arabian horses, the Spanish grapevines, and the trees he’d brought back from his scientific travels in the north, did not take long to enrich and humanize the land that until then had conserved its formidable telluric savageness. In his creative fervour, my father dreamed of establishing a “patrician order” that might endow the wilderness with human forms and laws, and populate it with fervent multitudes who, by settling in our land, would add a new note to the universal chord. Unfortunately, that happy enterprise was soon aborted. With infinite bitterness my father suddenly saw how the patricians of the incipient order abandoned their family lands and gave themselves over to such dubious interests and pernicious ambitions as seethed in the abstract heart of the City. At the same time, he saw new faces arriving from another world. They turned up on the prairie searching for a way of life to replace the one they’d left behind, far away beyond the sea — a way of life not on offer in the prairie, in its state of abandon and formlessness. All my father’s disappointments finally found expression in a single sentence, one we heard him repeat — ironically, bitterly — many times at the old dinner table at La Rosada: “The era of the patricians is over; now comes the time of the lawyers.” As things turned out, that sentence was to be prophetic for our lives. One unforgettable day, our father rounded up his three adolescent sons in the front room where the old arms of the wars of independence were still hanging. There, he announced that we were going away to school in Buenos Aires. The three of us were dumbstruck, first by surprise, then by panic. Never had it crossed our minds that we might leave our world so full of strength and colour, within whose bounds we were happy. Strapping young lads whose greatest ambition was to raise fine bulls and purebred horses, we felt, moreover, that our teachers at La Rosada had already taught us everything useful we needed know. Recovering from my stupor, and being the eldest son, I ventured a few timid protests, which my father silenced, good and stubborn man that he was. So off we went to Buenos Aires, not without shedding tears over that first rupture: the time of the lawyers was beginning, and that’s what my two brothers became, God only knows how! As for me…

The Personage became silent and withdrawn for a moment, as though fondly remembering his youth.

— I wasn’t a good student, he continued. My baccalaureat and the few subjects in Law I managed to pass (by who knows what miracle) didn’t inspire much hope in the old patrician of La Rosada. On the other hand, the bustle of the city stimulated in me certain literary inclinations, whose first inklings I’d noticed out on the prairie and which now began to take form. I read anything and everything, frequented intellectual circles, expounded upon ideas, and made arguments that attracted attention. But later I noticed that, when it came to putting pen to paper, all the talent I displayed so ardently at tertulias would peter out and vanish, like a ghost refusing incarnation. In irritable discontent, I told myself, as so many others have done, that my sterility might be due to the lack of a “propitious environment.” Determined to find such a milieu in Europe, I wrote to my father asking for his opinion and his consent. That magnanimous man, generous and open to any eventuality, responded laconically with a word or two of encouragement, a bill of exchange, and a fare-thee-well. So it was that a fortnight later I left the harbour of Buenos Aires with the emotion of a second and final rupture: little did I know that twenty-five years would pass before I was to return, having nothing to show for my absence, only to be subjected to a process of abominable alchemy! But I mustn’t get ahead of my story. You gentlemen may have heard stories about early-twentieth-century Paris. It was a marvellous decade for its colour, the free play of its vital energies, its madcap dreams, a sort of chaotic beauty that people thought was the dawn of something but in fact was a nightfall. Thrown into such a world, submerged body and soul in its drunkenness, I soon forgot about everything and gave myself entirely over to that great human comedy, believing I was an actor when I was really only a stunned onlooker. The creative atmosphere one breathed in that unique city, the presence of the period’s great talents, spurred on my artistic bent, which again failed in a hundred sorry skirmishes. But then life was a mighty river sweeping me along, and it consoled me for my failures by insinuating, deceitfully, not the ars longa, vita brevis of the ancients, but the notion of vita longa versus art’s brevity. In my befuddled state, all thought of my country and family faded further and further away. One day a telegram informed me of my father’s death, and I belatedly wept in remembrance. Another telegram detailed the dispositions of his will; I was to inherit the farmhouse and outbuildings of La Rosada, with its half-league of land, as well as the thousand hectares out back. Without budging from Paris, I dealt with an administrator in Buenos Aires; in his cold letters I learned that faceless tenants were working the land of my grandparents.

”Ten years went by. And one day the great sham of my existence suddenly became visible to me. Until then I had believed that, like the men and women around me, I was sharing in the hustle and bustle of life, that we were all riding the same wave. Now, however, it was clear each of them was steering a course and building a destiny, whereas I was like a cork aimlessly adrift. Each had his place in the great “living fresco,” his natural attitude, his necessary landscape, whereas I lurked outside the fresco, tolerated as an innocuous spectator. I remember my frustrated attempts, my futile struggles to enter the tableau of others, until the dreadful realization dawned that I, too, had my place and my landscape, back there, far away; but I had abandoned them, and now lacked the necessary courage and vigour to go back and start afresh. I resigned myself, then, to my uselessness, a cog flown off its gearbox, without purpose. I found out that my two brothers both had families, and both had mortgaged and sold their lands to finance successful election campaigns. I had seen them two or three times when they came to Paris on brief diplomatic missions, or when, as advocates for the interests of English capital, they passed through en route to London; thus I caught an early glimpse of how much moral distance was to separate us later on. To bring to a close these necessary preliminaries to my real story, I’ll say that I lived through the war of 1914 and the postwar reconstruction as an ideal spectator who, though “compassionate,” did not suffer the passion of the drama. Twenty-five years had gone by, and I was nearly fifty years old. It was then that I undertook the return journey — whether out of late-blooming nostalgia, or in hope of a miracle and eventual self-recovery, I still don’t know.

At this point, a bilious laugh rippled over the Personage’s inflated casing, and we had the impression his story was about to get livelier. His tale continued:

— As soon as I got off the boat in Buenos Aires, I went straight to the prairie. I had the mad hope of recovering at a single gallop my lost familiarity with the land, thinking to revive flavours and imaginary wells of freshness lying dormant. But when I got to La Rosada, my heart sank. The latest tenants had left, like so many others, in pursuit of new horizons, and the deserted countryside was dotted with cow skeletons blanching under the sun. Dismounting in front of the house, and not finding the military stockade my grandfather had set up by sticking six cannons upright into the ground, I tethered my horse to an abandoned wagon wheel. Quietly sobbing in anguish, I entered the house at last and wandered through its desolate rooms. Gone were the family weaponry and furniture (they had been put aside for a museum), and the big old house had the sad, cheap feeling of rented things and people. I went out to the park, searched for traces, invoked ghosts, stroked the odd tree, and chewed blades of grass in my desire to reconstitute my childhood — if only for a moment! But sources of freshness and flavours had died, and they refused to come back to life for me. I hastened to leave La Rosada, as one flees from remorse.

”Then I went to visit Uribe the Basque, who was now in possession of my brother Raphael’s land and leasing from me the fields adjacent to his. He welcomed me to his wattle-and-daub house, clean as a whistle and alive with fresh-faced lasses. His sons, halters hidden behind their backs, were moving around inside the corral among a whirlwind of skittish, snorting horses. When they had finally chosen mounts, they approached me, shy and cordial, their stiff handshakes like dagger-thrusts. Then they butchered their best lamb, and the dogs celebrated a festive tug-of-war with the offal. They set the meat to roast, wine flowed, faces lit up and tongues loosened. Later, finding myself ensconced in that patriarchal circle of men and women, their every word bringing alive some colourful being, with the prairie in my eyes and the smell of dripping fat in my nostrils, I told myself that the land, whether it were mine or the Basque’s, was always true to itself, above and beyond all infidelities. In the evening Uribe and I rode over the leased fields. Stroking the stout haunch of his honey-coloured horse, the Basque suddenly announced that his son Tomás was getting married and would soon be setting up house on my land. There was a moment’s silence during which his hard hands rubbed the rawhide strip of his riding whip, once, twice; then he offered to buy my thousand hectares. Devil of a man!

”I won’t recount the details of my move to the city, nor my newcomer’s impressions, nor my glowing fits of nostalgia. I promised you an account of the Invention and Death of the Personage, and by now you must be about to send me to the devil for all my digressions, whose sole purpose is to let you understand how alive I had been before my dreadful transformation. My only additional comment is that I gladly approached the hearth of my brothers, seeking from kith and kin the warmth I was missing.

”Raphael’s home was sumptuous and stiff. I didn’t understand the character of his wife, a sad, insipid lady who noiselessly inhabited their glacial residence, mechanically going through the motions, slowly fading away like a dead star. Raphael’s children, educated by English governesses and Anglo-Saxon schools, had a standardized air about them — neutral, athletic, happy. “A generation quite without grandeur or lyricism,” I told myself, “eager to follow their father along the road of calculation and sensuality, but innocently, somehow untouched by guilt, because they’re unaware even of their self-betrayal.” There was one exception, however: my nephew Germán. From my first visit, it was clear to me that this boy was the only one who sang a different tune from the rest of the ensemble. His energetic face, a certain desperation in his look, and his sullen silences suddenly shattered by utterances crisp as the crack of a whip, allowed me to sense the tension between him and his family, a silent war that had been going on a long time, perhaps since his early childhood. At first, he treated me with the same militant disdain as he did the rest. After all (and one day he said it to my face), for him I was nothing but a deserter who had fled our native land for France, there to live off the sweat of tenants’ labour. I almost laughed at that, calling to mind Uribe the Basque and the thousand hectares. But I held back and expressed instead a sincere mea culpa, which improved my relationship with Germán. One night at the dinner table, Raphael was boasting about how he had decisively intervened in a matter of public business favouring foreign capital and scandalously harming the nation’s interests. Suddenly, we saw Germán throw down his knife and fork: “In this family — he said, shaking like a leaf — there are men of action and men of betrayal.” My brother looked at him coldly: “What do you mean by that?” But Germán had got to his feet and, without another word, was already on his way out of the dining room. “An intellectual!” was Raphael’s comment as he applied himself to his strawberry shortcake. When supper was over, I looked for Germán in his room. “Your father called you an intellectual, I told him. Is there any truth in it?” Furious, he shot back: “That’s slander! I am — or at least I want to be — a writer.” Kiss your money goodbye! I exclaimed to myself inwardly, thinking the poor boy was a second edition of myself. After much persuasion on my part, and hesitation on his, he read aloud several remarkable passages. There were lively portraits, vividly rendered scenes, fresh views of our native landscape, and ideas of astonishing maturity, all expressed in intense waves, as when a river overflows its banks. Not hiding my amazement, I told him: “It all sounds more like singing than writing.” My observation seemed to please him more than any praise: “That’s what it is — he said — a song.” He went on to reveal that his sketches belonged to a future novel, Song in the Blood;86 it was to cover five generations of Argentines, depicted in their lives as men of action, men of betrayal, and men of reparation. Without his spelling it out, I knew Germán was trying to write a story of our family, and I enthusiastically extolled the project. From that moment on, I became his collaborator, made suggestions, brought back memories, initiated him into the true archives of La Rosada. As a failed writer, I drew life for a while from his creative fire, its glow indirectly touching me and warming, as it were, the old bones of illusions grown cold. But it didn’t last long. Germán’s situation in his father’s house became untenable; the roof now weighed too heavily on his shoulders. One Sunday, at midday, the crisis struck. We were in the dining room, engaged in bland conversation. Raphael, as I’d noticed, had lately taken to baiting the “intellectual” and again he managed to bring the conversation round to the sensitive topic, holding forth with belligerent cynicism. At first, Germán remained silent and aloof. But when Raphael made some pointed and satirical allusions to “neo-idealists,” the boy responded with a few verbal barbs. The general conversation quickly turned into an unusually violent spat between the two; what had started as a technical discussion became frought with irony, then biting sarcasm, and finally insults. At a certain moment, Germán glared hard at his father and shouted a terrible epithet, the popular term of abuse for those selling out the nation.87 A deathly hush fell upon the room, Raphael blanched as if he’d been slapped across the face, the other sons clenched their jaws in anger, and even the phantasmal mother stirred for a moment, as though flaring up one last time from the ashes. But my brother recovered his composure and, addressing Germán, pointed at the door: “This house is too small for the two of us.” Germán left the dining room, I followed him to his room, we packed his bags, and I took him to the apartment where I lived with only my memories for company, rather like Lugones’s “Old Bachelor.”88 But my nephew was unhinged by the crisis. For a week I feared for both him and Song in the Blood. Finally I made a heroic decision. Telling myself his only salvation was to escape to other climes, I telegraphed Uribe the Basque to accept his offer to buy my land. Upon receipt of the funds, I bought a passage and took out a letter of credit in Germán’s name. Then one night, ignoring his protests, I put him aboard the Oceanic. Germán sailed away, and my youth left with him — farewells and waving handkerchiefs! Bah! When the ship’s lights had been swallowed by the night and the river, I went back to the city. I had saved the only being in my family who was still alive. Walking along the street, I suddenly laughed out loud, attracting looks from the nocturnal passers-by. A curious idea had occured to me: Uribe the Basque would never know that his big bucks had bought my hectares for a Song…

Sweet bygone memories, lost flavours! The Personage’s chest swelled, and Schultz and I had to hold him down, one on each side, to prevent him flying away on us.

— Needless to say, I was no longer welcome at Raphael’s house. But I still had my brother José Antonio’s home to visit. Let me describe it now in a few words. While economics prevailed at Raphael’s place, political and social ambition found ample accommodation at José Antonio’s. The matron of the house was the proverbial “capable wife,” sharp-faced and calculating, warm or cold as suited her purpose. Consumed by the fever of ambition, she was at once laudable and odious. She had laid out her children’s destinies a priori: from birth, each had been consigned to such-and-such an administrative post and marriage with so-and-so. That lady held in her hands the threads of what-was-to-be, of fortunes, illustrious family names, and testamentary labyrinths; she spun and interwove them wisely, like an inexorable domestic Goddess of Fate. Her home was an incubator of personages whose future held no unknowns, their mother having foreseen every last detail down to their famous dying words. Now, gentlemen, its disconcerting abundance notwithstanding, reality has a certain symmetry; I point this out in advance, lest you hold it against me upon hearing the story of my niece Victoria.

”In that mansion solely inhabited by algebraic destinies, Victoria seemed to be an independent force, a tuft of life disentangled from the maternal distaff: a late sprout from an apparently withered tree… Damn it all! This last bit is from Song in the Blood. Excuse me, gentlemen — a reminiscence. As I was saying, Victoria was to her home what Germán had been to his; and if marriage between blood relatives were not abhorrent to me, I would surely have seen them wed. Fool that I am, I actually imagined such a union, forgetting that no one in José Antonio’s family married otherwise than to the “name” assigned him or her in my sister-in-law’s Book of Life! And the name allotted to Victoria was that of Baron Hartz, a character of Semitic features, gold-filled teeth, oily complexion, and receding hairline, whose fortune was as large as it was mysterious. Not without feeling my blood stir in instinctive rebellion, I watched as he set up camp in their house. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do in the drama (which would probably ensue), short of taking a pair of scissors and cutting the thread of sister-in-law Lachesis, an act I judged to be as impossible as snatching someone’s destiny from the Fate Herself. Moreover, Victoria showed no sign of worry. She had my father’s strong chin, my grandfather’s reserved character, and the dangerous self-confidence typical of our blood-line, for good or ill. One night I discovered her secret. I came upon her in a bar accompanied by a strapping young fellow to whom she breezily introduced me. He was an agronomic engineer with a blond brush-cut, green eyes, and an innocent face reminiscent of those facial types in northern Italy, half German and half Latin. The crazy fellow talked to me all night about mineral fertilizers, artificial insemination in cows, and Shorthorn sperm in vacuum flasks to be delivered to zones where the quality of cattle was poor. Listening to his scientific rave, I wondered what the heck Victoria found seductive in that big squarehead. But when I saw them rowing in El Tigre,89 their oarstrokes in unison, united in song, I realized it was serious and began to worry. Without quite knowing how, I got caught up in their romantic idyll. Some obscure fatality seemed to link me to those two, the only ones left in my lineage who were still wild at heart! In any event, if they were Love, I was the Elegy who by their side was already weeping the death of their romance. Let the children go ahead and spin their hopelessly frail cobweb! Not far off, in the city, a woman with greedy eyes was turning the symbolic distaff!

”These and other metaphors of the same ilk came to me as I watched the two lovers. And I pathetically fondled these figures of speech — sad, lonely old romantic that I was! — not suspecting that circumstances would soon expel me from my comfortable spot in the Greek chorus and throw me as an actor onto centre stage. At last the drama reached its crisis. It was a warm and marvellous evening in October… No, sorry! Damned literature! What I meant was, that evening at José Antonio’s they were to announce Victoria’s engagement to Baron Hartz. Pleading an imaginary indisposition, I excused myself from attending a ceremony which I considered (it could hardly be otherwise) the sacrifice of a white dove on the chill altar of Mammon. That night I didn’t leave my apartment. I sat slumped in my armchair, feeling more than ever the weight of my solitude. Reaching for a bottle of Napoleon cognac to fend off the “gnawing worm of melancholy,” I gave myself over to the saddest thoughts. After the first drink, my cogitations becoming downright woeful, there came a tap-tap at my door. I shivered with dread: might it not be Poe’s raven paying me a visit for another dialogue on Love and Death? But I quickly recovered, telling myself that, much as the raven liked to get involved in the love life of poets, it wasn’t likely to butt into that of an agronomic engineer — a subtle idea, and a felicitous one, soon corroborated by a fresh round of knocking. I flung open the door, and there stood Victoria!

”I could not have been more surprised if the raven itself had come in. Carrying an overnight bag, two hatboxes, and a fur coat, her fugitive air made me distinctly uneasy. She told all, with utter insouciance (she had my father’s strong chin, our family’s dangerous audacity!): fifteen minutes earlier, in the guest-filled salon, she had “done her duty” by telling her progenitors that she alone would be responsible for her future. The Goddess of Fate had fainted! Baron Hartz had smiled elegantly, like a gambler who knows how to lose. Consternation and scandal lay in Victoria’s wake. My first impulse was to phone José Antonio, but Victoria snatched the receiver from my hand. Panic-stricken, I quaffed a second cognac and, under my niece’s benevolent gaze, I improvised a sermon about “social conventions” that rang pathetically hollow. Seeing I was getting nowhere, I begged her to understand “my situation”: not long before, on account of another family madman, I had broken with my brother Raphael. But then I had been guided by “the incorruptible interests of literature,” whereas now… I gave up that tack, too, because Victoria, not hearing a word, had fixed her eyes on me, two calm and confident eyes seemingly awaiting a miracle. Exasperated and at the end of my tether, I burst out: “Crazy, knuckleheaded girl! What have I got to do with love? All I’m left with is cold ashes…” Great God, then the miracle came! As though I’d just invoked an old demon, I felt an invisible presence surround me: the breath of the night, coming in through my windows, revived I don’t know what taste of sweet, bygone springtimes. From their portraits hanging in my room, women both adorable and adored seemed to cry out: “Remember when!” Their calls evoked shades of freshness, resonance, and warmth I’d thought long since faded, alas! Heartstrings I’d given up for dead began to thrum. I closed my eyes, as if blinded by a light. Believing it was a dream, I had a third shot of cognac. But voices and music were saying “Remember!”, weeping “Remember!”, laughing “Remember!” All of a sudden an enormous idea flashed through my brain: I shook my head, as though bedazzled, then laughed in my soul, after knocking back my fourth cognac. “Bring on the agronomist!” I told Victoria as laconically as a general. Calm and smiling, as if it had been written for all eternity in God’s good book, Victoria dialled a telephone number. When the brush-head arrived, I dictated my Agenda to them, confirmed it with one last drink from the bottle of Napoleon, and the two of them had to put me to bed.

”The next morning I went to my notary and signed over the title deed to La Rosada. The civil marriage took place at noon, the nuptial blessing late in the afternoon. That night, having got them aboard their train, I told my niece: “La Rosada is growing old, but she’ll liven up when more children come along and restore the freshness she lost with us.” I turned to the engineer and warned him: “Careful with the mineral fertilizer and the Shorthorn sperm in vacuum flasks!” And to both of them: “I’ll send you the furniture and the military trophies I brought here from La Rosada. I was going to send them to the museum, but things have changed now. It’s good for children to grow up in the shadow of weaponry.” They left, and I was left alone on the platform. I was displeased with myself only because of that last speech I’d foisted upon them, which now struck me as melodramatic.

Again the Personage was quiet for an interval during which he shed the dreamy expression he’d been showing us while recounting the idyll. Then he took up his tale once again:

— The following days were grey and soulless. The wind that had shaken me was a borrowed one; as soon as it stopped blowing, I relapsed into inertia, into solitude compounded, and into that “lucid death” consisting, gentlemen, in knowing oneself to be finished, as one endlessly reviews the text of hours dead and gone. I used to be sober; the rural sobriety of my family was my inheritance. But now I gave in to alcohol and solitary bouts of drinking. Then, sick and tired of seeing my own ghost in each and every one of my reflexions, I started going out at night to the dance halls on Maipú Street, where vacant beings like me, females for rent, and tangos grubby with sadness attempted to construct an impossible architecture of jubilation. There, recalling my glory days in the cabarets parisiens (where I’d rivalled Russian princes with my feats of bottle-brandishing and mirror-smashing), I stirred up a few donnybrooks that soon earned me a certain scandalous notoriety. One afternoon (the day after a brawl landed me in jail), my two brothers paid me a visit. Now, watch carefully, gentlemen! Because right in front of your astonished eyes the Invention of the Personage is about to take place! Far from displaying any ill-feeling toward me, José Antonio and Raphael were suspiciously cordial, behaviour that should have put me on alert. But there I was with an icepack on my head, a bitter taste in my mouth, and troubling memories of the night before. My brothers’ speech was a classic, complete with beginning, middle, and end. The beginning, designed to censure my shameful conduct and assess the dishonour it threw upon our lineage, was a model of tact, seasoned by a pinch of the gay salt of indulgence. The middle, which developed the theme of my natural talents and how they’d been wasted up until now, had the rare virtue of making me blush beneath my bag of ice. The end was as sudden as it was unforeseen: in order to give my pathetic existence a purpose, José Antonio and Raphael offered me, in the name of Minister X, the General Directorate Z, an enviable position for which many men would have sold their soul. I stared at them in terror. What did I know about the workings of Z? But Raphael and José Antonio tried to put me at ease by saying that one’s suitability for the post, according to custom, came with one’s being appointed to it, much like a gift of grace gratis data by the Minister. While telling me this, they were observing me attentively, registering my every move and gesture, as a sculptor studies his clay before giving it form! In the eyes of both, there burned a malignant creative fire! Those two demons talked so long and persuasively that in the end — out of curiosity or desperation? — I accepted, not imagining the future consequences of that singular moment.

”Well, gentlemen, the Personage already brewing inside me made its first appearance a few days later at the General Directorate Z. The Minister himself had deigned to anoint me personally with the oil of official liturgy; that is, with a speech I listened to reverently, for it was a veritable graveyard of clichés. I listened, yes, but without hearing, as I stared in a daze around the room where a multitude of abstract personages were listening as well, or seemed to be. I soon noticed that the personages in the room were arranged according to a rigorously calibrated astronomical regime: around the Minister revolved the greater and lesser planets, each of whom had his retinue of subdued satellites, who in turn dragged in their orbits a host of modest asteroids, grains of stardust in that remarkable Astronomy. Taking a look around me, I was appalled: ah, gentlemen, I too was the centre of a circle of anxious faces who were soon turning to me, vacant satellites attracted to my orbit and exposed to the administrative light no doubt already beaming from me! I shuddered, gentlemen, for I had the impression of attending a ritual without mystery, a ghostly pantomime, a ballet of soundless puppets. That’s when something exploded within me — I’ll call it my First Dionysian Rebellion. Everything human about me suddenly gelled in an urgent desire to let fly, right there and then, a thunderous, formidable guffaw of Homeric proportions. But José Antonio and Raphael were sending studious and worried glances my way. I managed to contain myself, hardening my facial muscles by main force, a physically painful feat I’ll call the First Imprint of the Mask.90

”Gentlemen, a useful bit of advice: never, not even as a lark, try imprinting your face with a mask. The mask ends up taking over! When the Minister finished his speech, all eyes turned to me. It was my turn to make a speech in response! Feeling trapped, I feverishly looked around for some way of escape, by any means possible. But there was no way out; I was already caught in the cogs of the mechanism. Then came my Second Dionysian Rebellion: “I’ll send them a Panic message,” I said to myself, “a gigantic Evohé! — a spine-tingling invitation to Springtime that’ll set their dead hearts a-throb beneath their fancy waistcoats!” But, alas! Raphael and José Antonio were at my side, urging me to answer. And I spoke at last. I spoke of the General Directorate Z and the fundamental problems facing it, my speech abounding in classical and modern quotations, as well as intrinsically unintelligible paradoxes and metaphors obscure to everyone, including me. The more I talked, the more I enjoyed the sound of my own voice. This came as quite a surprise. And it prompted a flash of revelation, the crystal-clear resolution of the enigma of my old tendencies: I was a born orator!

”Thanks to this late realization, and to my initial noisy triumph, the Personage of recently moulded clay gained a firmer footing. The following afternoon, my soul heavy with dark premonitions, I took up my duties as Director General. After negotiating my way past two porters who jockeyed for the signal honour of taking my top hat, I was led to my Office. The furniture in the room, beaten down by ten generations of personages, received me with the hostile air of old dogs growling at an unfamiliar face. Waiting for me there was the Secretary! Gentlemen, the memory of that sinister little man still gives me chills. Dessicated as a clod of hardened earth, he had lightless eyes in a perfectly expressionless face, and wore a dreary suit over a funereal shirt. Nevertheless, a certain subtle irony leaked from him, a fluid slyness, a demonic malevolence; it was like an invisible sweat oozing from his pores, so offensively mysterious that several times a brutal urge came over me to smash open the inscrutable carapace of his face with a hammer, as children do with their toys, just to find out what was inside. When I asked him about my duties, the wretch led me to my desk, showed me a notepad, and put two pencils in my hand, one red and the other blue. Then he had me look through a peephole into the antechamber of my office, now chock full of men and women waiting. In his sour, monotonous voice, like that of an animal trained to talk, the Secretary recited the drill for me: every one of those men and women was a “postulant” bearing a letter. My job was to receive the letter, read it, then immediately pass it on to him. He would then indicate whether I was to note the postulant’s name under the column of the Chosen in blue pencil, or under Reprobates in red. The abominable instructions made me a puppet to be manipulated by the Secretary’s nicotine-yellowed fingers; and having heard them, I glared so hard at him that the man, incredible as it may seem, actually smiled or grimaced (I was never sure which), and then muttered something about “political convenience” and “the electoral imperative.” I bowed my head. Then the tragic procession began.

“I don’t know if you have ever been in one those antechambers that some waggish politician once dubbed “cooling tanks.” Once inside, the postulant with any optimism soon cuts the throat of his illusions; the irate postulant metamorphoses into a lamb; the loquacious postulant loses the very rudiments of language. My cooling tank comprised three interconnected rooms corresponding to three different degrees of “initiation” through which the catechumen had to pass before being admitted into the Presence. In the first room, the postulant would destroy his will, confound her memory, and abandon his intelligence, gradually renouncing human nature until he had descended into the animal realm. In the second room, he adopted elements of animal behaviour, pacing back and forth like a lion, roaring like a bull, yawning like a dog, licking her paws like a cat, or scratching himself like a chimp. Then, in the third room, the postulant descended dreamily into the vegetal realm. Therein he was to experience only vague vegetative sensations, perhaps those of hunger and thirst, of fingernails growing, the circulation of lymphatic fluids. By the time he finally entered my sancta sanctorum, the postulant had been reduced to the mineral realm. A few still managed, by dint of desperate exertions, to wave their letter in the air, as did the warrior from Marathon with his laurel bough. Others, as if they’d just woken up, actually asked me who they were and what they had come there for. In short, gentlemen, throughout my long days I was the focal point of that doleful procession: names written in red pencil, names written in blue! After the last postulant, I would flee the office, the building, the downtown area. Evening found me wandering residential streets in search of some sign of life, a child, a tree, or a just a dog to pet. The next day I would be back in my role as puppet: names in red, names in blue!

”To tell the truth, my Personage mask, on the outside, had consolidated quite nicely. No need for a mirror, for I could feel it on my face: absolutely rigid facial muscles, hardened mouth, a jaw of stone. Only my eyes continued publicly to betray hints of mercy, anguish, or grief. I finally decided to hide them behind dark glasses, under the pretext of an ocular ailment. All in all, however, while the external mask was indeed hardening, the other mask, the one trying to master the muscles of my soul, was failing to gel. Among those condemned by my red pen there abounded seekers of justice, invalids, the wretched of the earth. Some of their claims were so just, my heart would suddenly rebel against the Secretary, my pent-up anger flaring. But that man, surely my demon, would quickly douse the flames of my incipient revolts. What’s more, he seemed to take special pleasure in putting his finger on one more sensitive fibre within me and then killing it with the caustic venom of his Digests, Rules and Regulations, and Customs.

”One afternoon the unexpected happened. For several days I’d noticed an old man and a young woman waiting in the hall at my office door, motionless and seemingly disoriented. The old man caught my attention; he bore an extraordinary resemblance to a ranch hand who had taught me as a kid how to lasso sheep in the corral at La Rosada. He wasn’t the same man, certainly, but he was a close enough likeness to bring the image alive for me. Guessing that his letter of “recommendation” was too insignificant to gain him access even to the first room, I had the old man shown into my office, flagrantly flouting all protocol. Timorously, he handed me his letter: former labourer at a slaughterhouse gone bankrupt; in need of work; large family to support. I re-read the letter and looked at him. He said not a word. All he did was smile beneath his grey mustache as he gave me a long look, a large tear caught in the corner of each eye. At his side, meanwhile, the young woman was silently smiling as well. Suddenly, I felt an internal warmth melting my mask. Then I turned to the Secretary and ordered: “A job as labourer, right now.” With no display of any emotion, the Secretary picked up a Digest, opened it, and read the following article: “The General Directorate shall not admit labourers aged forty years or more.” He closed the Digest, and I saw his eyes gleam in triumph. But that set off my Third Dionysian Rebellion, the last of them. I climbed up on my desk, jumped heavily to the floor, flapped my arms like wings, and let go with an ear-splitting, a divine, a morning-glorious “cock-a-doodle-doo!” Then, before the old man’s astonished eyes and the girl’s pallid face, I turned to the Secretary and said: “If that job order isn’t ready in one minute, I’ll go to the antechambers and do the rooster again there.” He flew from the room as though chased by the devil, and returned immediately, still green with panic, waving a job order aloft like a white flag. After handing it to the old man, I gently pushed him and the girl out the door. Then I collapsed on a sofa, still trembling, my forehead clammy, my heart a bewitched echo-chamber: the look I threw at the Secretary was meant to pierce him like the sword of Saint George.

”My victory so excited me that I mysteriously disappeared from the General Directorate. Three days later they found me in a tavern on the Paseo Colón, happily drunk, playing truco with three sailors I’d just met. They were with the Genoveva, a barge that plied the Upper Paraná River. Theoretically, I had joined the the barge’s crew twenty-four hours earlier. Since then, my card-playing companions had been filling me with visions of tobacco-hued women beneath flowering orange trees, in a land of paradisal bliss, where red and blue pencils were unheard of. It was all a dream! Once I was sobered up, it was back to work at the General Directorate. Adiós, tobacco-hued women! Adiós, Genoveva! Back to work at the General Directorate: names in red pencil! Back to work: names in blue pencil!…

At this point the Personage fell to rambling, humming an improvised “Ditty of the Pencils” over and over again — “like a broken record,” as Schultz later declared; “monotonous as an old prison song,” I thought at the time. With a few friendly slaps, we brought him round, and he concluded his tale thus:

— Well, gentlemen, I later called that episode the Swan Song of My Sensibility. From then on, I no longer lived in human time but in Personage Time, a nebulous chronology I’d be hard put to account for here. Let me just recall that I gradually surrendered to the mechanism of the Directorate; its fascinating regularity subjugated me little by little until I was definitively hypnotized. If at first I read in the face of each postulant a vital problem, an unfolding destiny, a suffering microcosm, I was later able to jettison all sentimental ballast, to the point where every postulant was reduced to a mere face. Later, no longer interested even in faces, I saw each postulant as an arm outstretched and bearing a letter. Finally, I didn’t even see the arm but the letter alone, independent of its phantasmagorical messenger. In a parallel process, the upper echelons to whom I was beholden gradually granted me their trust, and I was allowed to do without the Secretary — free at last! — and to administer on my own the blue pencil’s benevolence and the red pencil’s despair.

“Then, and only then — alas! — did I notice the incredible metamorphosis the Secretary was undergoing. The man of iron was being humanized in inverse proportion as I was being dehumanized! As my Personage carapace hardened, his shell was cracking up and falling to pieces, revealing a raw flesh that bled at the slightest touch. While my clothes were becoming darker and darker, his were actually taking on tones suggestive of springtime. By virtue of a monstrous inversion, we arrived at an absurd juncture: he was rebelling against me for the sake of mercy, and I was bringing him to heel with his old weapons! And to complete this situational reversal, the man had his own crisis. One day, as though unable to hold it in any longer, he put his hands on my shoulders and, teary-eyed, accused himself of having methodically destroyed all that was human in me. And so saying, he displayed a contrition painful enough to melt a heart of stone. I listened to him as if to the ravings of a madman, then turned my back and walked away, leaving him to sob in silence with his arms around a typewriter.

”Now, gentlemen, you may think the Invention of the Personage would have been complete by now. Not so, unfortunately; one final turn of the screw was yet to come. Despite my transformation, I still retained a certain animal dynamism that made me hold my head high, walk tall, and speak in full voice — motes of imperfection which certainly did not escape the expert eye of my inventors. Jose Antonio and Raphael warned me about it one day: we were in a country where no man was allowed to exercise government who did not have one foot already in the grave. Their advice, therefore, was that I should simulate an attack of gout when walking, an asthma attack when breathing, and a worrisome hoarseness of voice when talking. Once again I obeyed, and with astounding results: my visible decrepitude and my oratorical triumphs allowed me, step by step, to scale the Olympian heights of officialdom. Henceforth, the Personage was a masterpiece. One time I tried smiling in front of the mirror; like Lautréamont’s hero,91 I understood it was impossible, even if I were to take a penknife to my face and carve it. My inner dessication was so complete that, when Victoria later came from La Rosada to show me her firstborn son, I didn’t even raise my eyes from the Record of Parliamentary Proceedings. A copy of Germán’s book arrived one day: Song in the Blood had just been published to great acclaim. I fell asleep on the second page. Finally, in an attempt at physical exertion, I discovered the gout and asthma had become real and taken me in their grip.

”I’ve forgotten the rest; everything gets hazy and confused when I try to recall the nebulous chronology of my Personage Time — everything, that is, except the circumstances of my final demise. Pay attention now, gentlemen, because the Death of the Personage is drawing nigh! One night, while I was waiting at home for some guests who were going with me to an official ceremony, I fell sound asleep in an armchair. I was dressed in tails and, inadvertently, I’d pulled my top hat down over my face before nodding off; and so, from the vantage point of the doorway, all that could be seen were my shoulders and hat. When the Secretary came in, heading up the delegation, he assumed I was asleep. Creeping up to me on tiptoe, he touched my shoulder. Then, before his startled eyes, tuxedo and top hat collapsed into the armchair — empty, completely empty! At the end of the long process of obliteration, the Personage had crossed the frontier between being and non-being, disappearing into the void. Slowly picking up my clothes, the Secretary turned to the delegation and announced in a cold voice: “The Personage has died.” On his way out the door, he paused, angrily pushed away a few wayward tears, and repeated: “The Personage has died.”

With these words, the Personage fell into a silence that seemed final, as though he considered his tale concluded.

— And then? I asked, not hiding from him my sympathy.

— Then, he answered, I felt my pneuma coming down into this circle of hell and heading irresistibly for the Sector of the Personages. Here I am. How long it’s been, I don’t know. Lately, an accidental leak gave me hope for a second death. Ah, gentlemen, I give you no thanks for inflating me a third time!

He stood staring at us, his eyes sad and reproachful. Visibly hesitant, Schultz consulted me with a look. And sensing in my return look some strange form of pity, he performed an act that would later earn him a good deal of praise: he untied the string around the homoglobe’s nozzle and let the air escape from his balloon. As the Personage deflated once and for all, a beatific smile stole across his face.

— Let his divine pneuma have its freedom back! grumbled Schultz. He bored us long enough with his shaggy-dog story, going over the top, in my opinion, with his “freshnesses” and “flavours.” But he defended his soul, and didn’t go down without a fight. A real son of a gun! Why did he have to go all the way back to his great-grandfather?

The astrologer dropped the empty husk of the Personage. Then he invited me to follow him through the cloud of homoglobes who, at the mercy of the wind’s caprices, pitched back and forth in the air, tussled with one another, or angrily surged against us. It was an annoying passage. In a few places we had to punch our way through, our fists hitting the spongy bellies, top-hatted heads, or tuxedoed rear-ends of the Personages. And, though we made it out of the homoglobe sector at last, it was only to fall into the no less hostile sector of the homoplumes.

The new loafers were gliding around at various levels in this other block of atmosphere. Essentially, they were schematic sketches: a human head attached to a large undulating feather — variously of an ostrich, rooster, partridge, swan, or peacock. They had long beards hanging down and away from their necks like pseudopods, amid which some of the wretches displayed the organ of their perdition. Pushed this way and that by gusts of wind, the homoplumes began darting around us, sinuous and slippery as fish in an aquarium. Their quick movements and the tickle of their feathers brushing our faces prevented our recognizing them, until finally one of them, more insistent or less cautious, landed on me, brought his lips close to my ear, and shouted mockingly:

— Hey, hoser, whatcha up to? Who’s the other suit?

His words were immediately followed by a wheezing guffaw. When he tried to take flight again, I grabbed hold of his rippling tail and, with Schultz’s help, pulled down the homoplume, who by this time was regaling us with the most colourful expletives known to the lexicon of Villa Crespo. Having wrestled him to the ground, we could see his face, the most bonafide malevo’s mug ever seen either side of the Maldonado: a dull, narrow forehead, eyes glittering beneath the single, solid line of his eyebrows, lips pursed as though around a bag of insults, but an indecisive nose and a jaw without audacity. A little tan-coloured derby was stuffed over his swinish thatch of hair, though without containing its unruly flow, and a white kerchief was classically knotted around his neck at the point where it joined his plume, which in his case was a rooster feather, grey with white stripes. His pseudopods were clutching a faded, patched-up bandoneón, survivor of a hundred milongas that had ended in fisticuffs.

— It’s the mack from Monte Egmont and Olaya! I exclaimed in recognition.

— Hosers! yelled the pimp, still struggling to get free. Two against one! If ya wanna go for it, come on over to Rancagua Park and have it out mano a mano, mack-style.

— Stop playing the taita! I told him. Remember when the sergeant from Precinct 21 sawed off your heels and gave you a brush cut?

— That wanker! the mack snarled like a dog at the memory.

— What about the time the gallego from the dairy gave you a black eye?

— Yeah, but with a sucker punch!

— And that’s not all, I insisted. What did you do to Catita? La Chacharola, poor old woman, wanders around looking for you, dying to wring your neck with her cold witch’s fingers. She’s a blister of hatred on the skin of the barrio. Where are her four fine linen sheets from Italy? What did you do with the sock full of money?

The malevo’s mug momentarily clouded over, whether from anger or remorse, I never found out.

— Catita? he sighed after a pause. Ah, one night, under the lamp-post, a tango…

— That’s it! I said. You’ve spent your life trying to be a theme for a tango. While your poor mother supported you, washing clothes day in day out, you — oh, infinite idler! — never got out of the famous sack. Except to go drink mate on the patio and maul the keys of your bandoneón, a martyred virgin. From whose offended breast, by the way, you never managed to squeeze more than a couple of bars from the waltz “El aeroplano.”92

— More than that! the mack thundered wrathfully. And how ’bout the two bars from “Don Esteban”?93

— Fine, I conceded grudgingly. Then there’s that way you’d shuffle along the sunny side of the street, dragging your feet, all slow and stiff lest you bust some spring in your precious anatomy — oh, mack! — all the way down to the corner of Monte Egmont and Olaya, where you’d loiter for so long, you looked like a tree taking root, a sorry-looking tree, leafless and fruitless, every now and then deigning to flower in a meagre whistle.

— Whadda lotta malarkey! the mack interrupted me. Cut it out with the fancy jivin’.

— Or, I continued implacably, how about your grey nights in Don Nicola’s cantina (his famous one-hundred-percent plonk!), where you used to spend your idle hours (and such were all your hours) conniving with other loutish birds of a feather, or spinning lies about your martial feats, or boring them with false yarns about equally false amorous conquests.

— False? protested the mack in a clumsy boast.

I grabbed him by the kerchief and shook him a few times.

— But one thing’s for sure, I said. Arriving at the milonga, you’d hit the dance floor and your incommensurable inertia would vanish in a thousand cuts and figure-eights and zigzags of the tango. What Dionysian force possessed you then? What Panic wind, what Orphic dementia was it — oh, mack! — that could so shake you up and sublimate your ignoble clay, your indolent architecture?

— Lemme go! roared the mack, finding himself tugged by the kerchief.

— What gust of earthy…?

— Lemme go, ya pair o’ swells! You want trouble, come on over to Rancagua Park. I’ll take you both on with one hand tied behind my back!

Just then a blast of wind pulled us backward. Suddenly free, the mack let the same gust carry him off; quickly corkscrewing upward, he gained altitude and made the atmosphere ring with his threats, protests, and challenges. The astrologer and I got up off the ground, took hold of the forgotten rope, and set off walking again. The mack’s vociferations, however, must have roused the whole barrio, because the homoplumes, patently aggressive, started swooping down, coiling their prehensile tails around us, shouting confused diatribes into our ears.

— Place Pigalle,94 whispered a guitarist, coming face to face with the astrologer. You were a young guy who liked to play the intellectual, like the man says, who…

— Silence! Schultz enjoined him. What kind of history did you have, guitar-picker! From the Mercado de Abasto all the way to El Garrón cabaret in Paris!95

— Now I’m playing on the radio, announced the guitarist, deeply sad. Place Pigalle in Paree!… Yeah, you used to talk egghead with those three bearded Germans. Chemists or alkeymists, I think they were called. Looking to make gold, or something like that…

— You patent oaf! cried Schultz, stung by those words. Didn’t you used to walk up and down the rue Fontaine, in dinner jacket and slippers, horking nasty spitballs over the lapdogs of retired whores?

— Dissolvons, putrifions, sublimons! parodied the guitarist in execrable French.

The astrologer Schultz turned every colour in the rainbow:

— And what was your ridiculous ambition? he urgently asked the guitarist, as though wishing to change the subject.

— To lay a bouquet of camellias on the tomb of Marguerite Gauthier.96

— Not that one! said Schultz. I mean the other one. The unmentionable one…

— I…

— Your supreme ambition, the astrologer mercilessly reminded him, was to have yourself photographed sitting in a luxurious vestibule on an armchair covered with a white throw.

The guitarist turned his eyes away and pretended not to hear:

— I’m playin’ for radio now, he mused at last in a voice thick with melancholy.

He prudently moved off, away from us, and Schultz’s face then expressed great relief, as if he had just warded off the risk of an awkward revelation. I looked at him, curious, and was wondering what veil over the astrologer’s secret life had narrowly escaped being drawn aside, when a homoplume came fluttering down and recited these words into my ear:

– “In their palatial mansions…”

I recognized the declamatory voice of Prince Charming. But the man was much changed since the last time we’d seen him at Ciro’s restaurant. His erstwhile filthy and dishevelled locks were now impeccably trimmed and well-nigh rhetorically coiffed. It was clear that facial massages and creams had worked wonders on his formerly pimply, sebaceous, pitted face. As always, he was wearing a high wing-collar (though now, marvellously, it was smudged by neither fingerprints nor flyspecks) and a honey-toned cravatte, in the centre of which gleamed a pearl, which may not may not have been oriental but came pretty darn close. In his loud-yellow — gloved hands, the sensitive malevo cradled and strummed a brass harp festooned in gaudy ribbons, whose dull strings of grocer’s twine thudded uselessly. I was glad to see him, for his presence in this circle of hell brought back fond memories of the world we’d imprudently left behind. I ventured to touch his long ostrich plume and said to him:

— Hail, poet! How go those demands for social justice?

Prince Charming recoiled from my hand, as if it were leprous.

— Have some respect! he deigned to warn me. Now I recite on the radio.

— I know! said I in a pitiful voice. That’s why the Muses of the Arrabal are in mourning.

Prince Charming gave me a disdainful smile, as if I were talking about Ancient History.

— Nowadays, he said, my fee is…

— Pesos? I laughed. Look who’s talking about money now! The man who once lashed bourgeois buttocks with the strings of his fulminating lyre; he who troubled the unjust sleep of magnates with naught but the clean blow of a stanza; he who…

— I wasn’t listened to! complained Prince Charming. No one’s a prophet in his own land. For all I care, the tyrants can thrive and multiply. Now I’ve got myself a seat at the banquet of life!

I looked at him with moist eyes:

— At the banquet of life! I exclaimed then. And for what? So sensible folks can laugh in your face, mocking your bad taste, so typically nouveau-riche, and your thuggish elegance and luxury. Those over-the-top shirts, those declamatory ties, those suits of impossible architecture, those agressive shoes you now show off at broadcasting sessions — a scourge for the eyes, an outrage against the light. And what to say about your neuralgia-coloured automobile and its calfskin upholstery? Or your apartment stuffed with useless furniture and knick-knacks, congested with mirrors, where a person can’t even turn around?

— Jealousy will get you nowhere! said Prince Charming sententiously.

— No, Prince, no! I said affectionately. Ever since you left, the soul has gone out of Ciro’s. The barrio moans, the old women whisper, and everyone says in one voice…

— What can they say? crowed the Prince.

— That some day your luck will turn. Once from the Maldonado, always from the Maldonado.

Prince Charming squirmed, tried out a disdainful chortle, cast about for a counter-argument. But he was cut off by three buzzing homoplumes who dove down on us in formation.

— Five times eight is forty! said the three voices in chorus. The pampa has the ombú!

— When? I asked them, recognizing without much enthusiasm the three members of The Bohemians.

— From 6 to 6:15 p.m. LX3, Radio Threnody.

They flew off as swiftly as they had come. And then at my back I heard the melancholy strains of a vihuela. I turned on my heels and faced a homoplume in a gaucho’s hat and chinstrap, whom I recognized as the payador Tissone. Full of a certain bovine melancholy, he contemplated me for a moment. Then, plucking at his guitar, he declared:

— I’m the hindmost harmony of a race soon to disappear…

— Where? I asked him, disheartened.

— LY2, Radio Home-on-the-Range, he answered. Every night from 8 to 8:15.

The wind whisked him away, guitar and all. At this point, Prince Charming, the Mack, the guitarist of Montmartre, the trio of Bohemians, and other homoplumes of similar ilk all came crowding back, apparently with some aggression in mind, judging by their insolent voices and belligerent attitudes. Fortunately, the sound of a xylophone reduced them to silence. Next we heard the nasal voice of a radio announcer:

— ZZ1, Radio Inferno. A very pleasant evening to you all, dear listeners. And it will be pleasant indeed, I assure you, if you have all heeded the wise counsel of prudence and shaved using the unbeatable Styx-brand razor-blade, the only one that’s as as soft on your chin as the caress of a sylph. Before we begin tonight’s program, allow me a brief philosophical digression, which by activating the not always well-exercised cells in your grey matter, may at this hour perturb the respectable working of your no less respectable small intestine. But fear not, dear listeners, for in the case of an internal revolution you will always have on hand the infallible Marathon, the world’s fastest and gentlest laxative.

Another stroke of the xylophone whetted our sense of expectation, and the announcer lifted his voice again:

— Rare is the mortal, he began, who does not revere Radio Broadcasting as among the scientific miracles of today, the one that has most exalted the faith of true believers in a future full of admirable artifacts which, furnishing their houses and unfurnishing their souls, will surely give access to a realm of headache-free bliss. Do you acknowledge this, dear listeners? Celebrate it, then, with a glass of famous Alembic-brand cognac, a masterpiece of contemporary alchemy! But if science has wrought a great miracle in Radio, no less miraculous is the feat that Radio itself has produced in this century, by populating the once silent ether with the crippled voices, whole-cloth grunts, musical belches, confused oratory, and artistic flatulence of a multitude whose lyrical talents had never crossed — alas! — the narrow limits of the family, and which today, thanks to H.M. the Microphone, surge forth from an age-old and unjust anonymity. And so in today’s world, there isn’t a dime-store guitar-picker, neighbourhood soprano, milk-bar playwright, gazebo poet, amateur actor, or home-body declaimer who doesn’t abandon the shameful shovel, the degrading hammer, the servile needle-and-thread, the vulgar scaffolding, in order to rush off to the broadcasting sessions, anxious to let their voices chime into the great universal chord. Our program will faithfully transmit their innovative harmonies. Listen attentively, dear listeners. And just remember: brands of toilet soap may abound, but none equals the exquisite Munda-totum, capable of giving your skin a second, eternal, adolescence.

The announcer stopped talking. Three strokes on the xylophone pierced the silence. And right away, as if cued by those notes, the homoplumes struck up the most abominable concert ever heard by human ears: tango orchestras bleating, strident riffs of jazz, crooners bawling, flowery cabaret songs, radio-drama clichés such as “Kill her!” and “Ah, I’m dying!”, newscasters foaming at the mouth, play-by-play commentary of soccer games and boxing matches, commercials insistent as horseflies and mindless as an idiot’s refrain. All these voices and many more erupted at once and mingled in such a dreadful din that Schultz and I took off at a desperate run, knocking aside homoplumes as they strummed or shouted like maniacs.

Thus, at full speed, we left that sector. Still running, we crossed the zone of silent homofolias; for a few minutes they rained down on us like dead leaves torn from trees by autumn winds. The urgent desire to reach open space and our furious speed in flight prevented me from getting a sense of the homofolias’ character. However, the lethargy of those infernal entities, their indolent gliding fall, and above all their absolute muteness led me to guess that they were of that well-known species of criollo — “those born tired.”

We stopped at the edge of an area in the middle of which was a merry-go-round (or calesita, as we call it in Argentina). Fitted with something like sails, the carousel span either slowly or vertiginously, according to the fluctuations of the wind. As it turned, it produced a kind of hurdy-gurdy music, its rhythm frantically speeding up or slowing to a crawl in tandem with the speed of rotation. Listening to the nasal strains, I was quite surprised to recognize the Gregorian Dies Irae.97 A concourse of grave men — their solemnity striking me as rather at odds with the infantile pastime — had filled the merry-go-round and were rotating with it. In groups of two or three, they rode ugly animals made of painted wood; among them, I picked out the Dragon of the Apocalypse, the Seven-Headed Beast, the Two-Horned Beast, the Great Whore, and the kings of Gog and Magog.98 These solemn men, castigating the flanks of their monstrous mounts with their brass spurs, did so with a will that seemed quite meritorious, I must say; and so did the way they eagerly strove to grasp a glittering ring nailed to a stick, which a demonic operator disguised as an angel was offering and denying to their outstretched hands.99 I was taking a good look at the calesita, still not guessing what meaning it carried in the hell of Sloth, when one of the solemn men, on the point of seizing the ring, lost his balance and fell off the revolving machine.100 Schultz and I ran over, helped him up to his feet, and with the best intentions began brushing the sand off his clothes. But, with dignity, the man broke free of our hands:

— Noli me tangere,101 he warned in an utterly passionless voice.

I felt confused. But the astrologer Schultz laughed benevolently:

— Of course! he said. This is the Grand Orisonist!

Difficult indeed to depict the rage that possessed the man when he heard those words. He stammered for a moment, spit out the sand still in his mouth, and shouted:

— The Vice-Pope is a clown! To Gehenna with him! If he’s blasphemed once, he’s done it a thousand times!

— No doubt about it, Schultz reaffirmed. We have before us the Grand Orisonist.

Then the astrologer turned and spoke to me in particular:

— You should know that a few years ago a new heresy began to spread its deleterious miasma in the very Catholic city of Buenos Aires. A handful of men, prey to a fanaticism not entirely devoid of grace, fell into the pious folly of clinging tooth-and-nail to prayer (which is praiseworthy) and refusing all forms of action to the point of becoming terrestrially immobile. This condition of stasis, however, did not stop them from consuming tea and biscuits in alarming quantities, or prodigiously climbing the ranks in their public service careers, or satirizing those foolish mortals who squandered their time on useless philosophical speculation, vain artistic efforts, and prosaic attempts to reorganize the earthly city.102 And this came to pass in the year of the Great Flood, when the last white herons appeared in the south.

— I deny the bit about the biscuits! interrupted the grave man at this point. The Vice-Pope’s pointed ears are clearly sticking out from behind this malignant tale!

Paying him no attention, Schultz continued:

— That’s how things stood when there appeared a man in whom the prudence of the serpent was wed to the candour of the dove. He saw that doctrinal folly as a final offshoot of the old and apparently exhausted heresy known as Quietism.103 Then he gave it the name of Orisonism, and those who yielded to such a dangerous tendency came be known as Orisonists. That strange apostle (who surely came straight out of the desert, having subsisted there on locusts and wild honey) claimed for himself the title of Vice-Pope — “the Vice” for short, obviously.104

When he heard that fearful name, the Grand Orisonist was bodily shaken from head to toe:

— Harrow him! he roared. To the outer darkness with him! Locusts and wild honey, my foot! The waiters at the Adam Bar might tell a different story!

— Once the heresy had been denounced and his nom de guerre adopted, continued Schultz, the Vice didn’t hesitate to go into battle to succour the Holy Church. He donned the helmet of patience, the breastplate of fervour, the backplate of good sense, the paunch-piece of benignancy, the gauntlets of justice, the knee-pieces of daydream, the sollerets of soldierly love. Then he called for the shield of the philosophia perennis, the mace of Sir Syllogism, and the pike of Lady Scholastic.105 Thus armed to the teeth, the Vice’s lights shone so brightly that his astounded cardinals were emboldened to compare him to the star Aldebaran on a moonless night.

At this point, the Grand Orisonist laughed as broadly as his gravity permitted:

— His cardinals! he scoffed. A crew of late-night revellers that drank like Knights Templar! Frivolity on legs, they were regularly hot on the pink heels of the pagan whore!

— A rock of inebriety in a sea of sobriety, Schultz reminded him judiciously.

And resuming the thread of his story, the astrologer turned once again to me:

— Before I go on, I must ask for your undivided attention. For the first time ever you are hearing about a mystery that some day will be divulged at large: it will be confirmed that Buenos Aires, having been the theatre of a battle of such great love, is the mystical centre of the continent. But I return to my tale. Having left the Vice armed like Saint George before the dragon, a description of the dragon’s nature is now in order, so as to understand something of the battle very soon to be joined between the dragon and the Vice. Orisonism, undifferentiated in its early hours, soon developed two distinct facets, namely, Aquilism and Vermism. The aquiline type of Orisonist was characterized by an alarming disposition; lord of the heights, pedestrian on the Way of Light and, of course, a citizen of the Celestial Jerusalem, he had all the surliness, solitary pride, and quick irritability of the eagle who leaves his mountain peaks behind. Whenever he descended to this planet, he would display the amazement of an angel, as if suddenly finding himself in a strange world. There were times when his disciples, weeping with piety, had to remind him what a streetcar was for, or how to hold a fork. Be that as it may, once down on earth, the Orisonist of the aquiline type clapped irate eyes on humanity, seeking strips of Promethean liver on which to exercise the heavenly wrath of his beak. And to this line of Orisonism — concluded Schultz — belongs, or once belonged, the man we have before us.

Seeing himself so clearly denounced, the Grand Orisonist, his face having passed through every colour of indignation, scorn, and shame, erupted in a few plaintive flatus vocis:

— Excommunicants! he wailed. Lord Saint Joseph is going to hear all about this! Your depiction is as false as the Vice’s Persian carpets.

— There you have a sample of Orisonism’s dual aspect, at once quietist and malevolent, Schultz told me. This gentleman hasn’t hesitated to demand help from the Celestial Court for such vulgar needs as renting a place to live or getting an irksome neighbour evicted. What’s more, he has just evidenced his taste for blasphemy by casting doubt on the sworn, irrefutable, and incontrovertible authenticity of the vice-papal rugs.

— What about his opaline glassware? ventured the grave man, one eye weeping, the other laughing.

— Silence! ordered Schultz. Now let’s have a look at the nature of Vermism. The vermiform Orisonist’s shoes, clothes, hairstyle, and diet were so oppressively humble that no one in his presence could avoid feeling vain and empty — in a word, like worldly garbage. If asked his opinion on any question at all, whether human or divine, the Orisonist would lower his eyes innocently and respond: “What do I know, lowly earthbound worm that I am?” And if someone asked him to make the slightest effort, the man would smile de profundis and answer: “Who am I, despicable grovelling worm, to participate in so admirable a project?” And those who heard him would feel an irresistible desire either to kneel before the worm or squash him in the classical manner, or just wish that sparrows from heaven would gobble him up at once. But the worm, entrenched in his position, felt steadfastly certain among the proud of spirit with their stuck-up attitude. He knew very well it was a sinful feeling, since no one should feel too sure beforehand about one’s own last judgment. And yet, though struggling with himself, the vermiform Orisonist fell a thousand and one times into that dangerous form of complacency. Especially on those evenings in this great Babylon that is Buenos Aires, when he would stroll down Florida Street, thronged with heathens and fornicators. He could barely restrain his mirth at the vision of them all marching straight to hell, while he, poor earthbound worm, could already feel his flesh caressed by the white raiment that will clothe the godly on the Day of Wrath.

Choked up by his own eloquence, the astrologer Schultz paused a moment. Then he turned to ask the Grand Orisonist:

— Do you have any objections to this depiction?

— Several, answered the Grand Orisonist. The Lord has said: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”106 Judgment Day will come soon enough, when all intentions will be weighed.

— Another Orisonist leitmotif! said Schultz to me, as though to a witness. This gentleman has harped so abusively on the Last Judgment that he put off everything until that day, even such a trivial matter as finding a shirt button in the dresser.

— What about the battle? I demanded. Let’s get to the battle! As you may have guessed, I’m not planning to grow roots in this Inferno.

— The battle, answered Schultz, took place in the Park of the Benedictines in Belgrano, a site both contenders agreed was ideal for the manoeuvres of a jousting match. Armoured and mounted on stormy steeds, the Grand Orisonist and the Vice, at a blast from the oliphant, charged one another at half-rein, lances at the ready. The spectators saw them take off like a shot from a crossbow and doubted not that both paladins were contemplating the bloodthirsty design of sending the other ad Patres. The collision occurred in front of the Benedictines’ three ombú trees. Both were struck in the cuirasse, both lost their stirrups, not to say their cool, and both came down with such a din of banging metal as to drown out God’s own thunderbolt. Both lay stunned on the ground for the time necessary to travel two leagues on horseback. The first to recover was our Vice-Pope. Unsheathing his brand, its pommel encrusted with the finest relics (including a tooth of Saint Stanislaus), he flew at his rival with the intention of laying open his entrails. Seeing him in a dead faint, however, and the Vice not being a man to attack a defenceless enemy, he waited for the Grand Orisonist to come around. Which would have been on Judgment Day after sundown, had the Vice not sent his squire to fetch a litre of Mendoza wine (vintage 1923), with which the Vice doused the face of the sleeping knight, not without first having knocked back at least half the bottle himself. As soon as the Grand Orisonist was up again, they resumed the fight on foot, using swords. The two chieftains, in all the vigour of their respective ages, then exchanged such violent blows that their fractured suits of armour went flying off in pieces, with the result that all the rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and lapis lazuli with which their arms were exquisitely adorned — in a manner some observers qualified as baroque — were scattered like seed over the ground. Meanwhile, the Grand Orisonist’s hosts and the Vice’s cardinals clashed in the most splendid rumble ever to be witnessed in those days. And they say the cardinals performed there such feats, and so many, that Theology and History, both in attendance, exchanged a look of surprise, as though wondering if they weren’t witnessing a revival of the times of the Archbishop Turpin.107

Whether it was because he felt flattered by the heroic mode the storyteller had cast him in, or for some other reason, the fact was that the Grand Orisonist stopped glowering and condescended to stretch his lips in a gesture that could pass for a smile:

— If the Vice’s madness were not already a proven fact, he said in the voice of a man without rancour, this carnivalesque tale would clearly clinch it.

— My tale is history, responded Schultz, even if it’s tricked out in a sailor suit.

— How did the battle end? I inquired.

— How do you think? Schultz answered me. The Orisonist hosts ended up melting like frost in sunshine. Some of them, touched by grace, converted to the correct doctrine; others shed their harshness and angelic airs when they crossed the threshold of Holy Matrimony.

— And the Vice?

Here the astrologer wrapped himself in solemnity:

— His merit was great, no doubt. For an angel snatched him from life and placed him in the southern sky in the form of a constellation called Del Vice; its stars, alpha, beta, and gamma, replicate the glorious wounds he sustained in battle.

An uncontainable guffaw burst out of the Grand Orisonist:

— The Vice? he laughed. A theologian whose genius never set sail if it wasn’t in an ocean of beer! If the booths at the Jousten Bar could talk!

— So what? retorted Schultz. After battle, didn’t he have the right to assuage his thirst with the hydromels of Quilmes and Río Segundo?108 Certainly, being a metaphysician, the Vice was not a man to deny the claims of thirst. Because thirst, though an ontological privation, is the potential force of being; as such, it can pass from the condition of potentiality to actuality through being-in-act. And anyway, what quantities of wisdom did he not lavish when he had a half-litre of suds before him?

— Sure, admitted the Grand Orisonist. For example, when he used to identify a person by asking what the individual would be if he or she was a toilet article, an element, a food, or a piece of furniture.

— Great God! shot back the astrologer, stung by the irony. Are we living among Quakers? Is the mind not allowed to frolic for even a moment’s rest, after labouring deep in abstract thought?

But the Grand Orisonist was no longer listening. In a sudden panic, he consulted his watch (a venerable eighteenth-century Swiss artifact), looked nervously over at the merry-go-round, and with nary a word of farewell ran off toward the artifact. We watched as he climbed back aboard with a touching vehemence.

When we turned our backs on the Orisonists, a new expression of concern on Schultz’s face caused me some alarm.

— There’s still more to see in this circle, he declared at last. But I’ll spare you the rest, since getting out of here will be quite tricky, especially for you.

— For me? What have I got to do with this circle of hell?

— It won’t do to forget about the Potentials, Schultz answered me enigmatically.

I followed him, feeling both angry and afraid. Given the tyranny of the rope, by now making my fingers cramp up, and especially the interminably howling winds, I was beginning to hate the fifth circle and its conceited creator. So I was greatly relieved when, after a short walk, I saw, looming in the light or fog that languished in the last corner of this part of hell, not only the wall but also the exit gate, generously open and seeming to invite the easiest of escapes. In my satisfaction, I laughed inwardly at the astrologer, fancying now that he’d purposely spun fears and worries in this tangled web of incident for the purpose of catching my interest or jolting me, according to the case. Distracted as I was by these speculations, while Schultz was lost in his own thoughts, we approached once again the race-course of the wind, which as I said earlier ran very close to the wall. We crossed it in a single hop, for the waxing drumbeat of heels on the ground warned us of the proximity of the wind that held sway in that final 90-degree sector of the circle. Without looking back, we made for the open gate, Schultz now very grave, and I more confident than ever. But in front of the doorway, and blocking access to it, a crowd of human quasi-figures suddenly came into view.

I say quasi-figures, because their contours were sparsely sketched in colourless, translucent material, like virgin celluloid. Thanks to their extreme lightness, the quasi-figures maintained a fluctuating equilibrium in the wind: they bobbed about in all directions but didn’t fall; anchored to a thick, round, leaden base, they were similar to those small, lightweight rag dolls children play with. Curious and smiling, I stopped before the battalion of toys guarding the portal. No doubt they were the Potentials mentioned by the astrologer. Seeing them now, I thought it was clear sailing ahead and imagined how easy it was going to be to get through a thicket of celluloid floppy-dolls. “No doubt about it — I said to myself — Schultz is a flake.” But when I got up close to the quasi-men and recognized their sparsely sketched faces or the simulacra of their jerky voices already boldly cursing me, I simultaneously felt a chill run down my spine and my face flush hot. Clairvoyant reader, rare is the man who, safe in the intimacy of his soul, has not invented for himself wild destinies, impossible adventures, outrageous poses, and absurd personifications. Even under torture, he would not dare confess to these fantasies forged in the inviolable workshop of daydream. Well now, in the celluloid homunculi now blocking my way, I was seeing, patently incarnate, the craziest dreams ever woven on the secret looms of my imagination. Now materially concrete, they looked like extravagant foetuses, plastic abominations, the contrivances of some demon. And as I identified them one by one, I felt a cold sweat of shame bathing me, as if I were being stripped naked in the street before a thousand mocking eyes.

Schultz was the first to confront the line of defence. Clenching his teeth, he barged his way through the celluloid homunculi fairly easily, though not completely unscathed. Once on the other side, he called over a few words of encouragement:

— Don’t be afraid of them! They’re the Potentials.

I closed my eyes and charged in turn, putting heart and soul into it. The homunculi bobbed and swayed, but on recovering their balance they pushed me back with mechanical violence, and I suddenly found myself sitting ignominiously on the ground. The astrologer was shouting and urging me on:

— Not like that! You have to look straight at them!

Armed with this piece of belated advice, I got myself up and charged again, but this time with less brutality and keeping my wits about me. At the first row of floppy-dolls, one put his gigantic thorax in my way, protesting in a piteous tone characteristic — I later realized — of all Potentials:

— Stop shoving! he whined. We’re not in the ring anymore!

I looked straight at him, just as Schultz had told me to do. Recognizing him with a start, my teeth began to chatter. He was sort of a gorilla — muscles bulging out all over the place — and his lantern jaw, crushed nose, and cauliflower ears suggested the idea of a pugilist pummelled in a hundred combats.

— I woulda bin the young boxer Edison Anabaruse,109 the Wild Panther of Villa Crespo, the pugilist continued whining. Gimme that hunnerd grand in prize money I woulda won in Madison Square Gardens in New York when I beat, or at least woulda beat, Jack Dempsey in the second round in one whale of a match!

— Easy, now, easy does it! I said, petrified.

But Edison Anabaruse wasn’t calming down:

— Five-hunnerd thousand spectators in the stadium! he moaned plaintively. The crowd went wild when I landed him one smack on the jaw and sent Jack flyin’ through the ropes to ringside. The Yanks shoutin’ like crazy; the glare of spotlights in my charcoal-blackened eyes — and the referee forgot to count!… But I didn’t lose my cool. I remembered Firpo.110 And when Jack climbed back in the ring, completely groggy…

— Sure, sure, I uttered, swallowing hard. Just a case of delirium.

— Delirium? he whined. I want my hunnerd grand and my world-champeen’s belt!

Sweating like a pig, I fled from the insistent Anabaruse. I staggered past two or three figures who were sobbing their names at me, and finally came upon a big, husky fellow. When he felt me run into him, he hit the roof:

— Hey! he growled at me. Don’t be fallin’ on top of me like that, like a chickenhawk swoopin’ for eggs. Nobody shoves Don Brandán Esoseyúa around!

Wide baggy trousers, accordion boots, broad-brimmed hat turned up at the front, silver-handled riding whip, wide belt, and a silver buckle packing more ounces of metal than a magnate, the homunculus’s get-up suggested a rancher from the south. And once I’d identified him, I stammered, crimson with shame:

— Señor Don Brandán…

— So you recognize me, he said, at once ironic and sorrowful. The pampa is still unpopulated. Where are the ideal settlements, the wonderful ranches I founded or might’ve founded in the south, distributing my land amongst settlers who worked like angels and proliferated like beasts, while neither function kept them so busy that they didn’t have time to read a little Virgil and meditate on Aristotle’s Politics?

— A mad fantasy inspired by patriotic intentions, I excused myself, my voice faltering.

— The road to hell is paved with good intentions, retorted Don Brandán. But I saw or might’ve seen the prairie covered with towns purling like wheat fields in the wind.

At that point, a bereaved though authoritarian voice was heard:

— Who speaks of towns? Have you forgotten that Bruno de San Yasea lives on?

I moved closer to the man who had so proclaimed his name, and beheld the most curious sight: an old man of flowing beard, Mosaic horns on his brow, and vestments at once civil, military, and priestly. Recognizing him, I trembled like a leaf:

— No! I implored him. Not you! It would be too ridiculous!

— Ridiculous? enunciated the apostle, elegiac. I, Bruno de San Yasea, in this the twentieth century, assumed, or might have assumed, the government of the Republic; and for forty years I ruled their destinies with one hand of iron and the other hand lily-soft. Thanks to me, the migrant workers from Tucumán and the Chaco, the wretched who harvest the sugar plantations, the damned of the quebracho plantations, established themselves, or would have, in a land that until then had been their stepmother. They set up, or would have, impeccable families; and the sons of their sons bless me today, or would do so, in folksy Castilian Spanish. You think this ridiculous? I am the one who organized bright and shiny corporations for the ranchers of the south, the farmers of the central region, the wine growers of Cuyo, and the tobacco, mate, and cotton farmers in the tropical north. I instituted their jobs in regal eight-line stanzas, I myself wrote their amazing codes of law, I designed their badges and emblems, determined their festivals, wrote their allusive songs and legislated their liturgical dance forms. And you find this ridiculous? On hill and dale, in villages and burghs, I tempered and harmonized the social classes as if they were strings on a lute, so that together and without discord they might raise the unitarian chord of life. And for you this is too ridiculous?111

— No, no, poor ghost, I answered. But one’s creations ad intra…

San Yasea interrupted me with a sad gesture:

— I haven’t yet got to the sublime part, he said. I got all of the nation’s inhabitants to recover, through happiness and well-being, the lost notion of their dignity. But I didn’t achieve this by sweet-talking them with the false illusion of a Terrestrial Paradise. Instead, I gave them the necessary otius, the opportunity to rediscover within themselves the image of the Creator. And so it was that, once I’d got, or would’ve got, the land of Argentina to be a “great earthly province,” I managed at the same time to turn it into a “great heavenly province.” Then it was seen how sixty million souls undertook the delectable road of metaphysics and progressed through every stage of contemplation!…

— Enough! I implored, overwhelmed.

— And it was seen how people deserted the city and, like the anchorites of Egyptian Thebes, built their solitary retreats in the wilderness of Santiago del Estero, the puna in Atacama, or the desert in San Luis. Great God, the cathedrals sprouted up like grass!

— Be quiet! I insisted. Not another word!

— Shall I ever forget the day I died? added Bruno de San Yasea in a fanatical voice. Millions of faces were gathered round my catafalque, sobbing…

I ran him over, made him spin like a weathervane, and fled in desperation. Now a foppish-looking homunculus tried to talk to me:

— I am Urbano de Sasaney, doctor in Eros…

But I knocked him over in passing — hapless celluloid puppet! — and continued punching and head-butting my way through those loathsome entities. I was already taking heart, convinced that no force could stop me now, when suddenly my legs went weak: the sweet, ascetic figure of a monk was fixing a lachrymose gaze upon me. I tried not to look at his face, emaciated by fasts and mortifications; I wanted to sink into the earth like a worm. But — alas! — I knew very well there was no escape from the impending converstion with Fra Darius Anenae (OSB).112

— Father! I implored him. Allow me to appeal to your immense charity and ask you to spare me this embarrassment…

Not even hearing me, Fra Darius began to speak, tearful and exalted:

— In the province of Corrientes, on the shores of the mysterious Lake Iberá, there is an inhospitable region seemingly abandoned by the hand of God. Do you remember the spot?

— Father, Father! I begged him again.

— It was in that zone where, called by the Lord to the hard road of penitence, I built or might have built my hermitage, a pigsty of mud and straw, practically sinking into the bog. The implacable sun, the noxious vapours of the lagoon, and the insects punished all flesh; so I, Fra Darius Anenae (OSB), dedicated or would have dedicated my days and my nights to cleaning the sores of lepers, burying the dead, drying the tears of widows, and feeding orphaned children. Ah! All that under a sky weighing down upon men and beasts like a terrible, wrathful gaze. One night…

— Father! I interrupted, sweating with anguish. Why reveal the wanderings of an imagination more poetic than contrite?

Fra Darius showed no sign of having heard me:

— That night I was visiting a shack in the area. I’d swept the earthen floor, and was now watching a pot of stew cooking over a cow-flap fire. Inside the darkened cabin various sounds could be heard: the dying man’s hoarse gasps, a woman’s voice wailing in delirium, the irrepressible sobbing of old women, the innocent laughter of children playing in the corners. But worst of all was the stench emanating from the running pustules, the caked and cracked scabs, the fetid breath, the rags damp with saliva and sweat. And I, Fra Darius, inhaled that bitter aroma of penitence. Stirring my pot, I persisted in a prayer, ongoing by then for years, which in my view would soon force open the sluicegates of heaven. Suddenly I saw the whole cabin being filled with a very soft light; and in the air I caught whiffs of a Sabaean perfume, as if invisible numina had begun to swing fragrant thuribles. Great God! At the same time I saw how the dying rose to their feet, how the women exulted, and how the children became sore afraid. All eyes were upon me, and the voices cried out: “Father Darius! Father Darius!” I was disoriented for a moment, put my hand to my brow. And, Great God! When I drew my hand away and saw how it glowed, I realized the light and the scent were coming from my body: I was the beacon emitting that light, the thurible of that perfume.

His mounting exultation multiplied my shame:

— Lunatic, lunatic! I shouted at him. I was reading the Flos Sanctorum at the time…113

But Fra Darius would not be quiet:

— I fled the cabin! And through the wilderness I ran, the night sky above unfurling its great corymb of stars. An infinite elation coursed through my blood. Miracle! I, Fra Darius, had just performed a miracle! I ran, I flew over the wilderness. A miracle! All avenues of heaven opened before me now, and I heard angelic voices calling from on high: “Darius! It’s our brother Darius!”

— Lunatic! I shouted again.

— All of a sudden, he said, the night was rent by laughter, an immense, diabolical, terrible guffaw. I stopped short, petrified. The euphoria fell away from my soul like a dirty garment. I felt something within me was collapsing, clamorously, catastrophically, and I sensed it was the ridiculous, haughty, despicable cathedral of my pride. Then I flew to the fen and plunged my eyes, nose, mouth, and ears into the foul mire, not without first begging the mire to forgive me the insult. And then…

I listened no more. Putting my index fingers over my ears, I turned my back on Brother Darius and charged against the last Potentials, who gave way like a field of wheat. When I raised my head, the astrologer Schultz and I were passing through the open portal.

X

Later, going over in memory my entire journey through Schultz’s Helicoid, I told myself no other incident had so vexed me as the battle with the Potentials, not even my subsequent encounter with Samuel Tesler, in the Hell of Pride, when I had to solve the fiendishly tricky riddle of his Chinese kimono. It’s quite logical, then, that when we left the fifth spiral of the Helicoid a sort of rancorous humiliation came over me, which translated into thoughts not at all benevolent about the astrologer Schultz, then into a boundless anger against all those wits who, displaying an arrogance both absurd and malicious, had ever dared to cobble together a literary Inferno. Poking their noses into other people’s lives, washing their dirty laundry in public, conducting a moral autopsy on their neighbours and making them sweat in violent infernal sports: all these seemed to me exercises which, contravening the sweet laws of mercy, betrayed a limitless wickedness. “To be sure,” I reflected, “when faced with the human disfigurations stemming from the first injustice, man ought to respond only with compassion or laughter: compassion, in the literal sense that we should suffer with the creatures resembling us in form and destiny; or laughter, provided that it be another image of compassion. By putting on a false halo, brandishing feeble brassy thunderbolts, and parodying God’s handling of the scales of justice, one risks falling into sacrilege and getting jeered at by the peanut gallery.” Moreover, I was worried about how menacing our journey was becoming as we went deeper and deeper into the Helicoid. Each new infernal circle held more numerous difficulties, becoming less disciplined, more excessively unruly and argumentative. I wondered if all those entities convoked by the astrologer might not end up staging a revolt and scaring the living daylights out of us.

Fortunately, the sixth spiral quite calmed me down, for it amounted only to a simple panoramic vision. True, my ears still ring with the disagreeable thud of oars knocking the skulls of those who dared raise their heads. But, for the rest, we crossed the melancholy water without incident, notwithstanding “the voice that let itself be heard between two muddy slurps.” Schultz and I were passing through a gallery, he in silence and I deep in bitter rumination, when suddenly, just as we rounded a bend, the sixth circle hove into view. The passage to the Hell of Envy was blocked neither by door nor wall nor hieroglyph nor guardian, perhaps in order to indicate how easily that passion can slip into one’s soul; or maybe (and most likely) as a result of Schultz’s innate aversion to symmetry and reiteration. The whole infernal area seemed to suggest a contrast between sky and earth, between organization and chaos. Above, in the darkness of a very good imitation of night, celestial spheres were spinning on their axes as they orbited around green, blue, and pink suns. But they were racing and whirling with the artificial speed of a Planetarium, each of them producing as it rotated its own musical buzz, which joined the tones of the other spheres in a furious chord that sounded like a swarm of irritated wasps. Below, completely covering the ground, there extended a marshy lagoon similar to those I’d seen in the prairies of the south, between Segurola and the sea, where I had often gone hunting otters and fishing for sharp-toothed dientudos. It was a patchwork of clearings of open water, here shimmering mirror-like, there ferruginous with algae, thickets of reeds, and islands of lilypads. The navigable surface of the marsh was being plied by flat-bottomed boats, whose crews seemed busy with some task I couldn’t make out right away.

Only when Schultz led me down to a wooden wharf did I catch a glimpse of what was going on. The light of the rotating spheres, waxing and waning as in the lunar cycle, alternately revealed and hid fragments of the lake’s quite agitated world. Then I saw the entire lagoon was a seething hatchery of men and women: they swam in the muddy water like otters, their noses cutting the surface of the water at the vertices of triangular wakes flairing out behind them. They were groaning with dissatifaction or cavorting in amphibious somersaults, revealing flashes of buttocks, thighs, and breasts, all a-glint with slime. At the same time the job of the crews manning the boats became clear to me: as soon as a head popped up over the water’s surface, whether inadvertently or deliberately, the nearest boat shot over like an arrow, and the crew brought their oars down on the rebellious head with a thud of broken bone, making it disappear beneath the surface. “Keep your head down!” was no doubt the watchword in that hell.

As I was stringing together these observations, the astrologer Schultz had been exchanging a series of shouts and signs with the two crewmen of a boat moored not far from the shore. Schultz, evidently, was commanding or beckoning them over to the wharf we were standing on. But the boatmen showed no sign of obeying. Seeing this, the astrologer started to insult them violently, unleashing a string of esoteric epithets that concluded with the wingèd and very musical putifilios.114 That word must have had some magical meaning, for when the oarsmen heard it, they overcame their natural resistance and headed our way. Once the boat was tied up at the wharf, one of the men rudely demanded:

— So what’s eating you?

— Nothing, answered Schultz. We want to cross the lagoon.

The two boatmen guffawed sarcastically, as if they found the astrologer’s request hilariously outrageous. The one in the stern held a long pole, the boat’s means of locomation; the one in the bow raised a dripping oar whose sole purpose, as we already know, was to bonk rebellious craniums. Both of them, clad only in loincloths, were unspeakably thin; their liverish faces were drawn, their foreheads bitter, their eyes searing within dark hollows dug out by resentment.

— Cross the lagoon! said the man with the oar, still snickering, as though answering a child who had just asked for the moon.

— Sure, added the man with the pole. And Daddy’s gonna bring you home a nice pony, too.

— Listen, you sons of a beehive! thundered Schultz. Do you know who you’re talking to? Has egalitarian pride so blinded you that you can’t even recognize the Neogogue?

Although the man with the pole kept on laughing, the one with the oar seemed to waver for a moment. He turned to the astrologer and pointed at the planetarium:

— Are you trying to tell me you hear the music of the spheres?

— Every last note of it, answered Schultz.

The man with the pole started to bite his nails furiously.

— He’s a second-hand Scipio,115 he warned his companion. If I were you, I’d knock him arse first into the lagoon.

Paying no attention to the man with the pole, Schultz tried to win over the one with the oar:

— So what? he said. Buenos Aires and the entire nation are under the sign of Libra. Here, every intellectual audacity is possible and desirable, even if this filthy pigsty seems to demonstrate the opposite.

— A megalomaniac! insisted the one with the pole. If I was you, I’d knock him arse over teakettle into the lilypads.

But the man with the oar, who no doubt had his responsibilities, adopted a prudent tone with Schultz:

— Look, around here you can’t just assume a highfalutin’ name and expect to bully your way across the lagoon. There’s lotsa guys showed up here claiming to be Tom, Dick, or Harry, with more moxie ’n you can shake a stick at, tryin’ to sneak in and see our sensational show for free. The ladies swimmin’ around in this marsh are wearin’ swimsuits not meant for pryin’ eyes — on account of the synthetic design, you understand. After all, this ain’t no fancy nightclub; it’s an Inferno with all the trappings. Some credential, sir, some sign: that’s all we’re askin’ for.

Schultz was not a man to turn a deaf ear to the voice of reason, when reason was speaking with courtesy. His response to the man with the oar was a paragon of urbanity and concision:

— I could be recognized as a scion of the Sun and the Moon, he said, were it not that my excessive modesty prevents me from wearing on my brow the horns of the inititate. The Prince of Oriental Efflorescence would bear me out if I were to say that I’ve eaten the purple mushroom, tamed the tiger-woman and the dragon-man, that I’ve mounted the red-crested stork and performed the dance of the yellow stork, that I know the garden of Leang, the turquoise pool, the ten islands, and the three promontories. But my true credential is otherwise: the twenty-eight signs of Apis the Ox, tatooed on this body that must one day return to dust.

Without another word, the astrologer began to unbutton his vest and shirt. And he would have stripped down to his underwear if the man with the oar, his mistrust now vanquished, had not, with almost adulatory solicitude, invited us to embark. So it was that Schultz and I hopped aboard, almost capsizing the craft with the weight of our mortal flesh. As soon as we had recovered our balance, the man in the stern gave a forceful shove with his pole and sent the boat gliding over the lagoon, while the man in the bow, his oar held high, scanned the environs in search of uppity heads. The infernal boat cut swiftly through the water, propelled by the energetic thrusts of the man in the stern who, without taking his burning eyes off us for an instant, performed wonders with his bamboo pole in his quite evident desire to get the crossing over with as quickly as possible and be rid of us. Not wanting to look at his hatchet face, his rheum-encrusted eyelids, his belligerent mien, I looked curiously around at the surrounding area. The water’s surface was a-boil with naked humans, of whom I glimpsed only surly fragments, smartly dodging our bow. For the second time the Helicoid was offering me the sight of humanity in the nude; and yet, this nudity did not have the perturbed and confused air I’d seen in the naked bodies of the second infernal residence, but rather a certain zoological candour, a certain innocent brutality that was expressed in the heavy euphoria of their cavorting and games. Clearly, the lagoon, for them, was the best possible world! Another aspect of the marsh came into view when the boat passed among the islets. There, among the black-green reeds, lay equally naked bodies, above water level or half-sunk in the mire of the shoreline. They sucked on the bombillas of their mates, tended their little barbecues, or dozed away in long batrachian copulations; elemental conversations, guitars of mud, earthen bandoneones, the buzz and croak of swamp creatures were all weaving a bestial concert, much like the soundscape I used to hear back in my childhood Maipú — what chthonic dread was it that had me sleepless and sobbing in the dead of night? what immense postdiluvian desolation? I still don’t know. The degradation of those people then became even more loathsome to me; the way they were vegetating in the lagoon, deaf and blind to the call from above, made me want to lie down in the bottom of the boat just to escape the sight of them, but my impulse was stayed by the sting of the poleman’s eyes on the back of my neck. Fortunately, it wasn’t long until we left the islets and emerged again in open water. Now we were crossing paths with other boats, their crews grunting in the grim pursuit of heads to clobber. Although no head had yet come within reach of the oar, it was beyond doubt that the lagoon abounded in rebels. I was just about to give up hope of seeing one, when the water to starboard started churning and the effervescence drew our gaze. A head emerged from the black liquid; dripping-wet, it shouted at us:

— Dwarves-from-around-here, beware the plain!

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the man in the bow brought his oar whistling down onto the talking head, which ducked back under the surface. Gaseous bubbles surfaced from the depths, and the man with the pole either laughed or croaked, I couldn’t tell which. But the head re-emerged spiritedly, this time beyond our reach. The head spit out a great mouthful of black water, shook its wet hair in the air, and rubbed its eyes with a pair of mittens dripping slime:

— Beware the plain! insisted the head. The plain is the egalitarian horizontal, the line that abhors holy unevenness and differences of level, tries to bring everything down, draw everything to itself, and convert it all to its terrible plane surface. The plain is resentment; it must be overcome. Dwarves-from-around-here, hear me and put aside your malice! The vertical is not disdain for the plain: it is the plain itself getting to its feet.

The aquatic orator flailed his arms to stay afloat and avoid the manoeuvres of the man with the pole, who, sweating like a poisonous fruit, was trying his utmost to get closer to him.

— Woe to him who heeds the drowsy voice of the plain! continued the orator. His destiny will be shameful mediocrity, shameful conformity, then idiotic complacency in shameful mediocrity, and finally a prideful resentment for all that tends toward the heights. Because the horizontal, too, has its pride: the demonic pride of the lowly. “This is an insult,” said the mouse when he regarded the magnitude of the elephant. Thus speaks a dwarf-from-around-here! I prefer the megalomania of the frog who tried to equal the ox by swelling up till he exploded. And it isn’t the frog’s explosion that plunges me into a metaphysical ecstasy; the act of blowing himself up seems to me a lack of moderation on the frog’s part, and an affront against the innocence of the ox. But there’s a certain heroic grandeur in the envious gesture of the frog, a tension toward greatness which, though ridiculous, deserves the praise of the Muses. A dwarf-from-around-here would demand that the ox shrink to the size of the frog. That’s the spirit of the plain, the spite of the horizontal!

Carried away by his eloquence, the orator had again come within striking range.

— How’s this for some vertical! cried the man in the bow, with a downward swing of his oar.

He missed his mark, for the orator, anticipating the blow, had ducked underwater and was now talking to us from a prudent distance:

— So? he asked. Are we to admit that a frog in a fit of sublimity, or a bit of froggish sublimate, should triumph before the bulge-eyed gaze of the ox? Must we admit that, before the conceited sufficiency of a mouse, an elephant should flatten itself into an elephant compress?116

At this point, I noticed, the two crewmen suddenly renounced pursuit and exchanged an intense, panic-stricken glance. The infernal craft shot frantically across the water toward the shore where we were to disembark. But the orator swam after us.

— No, a thousand times no! he said in response to the questions he’d just posed. We’ll make the frog and the mouse assume verticality without self-destruction. A vertical frog, who knows itself to be both frog and vertical; a vertical mouse, who knows itself to be both mouse and vertical. So declares the Contour of Life!117 Thus spoke the great Caesar and his Pontifex Maximus!

His final words came now only as a distant whisper. The orator had given up following us, but I could still hear him:

— Dwarves-from-around-here! Do ye wish to become giants-from-over-there?

Then, nothing. Our swiftly fleeing boat had just touched the far shore. The astrologer and I disembarked.

XI

I disembarked, alas, only to discover immediately that our excursion over the lagoon had been but a poetic interlude in the Schultzian symphony or, better put, a diversionary scene like the ones you often see at the theatre, mounted on the proscenium in front of the drawn curtain, while behind it the stagehands are preparing the main stage for the drama. No sooner were we out of the boat than Schultz started lecturing me on the topic of Wrath; his speech boded no good, and my previous experiences justified any amount of wariness:

— Sad is the destiny of corporal creatures! lamented the astrologer. They are limited to local movement, displacing themselves to the right or left, up or down, forward or backward: in sum, six rectilinear movements, condemning them to inevitable collisions and making them liable to react with anger.118 Circular motion is reserved for purely spiritual creatures; rotating around their centres, they can recognize and communicate with one another without violence. Man is situated between corporal and spiritual entities, being a hybrid freak whose invention Jehovah was later to rue, whether in a fit of anger or pity or remorse, we still don’t know. Possessing both a body and a soul, man fluctuates between the rectilinear motion of his body and the circular motion of his spirit. If body and soul are in harmony, there is no conflict between the two types of motion, but rather a state of peace in which both combine to produce motion of a third kind, undulatory or sinuous. Participating at once in local and circular movement, wave motion is most appropriate for human creatures, since it corresponds to their mixed nature and prevents them colliding (the curve being the line of detour and non-resistance). The first Adam in Paradise no doubt moved thus, as though dancing; and I believe the art of the dance to be a reminiscence of that paradisal motion.

— So what’s the point of this dissertation? I asked in displeasure.

— The point will be crystal clear, Schultz told me, when you see how today’s Adams move.

We followed the curved hallway that surely led to the seventh Inferno, and before long we heard muffled explosions, their sound apparently arising from below. The detonations shook the ground we walked upon, cracked the side walls, and dislodged chunks of masonry from the ceiling. Then, associating recollections from literature with Schultz’s recent dissertation, I understood the curve was taking us into the infernal circle of Wrath. But I had no time to dwell on my fears, because we were already coming out in front of a vast boxing ring, lit from above by spotlights whose glare blinded me. When I could see clearly again, the entire ring came into view; a group of characters was stationed at intervals throughout its area. At the back, in the right and left corners, were two pulpits or rostrums; a lookout holding a megaphone was posted on each of them. Between one pulpit and the other, against the wall, loomed the circular door of a gigantic boiler that put me in mind of the engine-room of a battleship.

No sooner had I concluded my inspection than the lookout on the left, who must have noticed us, raised the megaphone to his lips and shouted in alarm:

— Two fops in sight! Have an eye, you guys in the ring!

— Ahoy, mates! exclaimed the other lookout. Gunners to your stations!

Greatly astonished, I recognized the voice of Franky Amundsen, especially in that shout straight out of pirate novels. Turning back to the first lookout, I also recognized Del Solar; he was lowering the megaphone so he could take a puff on his mile-long, glass cigarette holder. The characters in the ring suddenly sprang into action, strategically aligning themselves like soccer players on the pitch. In the front line, I saw the Carter from the Hayloft, the malevo Di Pasquo, the taita Flores, and the pesado Rivera. At right mid-ring, the Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law were already assaulting us with dirty looks, while on the left La Chacharola was brandishing her terrible broomstick. Juancho and Yuyo had climbed onto the pulpit covers and were belligerently surveying the scene.

— A cardboard Dante and a vaudeville Virgil! Franky Amundsen shouted again. Don’t let them through, mates!

— La putta de tua mamma! La Chacharola shouted at us, hurling her broomstick in our direction.

The tough guys in the front line were now bobbing and feinting, jabbing at the air with knife-thrusts and punches.

— Leave ’em to me! thundered the Carter. I’ll show those fops!

— Sock ’em in the eye! Juancho shouted down at him.

— Stuck-up twits! spat the taita Flores. Come on over, if you’ve got the balls!

— They ain’t guys from the barrio! cried Yuyo, egging him on. Plough him one in the gut!

The Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law clenched their fists.

— Poking their noses into other people’s business, clucked Matilde. And they call that literature?

— They can tell that to my tea-kettle! scolded Dolores, patting her derrière.

The pesado Rivera took off a shoe:

— Gentlemen, he said, don’t waste ammunition on seagulls. Leave them to me!

— Not like that! protested Di Pasquo, the malevo. It’s gotta be a clean fist fight!

Having become quite familiar with Schultz’s technique, I was sure the circular door of the boiler would be the portal to the sector of the irascibles; to get there we were going to have to cross the boxing ring and somehow find our way past all those menacing lunatics. How to accomplish this miracle? I was at a loss until the astrologer spoke to them insidiously:

— Wimps! he said. You’re not up to fighting mano a mano. That’s why you have to gang up!

When the Carter heard this, he turned every hue imaginable:

— You lie, if you’re talkin’ about me! he howled right away. There’s three slaughtermen in Liniers can tell you whether I fight mano a mano!

— Bah! Schultz shot back. According to the taita Flores, who’s right here with us, it was only one slaughterman you fought. He says the fellow gave you a nice shiner.

— You said that? the Carter roared at the taita. I had a sneakin’ suspicion you were goin’ around trashin’ my name.

And without another word he felled Flores with an epic punch.

— Careful, you guys in the ring! cried Franky through the megaphone. Don’t pay any attention to him. He’s trying to sow discord!

But the taita Flores was already back up and having at the Carter in a hailstorm of blows. And because Di Pasquo and Rivera tried to mediate between the two, it wasn’t long before they were catching stray punches and conscientiously repaying them in kind. The Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law then moved forward into position.

— Would you take a look at these three honourable women! sneered Schultz. Anyone would say they’ve already got their husbands’ funerals paid for!

— And who dares deny it? Dolores asked him, her eyes glinting.

— Your husband’s funeral was paid for in easy monthly instalments, the astrologer reminded her. Too easy! Leonor and Matilde know it full well.

— What gossip have you been spreading about me? squawked Dolores, already attacking her two companions.

— Don’t listen to him! yelled Del Solar and Franky from their pulpits.

In vain. The Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law were already in the thick of a shoe-fight, creating a melee of black skirts and great sinister shawls. Seeing this, Schultz turned next to La Chacharola:

— Hey, old woman! he cried. Ask Flores what happened to your four linen sheets from Italy!

— Briganti! howled the old woman, and then took her broomstick to the tough guys, who were already knocking each other out.

The ring having become another King Agramante’s Camp,119 the astrologer and I, despite the lookouts’ shrieks, slipped among the groups of combatants and arrived at the door of the boiler. Opening it, we plunged through into what must have been the very homeland of violence. For, at first glance, that sector of hell gave the impression of the most frightful disorder; it was as if a championship soccer game between Argentina and Uruguay, a pugilists’ match in Luna Park, a movie featuring gun-slinging Yankees, and a Buenos Aires gang fight were all going on at the same time. But what really caught my attention was how the atmosphere was charged with a strange electricity or malignant fluid. The air itself, when I took it into my lungs, seemed to revive a ferment of angry skirmishes from the distant past, reigniting in my liver flames of anger that had long ago abated.

— Let’s bear to our right, the astrologer suggested then.

I gave him a dirty look, because it was obvious that Schultz was strutting with an insolence that, in my view, went way beyond the tolerable and which my status as a denizen of Villa Crespo would not and could not brook.

— I’ll go if I feel like it! I answered him. And don’t shout at me! All we need is some blasted compadrito…!

— How about I thump you one! he threatened me hoarsely.

My fist flew toward his jaw. But the astrologer parried my blow and locked me in a bear hug:

— Calm down! he said in alarm. I went a little overboard with the ether!

I understood he was speaking not as an antagonist but as the inventor of that Inferno. Struggling against the dense choleric fumes, I followed Schultz as he made his way into the Thieves’ Sector.

— Good Lord! I said, finding myself up to my neck in that mob of burglars. I knew that fingernail-fencing was one of the most popular sports in Buenos Aires, but I never imagined it had so may adepts.

The astrologer brought a finger to his lips:

— Shhh! he said. Cover your pocket-watch with one hand and your wallet with the other. Too bad we don’t have another pair of hands to guard our neckerchiefs and false teeth!

— Are we going to have to talk with these people? I asked.

— I don’t advise it, answered Schultz. Some of them are capable of filching anything, even your language.

The astrologer’s watchword was similar to that of his distant colleague — “look and pass on.”120 So I decided to keep my mouth shut and my eyes open in that little corner of hell through which we were scrambling as fast as our legs could carry us. Then I saw a legion of avid pickpockets obstinately working on a legion of bourgeois figures sculpted in granite. The thieves were trying to get their hands into the statues’ stony pockets, moaning at the vanity of their efforts, persistently scratching away at the rock. Finally, they would break off from their labour and go over to a row of Italian knife-grinders to get their broken fingernails sharpened on pedal-driven grindstones. Their nails once again sharp, the pickpockets ran back to the statues, while the Italian knife-grinders produced surprising flourishes on their copper Pan pipes. Next I saw the swindlers or con-artists: exuberant in language, eloquent in mimicry, deceitful in gaze, each of them was trying to pull a fast one on various mannikins, one representing a rural criollo, another a Spanish servant woman, yet another a recent immigrant, using their arsenal of scams: “the inheritance,” “the winning lottery ticket,” “the lucrative marriage,” “the money-making machine,” “the can’t-miss business deal,” “the invisible embezzlement,” “the magic purse,” “the prodigious cheque.” The swindlers were gesturing in vain, talking themselves hoarse; coming to the end of their pitch, they then had to repeat it over and over again, endlessly, always facing the same sly smile in the cloth mannikins. Then I saw the safe-crackers, the counterfeiters, the muggers, the fugitive bank tellers, the bank robbers, the money launderers, all of them subjected to torments that remained unclear to me, for the astrologer Schultz was not just walking but running through the thieves’ sector and pulling me along in his flight.

We entered the Laboratory of the Dynamiters, and I observed that Schultz, far from calming down, was looking around anxiously. To tell the truth, there was good reason for anxiety: the dynamiters had the appearance of Orsini-style bombs,121 hand grenades, and other machines of destruction, some with burning wicks, others with timer-switches emitting a sinister tick-tock. Such hellish devices constituted the torsos of the dynamiters. On top of each torso, an extremely skinny neck stretched up, ending in a mop head covered by an enormously wide-brimmed hat. The torso’s lower end was fitted with two legs made of wire, wobbling beneath the weight of the explosive upper body. And out of the shoulders poked two arms with little hands that feverishly tried to put out the burning wick or stop the timer-mechanism that would make their own particular device explode. The bomb-men were wandering around in their laboratory replete with glass beakers and chemical smells. For fear of colliding and setting off an explosion, they moved slowly, exchanging shouts of warning. And every time they narrowly averted collision, they covered their ears with their hands so as not to hear their own imminent detonation.

While I was observing all this, the astrologer was growing more worried than ever. When I looked at him again, he had his hat pulled down over his eyes and his brow lowered, as if not wanting to be recognized.

— Are they dangerous types? I asked him, gesturing toward the bomb-men.

— A wretched bunch, he answered. Poor souls who thought they’d been born under the sign of Anarkos.122

— So why are you afraid of them? Are the bomb-men loaded for real?

Schultz chuckled a moment under his hat:

— They’re loaded, all right, he affirmed, but with bad literature.

Schultz was trying to lead me to the exit of the laboratory, when a bomb-man puffing on a bird-bone cigarette-holder approached, looking Schultz over intently and showing signs of recognition.

— It’s him! he exclaimed at last, pointing a nicotine-stained index finger at the astrologer. It’s the traitor, the good-for-nothing, the turncoat who deserted the banner of Anarkos!

Schultz stopped, looked at him coldly, then turned to me:

— I don’t know this man, he told me. He must be suffering from an optical illusion.

— Kowtowing toady! yelled the bomb-man. He deserted the banner of Anarkos to kiss the elegantly shod feet of the bourgeoisie! Look at him now! He invents an inferno in imitation of the Great Bourgeois the priests are always trying to get us to adore!

Attracted by the shouting, the bomb-men had drawn closer to Schultz and were glaring at him menacingly.

— Comrade Bomb is right! shouted one.

— Throw him out! insisted another.

— You can read the phoniness in his face like it’s an open book, growled a third voice.

The astrologer, soaked in sweat, fended off the bomb-men already coming at him.

— Watch your fuses! he reminded them.

When he saw that the bomb-men, panic-stricken, were resuming a prudent distance among themselves, Schultz confessed to me:

— It’s true. For a time I hung around with these people, but just for a while, like a tourist.

— What a whopping-big Tartuffe! claimed the man with the cigarette-holder. He wants to deny he was inititated into the first rites!

Several voices piped up to confirm his assertion:

— He planned an operation to blow up a gasometer!

— He whistled contemptuously in a security guard’s face!

— He slept with our women!

Schultz’s eyes turned to me, as if pleading for indulgence:

— I was young! he alleged. Perverse readings had led me to the cult of destruction symbolized in Kali, the Dark Goddess, who dances on the rubble of the world, her heifer teats shimmying beautifully.

— Hah! laughed the bomb-man. There he goes again with his whoring orientalisms.

The astrologer looked at him sadly.

— In these men, I thought I’d found adepts of Kali, he told me. Didn’t I hear them endlessly conjugating the verb “destroy”?

— So what? cried the man with the cigarette-holder.

— Pure hot air! Schultz confessed to me. Their initiation ceremonies? Bah! Want me to describe them for you? They forced me sleep on the floor, eat their vegetarian stews, and do yogic breathing practices. Before we could have the revolution, you see, we had to become as strong as Zarathustra and renounce all bourgeois prejudice. I still blush when I recall the incident of the chamber pot…

Schultz hesitated a moment here, but the man with the cigarette-holder acridly challenged him:

— Go on, out with it, if you ain’t a wimp!

— Fine, conceded the astrologer. That night, while we were debating in assembly, I felt an intestinal plenitude urgently clamouring for evacuation (in those days I was a neophyte and, as such, a martyr of vegetarianism). I asked the assembly for permission to go to the toilet, and they got into a Homeric debate about whether or not it was a bourgeois prejudice to move one’s bowels in private. The matter was put to a vote, the “yes” side won overwhelmingly, and so they brought in an enormous enamelled chamber pot with blue trim, in which I was to satisfy coram populo^123 the urgency of my viscera.

— It was a profoundly liberating gesture! said the bomb-man in ecstacy.

— Quite so, affirmed Schultz. And what about the white tunics?

— The tunic of Anarkos! intoned the man with the bone cigarette-holder. One afternoon we put them on and ventured outside. But the neighbourhood kids pelted us with rocks.

— Make no mistake; common sense speaks most eloquently through kids, scolded the astrologer. The stones rained on us down to beat the band! And now I wonder: why all those fantasies and dreams of violence, when in the end we were just a bunch of poor devils incapable of hurting a fly?

When the bomb-men heard those words, they began showing signs of indignation. But Schultz gave them a paternal look, then turned to me, full of benevolence:

— Ignore them, he told me. They’re unfortunate wretches, good as gold. They could barely spell their own names, and yet they’d sit up nights trying to decipher Nietzsche’s Zarathustra or the Apocalypse of John of Patmos, not realizing they were getting their heads into one god-awful muddle. Later they’d repair to their cubicles and snore till noon, while their heroic wives broke their backs doing laundry at other people’s homes to support them.

Irate voices interrupted him here:

— Get out!

— Sold out to Yankee gold!

— Two-faced liar!

The astrologer smiled at me, as if begging a mite of charity for them.

— These excellent brothers! he said. God’s little lambs! I’d shower them with tears of tenderness if I weren’t afraid of getting their powder wet. True, they used to waste their time making paper plans for innocuous train-derailments and explosions, or mixing up batches of quite harmless chemicals. But it was heart-warming to see them at their Sunday picnics, chomping on chicken drumsticks like peaceable burghers.124

— A paid infiltrator! shouted a voice choked with rage.

— Clown! shrieked other voices. Get outta here!

And with that, as if responding to a signal, the bomb-men charged us, coming dangerously close and shoving us with their explosive bellies.

— Watch the fuses! Schultz warned them.

But the men came on relentlessly, and we had to back away in the face of the onslaught until we reached the exit from the laboratory.

There was now an interlude in the suite of sectors making up the seventh circle of hell. A parenthetical place of repose, as I understood it, or a chamber of silence. Schultz paused there a moment to recover the Virgilian decorum he’d lost during his altercation with the dynamiters. Having wiped the sweat from his brow, he quickly led me across the chamber to an open balcony affording a view of the sector of violence in its entirety. From there, I looked out over the central area crammed with a multitude hard at work in brutish exercise; truth be told, all the eye could see was a tangled mess of legs, arms, and heads aggressively flailing at each other with mechanical ferocity, in a silence so unreal that the whole tableau was reduced to a flitting succession of phantasmal gestures as in a silent movie.

— There are violent types and violent types, Schultz informed me. The ones you see down there knocking each other about are lunatics in potentia who seek release in spectacles of wrath. They’re the ones who, although weak in muscle or in spirit themselves, would nevertheless sit comfortably in ringside seats at Luna Park screaming for blood, brandishing mosquito-sized fists, and roaring their indignation or triumph at the honourable boxers who were fighting for real. They’re the narrow-lunged, feeble cripples who flock to soccer fields to insult players of the enemy team, or to throw empty bottles at the long-suffering referees. There you have them now! A little exercise is just what the doctor ordered!

I seemed to detect a certain anger in the astrologer’s words, and I was tempted to bring up a theory espoused by the pipsqueak Bernini about the cathartic virtue of demonstrations of brutality. But after taking into consideration how long we had already spent in the famous Helicoid, how much further we might still have to go, and my keen desire to avoid any word or attitude that might prolong the journey, I held my tongue. So it was that, with Schultz deep in his own thoughts and I in mine, we left the chamber of repose and entered the adjoining sector.

We found ourselves in a kind of gigantic workshop where machines were clattering. At first, I couldn’t make out what sort of machines they were because of the smoke filling the place. And yet, the odours saturating the atmosphere — fresh ink, turpentine, and lead — were strangely familiar. Only when I recognized the dark bulk of a rotary press did I realize where we were. And then, as so many times before, I gave Schultz an enquiring look, curious to know what new evil was brewing in these premises. But the astrologer, without a word, merely gestured toward the gigantic rotary press; toward one end of it, I now saw a mob of men in shirtsleeves, greenish in complexion, grimy, agitated, vociferating. Joining the mob, I walked along the entire length of the machine. When I got to the end, I saw how the men were rushing pell-mell up the steps of the press and then diving head first between heavy rollers, which sucked them in, crushed them flat, and transformed each one into a long ribbon of paper. Then I saw how the ribbon slid between the impression cylinders and came out as newsprint, complete with screaming eight-column headlines and lurid illustrations. The ribbon was then folded and cut up into an infinite number of copies of an infernal daily newspaper. Finally I saw that each copy of the tabloid daily, once off the press, recovered its human form and ran back up the steps to be flattened and imprinted all over again.

Completely sure now that this was a journalists’ hell, I looked attentively at the tabloid-men being vomited out by the rotary press, and my soul was sorely perturbed. For I too had once belonged to that vociferous brotherhood, had rolled up my shirtsleeves in late-night editorial rooms, had buried my bilious-green face in messy mounds of paper. All of a sudden, I noticed that one of the tabloid-men, having just resumed his human form, was approaching with an imperious attitude and trying to shout something at me.

— Boss! I exclaimed in recognition.

The man made was making such an enormous effort to speak that his eyes, underlined by purple bags, were nearly popping out of his head; the veins on his forehead stood out like tense wires under his skin. And his urgency found sudden egress in unspeakable vomit: a torrent of toads, salamanders, serpents, and other creepy-crawlies spouted from his mouth, in a convulsion that left him sweating, nauseous, and teary-eyed. When he’d recovered, he began to speak:

— God has put me in your city like a horse on a noble gadfly of combat…125

A second bout of vomiting cut his sentence short.

— Bah! I retorted, while holding his head to let him vomit more comfortably. Why carry on now with that old song-and-dance?

— Song-and-dance? he gurgled with difficulty.

His anxious eyes flew to the rotary press, then to his big pocket watch, and he shouted at me in a fury:

— The sixth edition is already in press! Did you bring your quota of blood? It should go six columns’ worth! What about the photos of the decapitated woman?

— Yes, Boss, I answered. I was your “bloodhound”; it was my job to hunt down blood every day, so readers of the sixth edition could quaff it like a nightcap before bedtime. I had to find a gory crime and muck around in it, gather the brackish filth of mutilated cadavers and grubby souls, then season it all with the sweet-and-spicy sauce of the sentimental-pornographic; once the delicacy was ready and printed up in point-size seven, it was tossed to the beast, along with illustrations of pathological anatomies and copious crocodile tears.

— So what’s wrong with that? retorted my Boss. The anonymous man-in-the-street, the low-brow without a life, needs his daily fix of violence.126 “God has put me here in your city…”

— Oh, come on! Enough of that old routine! Time was when the man-in-the-street, at the end of his work day, used to go home to the warmth of his family and catch the last laughter of his children, appreciate the grace of his wife, or simply take a look at his own inner world. It was his time to look and be looked at; and you robbed him of it. It was the only time left to the ox to raise his head and savour a bit of the earth’s sweetness; you stole that time from the ox. And, as a substitute, you gave him ten pages laden with ignominy.

By talking away like that, I must confess, I got myself almost ridiculously worked up. So it was no surprise when my Boss, in response, half guffawed, half vomited:

— The poet! Now I remember! Didn’t I fire you because I caught you writing cute little verses in the editorial room?

— They weren’t cute little verses, Boss! I responded. That day, between a major fraud and a crime of passion, I was starting a sonnet.

— Counting syllables on your fingers! That’s what you were doing when I found you out. How absurd!

— I’m no syllable-counter! I protested. I was using my fingers to count the matches in those five-cent boxes.

— Matches? I don’t remember that.

— There were supposed to be forty-five matches in each box. You ordered me to count them. I found a few boxes containing only forty-four. You threatened to denounce the manufacturer with the headline: “Consumers robbed of one match!” The manufacturer paid up without a peep. And that was the end of that!

My Boss laughed heartily:

— Just having a little fun! he pondered. A witty prank! I’m sure we didn’t get much money out of it.

— And the “prank” with the restaurant? I reminded him.

— I’ve forgotten it.

— The idea was to have someone eat at a high-class restaurant and get food-poisoning from the oysters or the paté de foie. The victim would inform the editorial room. Then, a phone call to the restaurant owner letting him know that, sadly, our journalist was duty-bound to publish the name of the establishment, and bingo…

— Trifles! he commented. Can’t even remember them. It was art for art’s sake. My masterpieces, on the other hand, will remain forever unknown.

— Don’t I know it. But I’ve seen the beleaguered characters filling your waiting room, day in, day out — bankers, politicians, criminals, professionals, shifty-eyed men — all on their way to see you, Boss, to beg for some venal discretion or a four-figure silence.

— Quite so. But people don’t realize how hard it is to milk the exceedingly tough udders of some consciences. And they have no idea of the sickening solitude one suffers afterward.

— I do. Sometimes I imagined you in your solitude like a movie gangster, the kind who sends his men out to commit a crime and then stays alone in his monumental office-suite, smelling the perfume of a gardenia, sensitively playing a Beethoven sonata on his concert grand. Do you remember Walker, Boss? The red-headed editor? He came up with a very poetic name for you: The Thief in His Forest of Bricks.127

— Walker was a sentimentalist, growled my Boss.

— According to what I hear, he died of revulsion.

— He died of dementia. He was one of those types who can’t take life’s hard knocks. So what of it? After all, everything goes on the same as always.

— No, Boss. It’s all coming to a close.

— To a close? he laughed, looking triumphally at the rotary press. Just look! The sixth edition is about to come out!

He lumbered heavily toward the end of the machine.

— Sixth! he was shouting. Sixth!

I was still watching him when a quite different character hove into my line of sight. He was an individual of dubious classification; he might have been a businessman, a movie actor, an amateur boxer, or all three in one. He was dressed ostentatiously, Yankee-style — baggy, grey-flannel trousers, sports jacket, loud tie. The mirth in his face did not quite conceal the sly gleam in his squinting, beady little eyes. The man looked me over for a good while, as if hesitating.

— Brother! he cried at last, opening his arms wide to receive me. I didn’t recognize you at first, but blood speaks louder than words…

— You mean ink, I corrected him. And don’t wax sentimental on me; I can see right through you.

— But, brother! he exclaimed in a wounded tone. Let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill. I had no choice but to give you the sack: a newspaper is a newspaper, not a first-aid service.

— The night of the fire I was just following your damn lessons, I said.

— What lessons?

— The ones you used to give us guys in the newsroom every two weeks. I can still see you with the pointer in your hand, standing in front of a figure painted on canvas, which you said represented the Standard Reader. According to your doctrine, the Reader’s interests were arranged in the following hierarchy: first came the interests of his stomach (and your pointer would go to the figure’s belly); right after that, those of his wallet (and with the magisterial pointer you would indicate his pocket); next, those of his heart (and you would point to the flaming red heart of the figure); finally, the interests of his intelligence (and you would indicate the stylized brain of the Standard Reader). A good journalist, you taught us, was obliged to serve all those interests in the order established by your pointer.

— A good lesson! he exclaimed enthusiastically.

— A lesson I followed to the letter, even though it cost me my job.

— You followed it? protested the tabloid-man.

— Absolutely. I was fascinated by the smile of inexpressible imbecility on the Standard Reader’s face in your famous painting. Incredible as it may seem, his smile inspired in me such tenderness that I resolved to defend the Reader’s interests right down to my last drop of ink. And I got my first chance when I discovered the Saint Ignatius Dairy was selling watered-down milk or milky water. Understanding this as harm done to the Standard Reader’s first-level interests, meaning those of his stomach, I wrote an irate editorial that was never published…

Here, the tabloid-man guffawed obstreperously:

— You crashing idiot! he cried. Didn’t you know that the Saint Ignatius Dairy was giving us twenty columns’ worth of advertising a month?

— Your pointer failed to point that out, I said bitterly. The second time I applied your doctrine was when the streetcar companies tried to raise the fare. It was an insidious attack against the Standard Reader in his second-rank interests, those of his wallet; and, borne aloft by my righteous wrath, I wrote an editorial that never got the go-ahead from your red pencil.

— First-class pinhead! the tabloid-man qualified me. The streetcar companies were stockholders in our major daily.

— Your pointer didn’t reveal that in the pathetic figure of the Standard Reader. Now let’s move on to the night of the fire.

— That’s where I wanted to see you! the tabloid-man challenged me, not hiding his delight.

— The fire had broken out, and I went out in search of material for the report. Thanks to our powerful communications network, I arrived at the burning building before the firemen. Suddenly I heard shouts. Throwing myself into the fire, I was able to save a man. I pulled him clear of the flames and used my handkerchief to wipe the soot off his face. And whom did I find in that man? The Standard Reader himself! I felt something like the wings of glory graze my brow: with that humane act, how well had I defended the standard readers in their third-rank interests, those of the heart! I remember a suburban pharmacist disinfected my burns and, in admiration, filled my pockets with jellybeans. I returned triumphant to the newsroom, but dirty, beat-up, charred, and without a news report. Then I received news of my dismissal. And I left, swallowing my tears and my jellybeans.

The tabloid-man again laughed obstreperously:

— Great oaf! he said. Were you sent so you could show off in a rescue operation or so you could write a report? It was all your fault that we didn’t get the scoop on the fire.

— What about the Standard Reader I saved?

— The truly journalistic thing to do would have been to let him roast, and then write up two columns’ worth of weeping and wailing over him, headlined by a piteous groan in point-size seven.

— Monster! I shouted at him.

— And what did you do in the interests of the Standard Reader’s mind? the tabloid-man asked in a challenging tone.

— I had no chance to do anything, I answered. You had already taken it upon yourself to fill his brain with moronic cartoons, clichéd stories, insipid editorials, vapid maxims, sorry jokes, and photographs of naked actresses.

— What did you want me to do? Publish Aristotle’s Metaphysics in serial installments? No, brother! You failed because of your confounded lyricism. And I gave you plenty of warning!

— But you sure admired my lyricism when I wrote the obituary for the newspaper Founder’s death! Do you deny it made you weep with emotion?

— I don’t deny it. It was one rip-snortin’ elegy.

— And a lie from start to finish. The Founder was a miserable nobody. Fine. That night you crowned me with laurel leaves, but you refused to reimburse me for my supper.

— Eat supper? We were in mourning!

— And at the end of the month, you deducted money from our salaries to pay for a bust of the Founder.

— The Founder was a very thrifty Scotsman. That deduction must have given him pleasure beyond the grave.

— But the victims of the deduction got their own back.

— How? he asked in alarm.

— For your information, every night, before leaving the paper in the wee hours of the morning, the reporters used to go over to the bust of the Founder and take him down off his pedestal; then they formed a circle and ritually pissed on him.

— You don’t say! exclaimed the tabloid-man. No wonder the bust has such a nice sheen to it!

A silence hardened between us.

— Do you still hold a grudge against me? the tabloid-man asked me at last, looking at me timidly.

— No, I answered him. After all, getting fired was only an economic annoyance for me.

My words plunged him into thought, as though he were weighing alternatives in an inner struggle. Then, apparently defeated, he dug into the pocket of his gaudy jacket, pulled out a well-worn billfold, and opened it before my eyes:

— Brother, he sighed, three pesos is all I have left. Take two, and leave me one for the streetcar.

I quickly reached around to the back pocket of his trousers and brought to light another wallet stuffed with bills.

— Thanks, I answered. I know the trick.

Confused, the tabloid-man snatched back the second wallet in a huff and ran to the end of the infernal rotary press. Then I looked searchingly at Schultz, anxious to leave that sector. But a third tabloid-man came to meet me; not without anxiety I recognized Walker the redhead, my unfortunate comrade-in-arms at the newsroom.128

– “I’m Walker the northerner,” he hummed in his madness. “My mother was a cardboard queen, my father a little tin soldier, with a heidy-heidy-ho!”

— With a hey-diddle-diddle and a heidy-heidy-ho! I chimed in.

— Attaboy, comrade! laughed Walker. That’s how the chorus went!

And he hummed again:

– “Was he a poet or no, Buenos Aires never knew. What does she know, what will she know, what could she know, the City of the Tobiano Mare? A smithy of images, a turner of musics, a smelter of vapours, such was Walker the redhead, when his two cheeks were rosy yet, and springtime let’m touch her pretty knees, with a heidy-heidy-ho!”

— With a hey-diddle-diddle and a heidy-heidy-ho!

Walker clapped sympathic eyes on me:

— We meet again, comrade! he laughed. May God keep you, brother.

And he took up his tune once more:

– “But one day along came an antimony devil and stood in Walker’s way: he was a daft wee devil, upon my word, a foolish devil not worth a farthing, oh. And yet, and yet, he led Red Walker astray, down from his ivory tower fair, to nocturnal tables in a newsroom-ho, where little leaden men ’neath mucilaginous lamps, turn and hone their little horse bun, that it may taint the pure threshold of dawn, with a heidy-heidy-ho!”

— With a hey-diddle-diddle and a heidy-heidy-ho.

– “Walker the Red resisted, aye, that he did so. His music’s banner he was loath to surrender — God’s teeth! Never and no! But the antimony devil is tenacious (if notoriously cretinous), and he unravelled Red’s tunic of innocence, thread by gossamer thread, and with cheerful shears pruned Red’s lyrical shoots, all those buds that used to burst out of him. So Walker, deep down in the hole went he, and forgot the light above with its peacock tail; and night after night his wee horse bun he honed, with a heidy-heidy-ho!”

— With a hey-diddle-diddle and a heidy-heidy-ho.

– “Till came a day when an aluminum angel alighted by Walker’s table and peered sadly at the redhead, who was clacking on his typing machine. ‘What hast thou done with thy soul?’ asked the Angel. ‘The antimony devil stole it,’ answered he. ‘You lie!’ cried the antimony devil who, beneath the gaze of the angel, twitched like the poor sod he was. Then Angel and Devil set to, they warred in words, a dialogue sublime that Walker heard in wonder. Then the Angel drew his sword and took off after the Demon: chased him all among the newsroom tables, and like a wee churchmouse the poor devil he squealed, with a heidy-heidy-ho.”

— With a hey-diddle-diddle and a heidy-heidy-ho.

– “The Angel, he killed the Devil, killed him hard by the Director’s spittoon. And Walker the Red, now free as God’s little sparrows, leaned into his typewriter and wrote a sensational feature in praise of the dawn. But the noble steel string of his soul had rusted, and when plucked, it snapped with a Ping! Oh, and the noble string snapped with a Ping! — heidy-ho!”

— With a hey-diddle-diddle and a heidy-heidy-ho.

Walker the Red had finished his song, and laughed uproariously.

— Good, good! he said. The brave comrade!

Suddenly serious, he looked right and left:

— Have you seen the Thief in His Forest of Bricks hereabouts? he asked me.

— He was around here, all right, I told him.

— I’m off to look for him, Walker decided. I want to suggest to him that, with Walker the Red, he blackmail the living God.

He joined the herd of tabloid-men. And then I felt Schultz take me by the hand and lead me out the door of the infernal shop.

The Slanderers, the Flatterers, and the Hypocrites had been lodged in the other residence. Their mise-en-scène was a vast field, similar to those where garbage is dumped and burned in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. The astrologer’s fantasy, having interpreted Slander and Flattery as two forms of violence in polar opposition, had seen fit to conjoin slanderer and flatterer in a single monstrous figure, which as a whole gave the impression of Siamese twins. Joined at the thorax, the slanderer and the flatterer moved dissimilar arms and legs, trying to get them coordinated. Their two heads were separate, facing one another. The slanderer’s head, poisonous as a toadstool, was caustic in expression and oblique in gaze; the flatterer’s head was endowed with sensitive eyes oozing sweetness thick as jam. The twin monsters I’ve just depicted wore black on the slanderer’s half and white on the flatterer’s half. On their four arrhythmic legs, they went picking their way around little piles of burning garbage that gave off acrid smoke and no flame, or sinking up to their knees in the quaking bog of old tin cans, rotten boards, and barrel hoops. And even though the pervading smoke impeded visibility, I seemed to notice each of the monsters violently gesticulating in a dialogue between its two contradictory halves. In the same sector, though careful to avoid the monsters, roamed the Hypocrites: men and women of pious demeanour, downcast eyes, and clement smile, who wore long, rabid-yellow tunics trailing behind them through the fillth of the dump.

After a quick look around, the astrologer and I were just getting ready to skirt that zone of waste ground in search of better air, when one of the monsters, its two halves apparently in heated argument, approached us with its double head and its four badly coordinated legs.

— Take this gentleman, for example, said the adulatory half, pointing at Schultz. Could anyone who beholds him doubt that the gods have favoured him and granted him an illustrious lineage? One has only to observe his dignified bearing, his elegant lineaments, his delicate feet, and the ethereal hue of his complexion in order to realize that many refined generations have worked to produce this unique paragon.

The slanderous half of the monster turned venomous eyes on Schultz:

— All I can say about this man, he said, is that he has cast an impenetrable veil over his origins, a veil of romanticism that no doubt impresses fools, but which for the wise fails to dispel the certainty that some fundamental dishonour has rocked his cradle. The elegance of his feet is undoubtedly due to the astonishing fact that he manages to cram them into a size-eleven shoe, thanks to some trick recalling certain Japanese practices and causing him constant torture — all of which betrays his infinite vanity. As for his complexion, it didn’t come from any ancestral practice among the aristocracy; it’s the result of unspeakable habits, his addiction to staying up all night, and especially his weird diet; one suspects disgraceful cannibalism — the strangest stories are going around, and the police are already on the alert.

The adulatory half had listened to his rival with visible displeasure:

— You only confirm my argument! he exclaimed, contemplating Schultz with sickly sweetness. It is now beyond dispute that the type of congenital degeneracy you think you see in this gentleman stands as the firmest guarantee of genius. There are men of science who maintain that every brilliant creation supposes a creator rotten to the core. If you look carefully at this gentleman, you will find the stamp of genius in the angle of his face, in his imposing cranial cavity, and in his frontal lobe, which I hope has not escaped your clinical eye. But in fact, external signs are not necessary to trace the virtues of genius which Nature, not always magnanimous, has deposited in this gentlemen, for those virtues sing sublime both in his writings — texts that have taken the world by storm — and in his awesome erudition in sciences both human and divine which, simply put, has made him the scourge of the Universities.

— Bull roar! cried the slanderous half at this point. His work is the clumsiest plagiarism committed since the invention of writing! And I crushingly demonstrated as much in the anonymous letters I wrote, modestly disguising my handwriting, to newspaper editors and directors of publishing houses. Moreover, the erudition attributed to this sinister personage is all second hand, picked up higgledy-piggledy from poorly edited books from Spain and dreadful French translations. Thanks to this dog’s breakfast of knowledge-scraps, and his facile memory, this so-and-so pretends to be a genius, a pose that has him cantering across the entire spectrum of the ridiculous.

— No way! protested the adulatory half, grabbing the other by the shoulders.

— Hands off! growled the slanderous half.

— In any case, insisted the adulatory half, it must be acknowledged this gentleman is an ideal husband, the self-sacrificing father of eleven vigorous scions, a man who has made his home in the very image of paradise; in sum, a citizen whose civic virtues shine in two exemplary records, one in matrimony and the other in military service.

— Nothing could be further from the truth! thundered the slanderous half. After shacking up with a woman in coarse concupiscence, this man soon abandoned her and led her into twisted paths. The ulterior motives of his actions qualify him as a born cuckold, as has been demonstrated in the anonymous pamphlets I liberally distributed throughout the neighbourhood. Needless to say, the eleven sons for whom this gentleman assumes a highly dubious paternity now live off public charity and are already sliding down the slippery slope of vice. As regards his civic virtues, suffice it to recall that this gentleman is an army deserter, has sold out to English gold, and profanes the electoral urns with the obscene drawings he slips into his ballot envelope, gloating malignantly.

— That’s slander! roared the adulatory half, seizing the other half by the neck.

— Naturally, said the slanderous half, likewise clutching his antagonist around the neck.

They tumbled to the ground in a single thrashing snarl, snapping at each other like dogs in a fight. And while contemplating the monster’s wrestling match, we were approached by a woman wearing the cloth of hypocrisy. She was clearly an old relic, chastely garbed in a yellow tunic and festooned with infinite medals, scapulars, and crosses. Her left hand found support in a little ebony cane with an ivory handle; her right hand held an enormous rosary of corks.

— Brothers, she said in a humble voice. Might there be a church, a chapel, or an oratory nearby?

— Oh, boy! I observed to Schultz. It’s that annoying old bag who used to plant loud, sloppy kisses on the images of San Bernardo; the one who used to distract me during the Elevation by noisily beating her breast and generally showing off; the one who would lunge for the communion rail like a famished tiger, kicking and elbowing her way among the resigned parishioners.

The old woman humbly lowered her eyes, in which two big, glassy tears were gleaming:

— Brother! she whined. Forgive me if my excessive piety hindered your prayer! I am a great sinner: the world’s dross. Nevertheless, the Apostle counsels us to tolerate one another in the spirit of Christian charity. Are we not all brothers in the Lord?

— So were the poor martyrs who fell into your money-lending clutches, I told her.

The old woman crossed herself devoutly:

— By the body of the Lord with whom I’ve communed this morning, she whimpered, I swear I never demanded more than twenty percent.

— Not much, I admitted. But what was the point of your exhibitionism? On your way out of the temple you would drop small coins into imploring hands, caress the faces of children, and hold out your right hand as if blessing the suburb.

— God will bear it in mind, the pious woman predicted.

— No doubt. Along with the dreadful state of hygiene in your tenement buildings, for which the same suburbanite tenants whom you blessed were paying onerous monthly rents. But let’s move on to another matter, the way you used to walk down Gurruchaga Street: why the need to strut your affectations, your air of disgust, your fussy prudery? And every time you heard the Carter from the Hayloft crooning a tango at the barbershop door, did you really have to make the sign of the cross, as if hearing the song of the devil? And why the need to mercilessly scrutinize young girls’ hemlines or necklines when they flaunted their sheer youth in front of you? Was it necessary to look earthward, sobbing “good grief!” and striking your breast, when the nymphs in the zaguán were frolicking all hot and bothered?

— It was the street of sin! wept the old woman. “Woe to him who causes my children to stumble” sayeth the Lord.129

— Certainly. But what about your intimate get-togethers with Mistress Chaste and Madame Pure? Didn’t the three of you wolf down gobs of cookies soaked in sweet wine, and afterward hike up your housecoats and dance on your arthritic legs as if possessed?

At this, the old woman got so perturbed that she dropped her rosary of corks:

— That was in private! she stammered. An innocent game. The Lord sayeth: “Become as little children.”130

— But He doesn’t say: “Spy on your neighbours with opera glasses.”

— I don’t what know you’re talking about, she retorted in a quavering voice.

— It invariably followed the wine and dancing. You and Mistress Chaste and Madame Pure (what a lovely threesome!) would train your opera glasses on the neighbourhood, hoping to catch intimate scenes being played out in hovels and outhouses. “Oh, my!” stuttered Miss Chaste. “Tsk, tsk,” sobbed Madame Pure. “Incredible!” you would whine, desperately adjusting the focus.

— False witness! cried the old woman, putting her thumbs in her ears.

She looked around in dread:

— Is there not a church, a chapel, or an oratory around here? she asked again.

And off she wandered through the dump, her yellow tunic wrapped tightly around her.

As we left that sector and entered the following one, I thought I detected in the astrologer a certain quizzical look typical of artists who, being not quite satisfied with a piece of work, hesitate to display it. Nevertheless, and in happy contrast to the garbage we had just left, the new environment was decked out in all the poetic colours imaginable. No doubt it was, or aspired to be, a version of the Elysian Fields in the classical style. Verdant hills, blue brooks, glades generously laden with fruit and orchestral with birds, all befriended the eyes and caressed the ears. Men and women, crowned in laurel leaves and draped in majestic Greek robes, were conversing here and there, or joining in demure circles. Such was the intruder’s first impression of those gardens. But, after the initial fascination, the interloper soon noticed that an absolute falseness ruled the entire scene: the streams and hillsides were of painted canvas, the trees of bristol board; the lights were neon, the nightingales trinkets. As for the denizens of that Eden, a similar disillusionment ended by reducing them to a troupe of actors wearing paper clothes and gilt-cardboard diadems.

— Can you guess what sector we’ve entered? asked a still-hesitant Schultz.

— I don’t know, I replied. Who could these tinsel figures be?

— No offense, but I call them the “artistically violent.” I conceived this sector as a false Parnassus, where the pseudogogues metaphorically display their peacock tails, under the direction of the false muses or Antimuses, as I’ve named them.

I must admit, it was with profound displeasure that I anticipated our tour of this sector. Already I’d been finding it abusive that, against all custom and usage, the comfortable role of rubbernecker, which by rights should have been mine in this descent into hell, was being distorted; which meant I’d been getting railroaded into dialogues, controversies, and arguments I had no taste for, thus becoming just one more actor in Schultz’s farce. And if this had been happening to me among strangers, how uncomfortable were things going to get among the men of my own métier who squirmed in this new environment? Truth be told, my own tail of straw made me vulnerable.131 And knowing Schultz’s taste for the freakish, I was already fearing that the Antimuses might be a new version of the Bacchantes who tore Orpheus apart. Nevertheless, aware that resistance was futile, I followed the astrologer, who was already penetrating deeper into the cardboard Parnassus.

The first contingent of pseudogogues (as Schultz called them) was led by the False Euterpe,132 an elderly spinster wearing a sky-blue peplum that imperfectly disguised the boniness of her frame. Her unhealthy complexion, the bitterness in her face, and the look of irritation in her rheumy eyes were all telltale signs of incurable constipation. And to complete her misfortune, she was constantly hacking and coughing up greenish phlegm into a handkerchief of indefinite colour. Seeing us, the False Euterpe came to a halt. Her tunic-clad circle of followers likewise stopped. Then, as I was warily giving the group the once-over, who should I see front and centre among the pseudogogues but our fast friend, our illustrious and never-sufficiently-praised comrade, Luis Pereda! I thought I was going to choke with indignation:

— This isn’t right! I told Schultz. Sure, according to venerable tradition, the inventor of an Inferno enjoys the right to put his enemies in it; it’s been common practice up to the present. But if the creator of an Inferno brought a friend in on the act, it was to give the friend a chance to look good in a smart role. So, what need was there to inflict upon our comrade Pereda the ignominy of showing up in this bordello?

— For all the times I’ve paid his streetcar ticket! growled Pereda, looking rancorously at the astrologer.

At this point the False Euterpe intervened, and through her catarrh she cried thus:

— He lies through his teeth who claims that Don Luis has been unjustly acommodated in this inferno!

— What’s he accused of? I asked her.

— Don’t pay any attention to the scarecrow! Pereda warned me, jerking a thumb toward the false goddess. She’s a dirty trick Schultz cooked up, a German joke in the worst taste. If I ever run into him at the corner of Pampa and Tronador,133 I’m going to give him a couple o’ shiners!

The False Euterpe made a noise, a sort of gargled chuckle.

— That’s the remarkable thing about Don Luis, she told me. He stands accused of wandering around the barrios of Buenos Aires playing the malevo, his bully-boy glances slanting off left and right, spitting between his teeth, and muttering the poorly learned lyrics of some tango.

— A personal gesture that does no one any harm, I retorted.

— Exactly. The trouble is, Don Luis wanted to give literary expression to his mystico-suburban fervour; he went so far as to invent a false Mythology in which the malevos of Buenos Aires acquire not only heroic proportions but even vaguely metaphysical dimensions.

I gave her a hard look:

— For that virtue alone, I told her, my distinguished comrade Luis Pereda deserves the laurels of Apollo.

— Your reasons, please? demanded the False Euterpe.

— Has it not been said that a heavy cloud has been hanging over our literature, a tendency to imitate foreign models? It’s been said, you can’t deny it! And when a man like Pereda goes out and vindicates the right of the criollo spirit to ascend to the universal plane of art, he gets mocked and ridiculed and subjected to infernal indignities. Well, Madame, I bow before our champion; and I’d reverently take off my hat to him, if I hadn’t lost it somewhere in this damned Helicoid.

— Thank you, my people! cried Pereda, visibly moved. When I get out of here, I’ll buy you a gin at the pink general store on the corner.134

But the False Euterpe insisted:

— Even if we admit that our patient is a brilliant innovator. Does that circumstance give him the right to geld the words of our language and write soledá for “soledad” and virtú for “virtud,” or pesao for “pesado” and salao for “salado”?135

— An idiomatic prank! I retorted. An artist’s capricious snip of the shears. He comes by his taste for gelding honestly, from his rancher forefathers.

— Fine, admitted the false Muse. But then there are his neologisms. This gentleman has had the cheek to coin terms like “tile-floorishness” and “cisternism” and “bannisterdom” that scream bloody murder.

— Have you ever read Horace? I asked.

— Horace? she said. I didn’t know he was a writer. An upstanding young man like him!

— Not that one! I griped. The Horace I’m talking about gives bards licence to introduce neologisms galore.

The False Euterpe was about to answer me, when a pseudogogue wearing a rather pompous purple tunic intervened:

— Gentlemen, he declaimed in a resentful tone, I think it unfair to distract these noble tourists with the literary romps of a writer (and he pointed at Pereda) who, they say, hasn’t got beyond the narrow confines of grammar. In all modesty, I believe there are geniuses worthier of human attention among those of us gathered here.

— That’s right! Bravo! a few voices piped up.

— A little composure! shouted the False Euterpe. This isn’t the Café Tortoni.136

I turned to her:

— Who’s Purple Tunic? I aked. The fellow who’s just expressed himself with such exquisite taste?

— He of the pedestrian metaphors, answered the false Muse.

Levelling a powerfully ungulate index finger at him, she declared:

— This gentlemen has fallen into the reprehensible mania of stringing together comparison after comparison, with no restraint whatsoever, and against the fundamental dictates of prudence.

— So what? I shot back. Isn’t figurative language the best kind for poetry?

— It all depends on the figures, in my opinion. This gentleman, for example, has hung on the hanger of his heart the grey overcoat of melancholy; and with alarming frequency he has donned and doffed the nightshirt of hope. He has compared his love, succesively, to an automatic bar, a box of matches, and a pair of boots. Now he has muffled himself in the warm blanket of doubt, and no power in heaven could make him climb aboard the streetcar of mystery.137

I looked at Purple Tunic with a fraternal gaze:

— Sir, said I, through metaphor we attempt to express the subtle relationship we find between two different things. But it won’t do to bring what is superior down to the level of the inferior; rather, through comparison, we must bring about the ascension of the inferior to the level of the superior. To compare the sky with a water-closet is to offend the sky and heap ridicule on the water-closet.

— So what are we supposed to do? grunted the fellow in purple. Compare the water-closet with the sky so as to make the water-closet rise up to heaven? And anyway, look who’s talking! A parrot of the new generation who has mortified us with the most absurd metaphors. Wasn’t it you who wrote that line about “love more joyous than a child’s funeral”?

Here I turned every colour of the rainbow:

— Look, I told him, it may be a risky comparison, but it has a hidden folkloric meaning.

— It’s nonsense! shrieked the Tunic. Moreover, did you not dare to say that “your sky is round and blue like the eggs of a partridge”? And since when do partridges lay blue eggs? Haven’t you told a woman that “in the climbing vines of her voice, a bird of grace broods over three little eggs”?138 Please understand, sir, that so many eggs are hard on the Muse’s liver!

— How’s that? growled the False Euterpe, giving me a dangerously curious look. This gentleman has written all that?

— And more, answered the Tunic. This young versifier who goes around censuring other people’s style has had the nerve to praise a lady by saying her smile was “as pleasant as the death of illustrious uncles.”139

The False Euterpe stopped looking at me to fix two questioning eyes on Schultz:

— Shouldn’t we add him to my entourage? she asked him.

I felt a cold sweat break out on my forehead. And it got worse when I saw the astrologer silently looking me up and down as if taking my measurements for a tunic.

— A case of youthful measles! I uttered in fright. And who hasn’t gone through it? Believe it or not, by putting the most heterogeneous things in relation to one another, I wanted to emancipate them from their narrow ontological limits so they could take on other forms and other meanings.

— This gentleman is raving! exclaimed the False Euterpe, pointing at me. Bring him a peplum, the straightjacket model!

— It’s a fatal error! interjected somewhat bitterly a tunicked pipsqueak, two cardboard wings sprouting from his shoulders. Woe to him who profanes art with the idle game of forms!

Everyone looked at him, and my soul was filled with gratitude for the intervention of this new character who was attracting the curiosity of the assembled company.

— Woe to him who offends the hierarchies of art! proclaimed again the tunicked pipsqueak.

— You be quiet! the False Euterpe ordered him.

And turning to us, she spoke thus:

— This poetaster, who decorates his shoulders with fake wings, has a mania for putting his art at the service of a kind of cheesy mysticism that has angels and archangels flapping all over the place.

— And why not? adduced the pipsqueak. The angels are with us: woe to him who senses not their invisible presence!

— Candle-sucker! a fellow in a red tunic shouted at this point.

— Silence! growled the false Muse. I haven’t finished yet with the tunicked pipsqueak. It’s fair to say that his commerce with angelic creatures wouldn’t be so bad, if at the same time he didn’t go in for theological digressions and symbolisms that God himself doesn’t understand. Especially the symbolism of numbers. This bard has contracted a strange and baneful passion for the number seven: he sees and explains everything in sevens.140

— It’s a sacred number! exclaimed the pipsqueak, swooning in ecstacy.

The fellow in the red tunic who had just spoken now stepped forward angily. I recognized in him a libertarian poet from Boedo Street.141 Pointing at the pipsqueak, he cried:

— Don’t pay any attention to him! He’s a sanctimonious Holy Joe working for the bourgeoisie!

— And you? the false Muse asked him, studying him carefully.

— I put my art at the service of social justice, answered Red Tunic.

— That’s turning the hierarchy upside down! scolded the angelic pipsqueak. There is a hierarchical order of values obtaining among human activities, and it would be dangerous to destroy it. By virtue of its transcendence and universality, the metaphysical plane is superior to the artistic, and the artistic is superior to the political. Art can serve metaphysics without lowering itself, since by doing so it rises to a higher sphere. On the other hand, by serving any activity of lower rank in the hierarchy, art loses its freedom and falls into the servitude of the inferior.

— Rubbish! exclaimed Red Tunic. Like I just said, he’s a well-known Holy Joe.

At this point, forgetting the norms of caution I’d imposed upon myself, I again intervened in the debate.

— If I’m not mistaken, I said turning to the astrologer, the tunicked pipsqueak has hit the nail right on the head. And I’ll go further: if he gave his thickets of angels a good pruning and lopped off a few number sevens, I do believe the tunicked pipsqueak would deserve a promotion in this Helicoid.

My words produced a disastrous effect:

— Who are you to play the redeemer? the false Muse practically spat at me.

— And who gave this tourist the right to prune my angels? whined the tunicked pipsqueak.

— I know him! said the red tunic. He’s a fifi from the new generation who used to come over to Boedo Street every night and mock the libertarian muse.

With the tumult intensifying and the False Euterpe’s entourage threatening to attack, I beat a retreat that to this day I do not consider shameful. However, the astrologer Schultz, having caught up with me, stopped me at a gathering of ladies and gentlemen lying around on the fake grass.

It was immediately obvious that another hideous Antimuse was in charge of this group. The False Erato^142 was distinguished by badly bleached hair, two pale eyes underlined by smoky black bags, a big, rouge-inflated mouth, and a crusted-over complexion flaking off layers of ancient, dried-out makeup. She sat on the ground, legs splayed out, a few wisps of tulle veiling the now withered charms of an old whore. Puffing on an outrageously long quellazaire ending in a Turkish cigarette, she exhibited hands with all five fingers a-glitter with cheap rings and fake jewels. To the left and right of her, clumps of poetesses were likewise lounging on the ground, along with a swarm of erotic poets who’d dreamed up false loves and lied about amorous adventures. The poetesses dilated their burning eyes, rolled around on the fake grass, or avidly sniffed at cloth roses. The poets, in a robotic frenzy, pretended to pull out the cardboard arrows apparently piercing their sides.

In silence, I let my gaze wander over the various groups, here pausing on a woman who, when she recognized me, put an imploring finger to her lips, or there diverting my glance from a man who turned away lest he be recognized. The discretion observed by the erotic poets seemed to bode well; and when Schultz, without a word, tapped me on the shoulder to signal it was time to leave, I realized he was generously sparing me a dialogue that might well have been more than disagreeable, and in mente I swore him eternal gratitude.

Encouraged by this turn of fortune, I decided then and there that Schultz wasn’t going to foist the complete series of his Antimuses upon me. I started walking faster, though not yet in flat-out flight, and I glanced left and right, ready to swerve and feint. Unfortunately, in attempting to avoid the groups surrounding the Antimuses, I bumped into a voluminous female crossing the meadow with no entourage at all; her wide black tunic imperfectly hid the enormous development of her buttocks, the adipose sphere of her belly, the torrential overflow of her udders, and her elephantine legs blue with varicose veins. After our collision, the False Melpomene (for that’s who she was) clapped porcine little eyes on me:

— Watch where you’re going! she shouted at me in a harsh voice. What’s the big idea, ploughing into people like that?

— Pardon me, I said. I never would have expected to find Madame walking so alone.

A grimace of hatred pursed her luxuriantly mustachioed lips:

— Those scatter-brained whoresons up above! she exclaimed. Buenos Aires has lost the notion of drama. What happened to all the porteños who used to burst with indignation at the circus when they beheld the heroic figure of Juan Moreira?143 And those whose eyes grew moist as they watched the final scene of Barranca abajo?144 And what of the philodramatic hosts who would mount serious plays like Juan José^145 or Cena de las burlas^146 in their little neighbourhood theatres, before audiences of girls sobbing and old women sniffling and riled-up compadritos fit to bust a gut? Those bastards up there are now in full farcical mode. To hell with the sons of whores!

— Don’t send them quite so far, I implored her timidly. According to Aristotle, every tragic scene must elicit the spectators’ compassion. Now then, it isn’t easy to feel another’s pain if one’s own flesh has never suffered it. And it’s been a long time since our beloved city has suffered a tragedy.

— Degenerates! rebuked the False Melpomene. They stuff themselves in luxury restaurants, and then plop their fat butts into Pullman seats, where they guffaw, hoot, belch, and laboriously digest their meals. But you can sure, before they go to the show, they take a good look at the marquees: “A thousand laughs per hour at the Astral.”147 Fine! Laughter stimulates the peristaltic movement of the large intestine. And if by mistake they end up watching a drama, they laugh all the same. A mother weeps over her son’s grave? Muffled laughter in the orchestra seats. Two lovers discuss their unhappiness? Convulsive hilarity in the gallery.

The False Melpomene fell silent. Then, gloomy and alone, she walked away muttering a endless stream of profanities.

— If you think about it, I said to Schultz, the poor old roly-poly is quite right.

But at that moment, without giving us a chance to take defensive action, the retinue of the False Terpsichore^148 descended upon us, imprisoned us within a hermetic circle, and began to execute dance steps: tango, foxtrot, walse, Charleston, and polka. They danced alone or in couples, spinning and twisting and throwing themselves out of joint like rag dolls. And the vertiginous circle was closing in tighter and tighter around us. Then, after exchanging a look with Schultz, I put my head down, closed my eyes, and charged violently against the dancers. The circle was broken, I fell down, got up again instantly, and took off running with the astrologer right behind me, for he had imitated my escape technique. Just when we thought we were out of harm’s way, the False Thalia^149 attempted to detain us with her vaudeville troupe.

— Don’t take off, rubes! she shouted at us. The trick’s easy. Toss in a gallego, an Italian, a Turk, and a compadrito. Shake well. And out comes a sainete criollo, a home-grown comic farce.150

Paying no attention, we lunged straight into thespian rabble already in combat formation. By dint of strenuous dekes and dodges learned on soccer fields, we managed to pick our way through the crowd.

The pseudo-Parnassus had been left behind. Now came the sector of the Despots and Traitors. The discretion I adopted at the beginning of this chronicle of my journey through Schultz’s Helicoid will serve to justify the merciful tact I’ll now use in describing this new sector. Fortunately, I caught only a panoramic view of it. As in the classics, Schultz had included traitors and tyrants in the Hell of Violence; due to his furious personality, however, he had lumped them together in a common environment, as though he meant to convey that despotism is a form of treachery, and treachery a figure of despotism. Moreover, and just as he had done with the other human passions, in this new sector the astrologer had refrained from displaying those historical personalities who could very well have served as paradigms. Instead, with a view to disinterested generalization, he had gathered a bunch of anonymous exemplars.

The infernal environment spreading before us was an expanse of muddy pampa. No tree, no weed, no colour interrupted the black surface of the quagmire, where despots and traitors squelched around beneath a rainy sky, busy at who knows what tasks. As soon as the sky brightened, I noticed dark shapes sprouting up from the quagmire and swelling in a process of swift vegetal growth: they were earthen horses, colts of wet mud. Then I saw how the despots, unrecognizable under their layers of muck, headed for those equine forms, frantically mounted them, punished their flanks with their heels, shouted to spur them on. But the earthen horses remained motionless, collapsed under the weight of their riders, fell apart like clods of mud, and finally crumbled, dragging the horsemen down with them. And then, after laboriously floundering in the mud, the despots got up and mounted other horses and fell to earth again. As for the traitors swarming in the quagmire, I’ll be brief: they had the shape of half-men, each having half a head, half a thorax, and only one arm; they hopped along on their lone foot, anxiously searching for their other, betrayed, half.

The last sector of the hell of Wrath, it turned out, belonged to the assassins. Stranglers, dismemberers, poisoners, all the models of man as tiger, serpent, and hyena were there, encased in coarse hospital gowns and stretched out on nickel-plated operating tables. Intense spotlights blinded them and cast their features in relief with the implacable sharpness of mug shots. Hovering over the assassins, walking around the operating tables, cackling and febrile, a hundred demon-psychiatrists in white lab coats were measuring their skulls, pricking their nerve endings, extracting glandular fluids, pawing them over and submitting them to vexatious experiments. A vulture-faced assassin, who had managed to escape from his operating table, ran up to us:

— I’d like to meet the guy who invented this inferno! he griped, staring me in the face.

— What for? Schultz asked him.

— To tell him where to get off. He’s gotta be either an avant-garde type or a bungler. Any sophomore student would have known enough to set this hell up as a deluxe butcher shop, with nice big hooks, knives, saws, and cleavers. Where was the turkey’s head? Shoving us into this dump, with a bunch of weird medics scratching away night and day at our grey matter!

The astrologer, all the while listening to him, leaned over and discreetly whispered in my ear:

— Take a good look at him. He’s an old-school murderer.

He was just turning to respond to the vulture-faced fellow, when he saw him flailing amid a throng of psychiatrists as they dragged him back to his table. Only then did we come face to face with the Man with Intellectual Eyes.

Tall, gaunt, aquiline of profile, the Man with Intellectual Eyes was wearing blue trousers and a chamois jacket. But his ashen-grey eyes were his most striking feature; as they peered they emitted a disquieting light.

— The green fly hasn’t come back to buzz in front of my eyes, he announced, his voice tranquil and confidential.

— It hasn’t come back? Schultz asked him.

— It couldn’t come back anymore. The three fateful sisters haven’t returned either.

— It is just.

— You said it, affirmed the man. Now there reigns the peace of an evenly balanced scale. Yes, some invisible weigh-scale has come to rest, with its two pans at the same level.

He must have noticed my astonishment and great curiosity, because he turned to Schultz and asked, pointing at me:

— Does the gentleman not know the story?

— I know nothing, said I, about any green fly or three fateful sisters.

The man seemed to recover an extinguished fervour, and his disquieting ashen eyes grew moist:

— Let me tell you about Bellona! he implored us. When I was a happy mortal and worked with the language of men, I described strange affections and introduced strange intrigues into the passions of others. Now I need to talk about myself. Give me the chance to deliver my monologue! Not the terrible inner monologue that wracks my being in this night of punishment, but the other kind, which one delivers before an understanding face, so it seems less a monologue than a dialogue between a voice and a gaze. May I speak of Bellona?

And since he’d read tacit consent in our faces, the Man with the Intellectual Eyes took us aside to a free spot and spoke in this way:

— I shall not give you my name, although you may have heard of me up above and associated my name with the death of a literary promise. My first comedy, The Invaders, premiered by chance at a theatre in Buenos Aires and unexpectedly plunged me into the flattering world of notoriety. And so I became a demiurge of theatrical fables, proudly manipulating a hundred destinies not my own. Little did I know, or else I’d forgotten, that I too (and forgive me the cliché) was a comic character on the great stage of the world, dangling from threads manipulated by the invisible fingers of angels and demons. It was in those days that I met Bellona.

He paused here, apparently trying to gather into his soul the shards of a broken image.

— Every time I pronounce Bellona’s name, he declared, I say it as the poet rereads his unfinished and unfinishable poem.151 Or as one names a truncated happiness, remembered less as something that actually was than as something that might have been. Bellona was the only child of an artillery captain. She grew up in the care of others and, in her solitude, she developed the traits of a soul which I never managed to define. For her soul used to open and close unexpectedly before my awareness, such that I caught only glimpses, a quick succession of bright and dark zones within her. As for the name of that incredible woman, Bellona — its rarity and musicality aside — I saw nothing premeditated about it at first, no occult meaning, no hint connecting Bellona to the genius of war. Except perhaps her hair of bronze — she used to wear it gathered in the form of an ancient helmet.

”Our honeymoon was one of mutual discovery. We spent it in Mar del Plata, during a season of steady summer weather uncommon in that maritime city. Bellona and I had taken a house on the edge of town. A cheerful-looking residence, its large windows looked out over the Atlantic, especially those in the living room, which we converted into a studio. There Bellona installed the objects we loved — pictures, books, tapestries, my old harmonium, her bird cage, and the models of set designs I used when hatching plots for my plays. I mentioned an initial bedazzlement, when Bellona and I were like two worlds commingling, laughing in the astonished delight of gradual discovery, not yet suspecting that love is sometimes the most terrible form of solitude. But after our rapturous beginning, when my eyes again saw reality as it is, I began to feel something was not quite right in that happiness-machine Bellona and I had built.

— Naturally! I interrupted him. The first rapture, or rapturous mode of looking at one’s beloved, so they say, is the only view love can take. Saying that the rapture is over and that one “sees reality as it is” is tantamount to announcing love’s death.

The Man with Intellectual Eyes regarded me with affectionate curiosity.

— I didn’t mean to go that far, he rejoined. The initial rapture to which I referred is not the rapturous mode of looking at the beloved, but rather the rapturous mode through which the lover looks only at himself in the act of his own rapture.

— Another form of solitude, grumbled the astrologer at this point.

— Very well said! affirmed the Man with the Intellectual Eyes. But once that rapture has dissipated, a true lover will want to know what it is he really loves.

Here I interrupted him again:

— That’s turning the natural order of things upside down, I objected. Is it not said that knowledge precedes love and that no one can love what he has not previously known?

The storyteller’s hands flew to his head:

— Saints preserve us! he exclaimed. A Platonist! And it’s true, knowledge precedes love. But there’s a missing piece. If knowledge anticipates love in order to inspire it, knowledge constantly accompanies love in order to sustain it. The act of loving continues in the lover as long as the act of knowing tells him that what he loves is still the object of love; and it ends if the act of knowing announces to him that the object of love has ceased to be so.

Here the astrologer Schultz began to show signs of impatience:

— It hardly seems to me, he chided, that a Hell of Wrath is the most suitable place for an academic discussion on the art of love.

— You’re right, acknowledged the Man with Intellectual Eyes. But I’m glad we’ve had the discussion, because now it will be easier for you to understand the nature of the abyss that grew between Bellona and me as soon as the initial rapture had worn off. To know what I loved, or better, to understand what I possessed: such was the impossibility my amorous mind bumped up against. Bellona’s aspect changed every hour, like the moon or like the maritime face of the water whose mutations I used to watch from the windows of my study. Sometimes, in a sudden moment of unmediated presence, she seemed so close, so accessible, so rich in bridges and passable roads, that my entire being would hasten toward her; and on drawing nearer, I would find the bridges broken, the roads erased, and before me only a strange distance in the figure of a woman. At other times, when my being felt at the ends of despair, Bellona would fall upon me like a surprise wind, or like a rain shower no longer implored but that came anyway, by virtue of who knows what laws of mercy. Thus, between zones of light and darkness, I experienced first anxiety, then sleeplessness, and finally a crippling obsession that led me into an absurd, ongoing dispute with Bellona (only now do I understand!); for to demand that she explain the reasons for her changeability was tantamount to asking the sea to account for its mutations, its ire, its benevolence. Unfortunately, our quarrels, far from bringing us closer, only deepened the rift. Then I turned to the vulgar relief of drinking and gambling; they would dull my awareness for an hour, but later I’d wake up in bitterness and shame. How many times, in deepest night, seeking respite or forgetfulness in work, did I weep over the impassive marionettes I used to manipulate in my studio, or make them act out abominable scenes that were nothing more than the translation of the inner monologue driving sleep from my soul!

The Man with Intellectual Eyes paused here and studied us intently.

— The gentleman, he said gesturing at me, just alluded to the Platonists. They maintain that, through love, the lover gradually becomes what he loves; it is an act of amorous transmutation that ends in the peace of lover-converted-into-loved-one. Unlikely as it may seem, my conflict with Bellona originated in the impossibility of the ineffable assimilation; for, not knowing her, I could hardly assimilate myself to her, and without being converted to what I loved, it was unlikely I could attain the tranquility in love which is the goal and recompense of amorous movement. On the contrary, far from bringing me peace, Bellona unfailingly exercised the power to provoke an inner war in my soul; and it is fair to say that she accomplished this entirely without deliberate intent, by the mere fact of her presence, by her slightest gesture, by an innocent word. She was Bellona, after all, and too late did I understand the true meaning of her name! I never found out if her father, the artillery man, had chosen her name as a philosopher aware of her essence, or as a perverse genie who had marked Bellona with that name’s magical power, thus compromising her fate right from the cradle, and mine as well.

The storyteller paused again here, and we saw by his furrowed brow that the story was about to enter difficult terrain.

— Bellona’s death, he continued at last, brought my state of madness to an abrupt end. I still remember the astonishment and consternation that took the city in its grip on that unforgettable February morning when the fishermen returning from the sea found Bellona’s body floating on the waters. I had spent the whole night at the Casino. At dawn, on arriving home, I hadn’t been surprised by Bellona’s absence, being quite familiar with her morning habit of going out to watch the sun rise over the sea. From our house, it was only a short walk down the hill to the shore. There, she would walk out along the rocky point that penetrated the sea like the cutwater of a galley. I recounted all these details to the policemen on that terrible morning while they drove me to the Prefecture to identify Bellona’s body. I hardly know how to express the horror that came over me when I saw her stretched out on an ordinary table, her clothes still dripping wet; redolent of the sea, she was more beautiful than ever! For above and beyond her demise, her body’s defeat, in spite of the devastation already threatening her poor flesh, she was still Bellona, with her bronze hair in the form of a helmet and that warlike expression of hers which not even the ocean had managed to erase. Yes, she was Bellona! And the people with me realized this when I went to her side and kissed her sad eyes embittered by salt. Once the hypothesis of suicide was discarded (since none of our acquaintances doubted that Death, when it mowed Bellona down, had cut short an idyll in flower), the only explanation was an accident. This conclusion was entirely borne out by police investigations on the rocky spur, the indisputable site of the drama.

”Monstrous as it may seem, the following days left me with pleasant memories. Bellona’s death, poeticized in all the eulogies, soon had the effect of bathing me in a prestigious light. Not only had my circle of friends drawn closer around me, but new faces approached me and sought permission to share my grief. In public places I felt myself the target of sweetly compassionate glances. A reverent silence suddenly came over men and women when I addressed them; they would answer me in lowered voices, lest a careless word hurt me. And I, though not exactly aware of what was happening, let myself be lulled by those consoling voices, looks, and deferential gestures. In a word, Bellona’s death brought me what her life had always denied me: the dawn of an inner tranquility that allowed me to sleep once again and gradually restored to me the lost flavour of things. And that’s how things were going when “the first manifestation of the abominable” took place.

”I’ll need to describe in detail what occurred that day at noon (for the abominable made its appearance in broad daylight, as though not wanting to grant me the relief afforded by doubt, as is usually the case when abnormal events occur under conditions conducive to hallucination). And I shall insist, moreover, on the utterly commonplace details of that luncheon, so you may glimpse something of the terror that was to seize me when the supernatural so violently irrupted into a perfectly ordinary and peaceful milieu. That day, my friends and I were having lunch, as usual, in the livingroom-studio. The folding table had been placed beside the picture window overlooking the ocean. I had sat down at the head of the table, facing the sea, whose intense blue seemed to be wilfully coming right through the windowpanes into the room with us. Three of my guests sat to my right, and the other three to my left. One place at the table, then, was left vacant: the one opposite me. I must mention that during the morning I’d been showing signs of great vitality; for the first time since Bellona’s death I’d taken an interest in the set designs filling the room, sketching out a few artistic plans, and even playing with my miniature puppet theatre. After their surprise at my animation, my friends felt joy on seeing the revival of an intelligence they’d considered seriously wounded. And so in this auspicious atmosphere the luncheon began, with glasses clinking in timid toasts and voices still holding back their excitement. Such was the mood in the livingroom-studio, when the abominable appeared before my eyes.

”Bathed in an opulent light that made the food on the plates and the wine in the glasses sparkle, and pleasantly attending to the friendly voices and the temptation of a world that was again calling me, I all of a sudden sensed something moving in front of my eyes, something like a green fly, a buzzing fly of metallic sheen. I swatted at it with my fingers, and the fly went away. And then, opposite me, I saw three women dressed in mourning seated at the empty place at the table. Their three pairs of burning eyes pierced me as they laughed like three drunken Bacchantes, their laughter dark, throaty, monotonous, echoless. Stunned by that vision, I pushed away my plate, rubbed my eyes, and looked again: the three women in mourning, the three uninvited commensals, remained where they were, seated on the empty side of the table, piercing me with their gaze and still laughing. Later I found out that my friends had gone painfully silent when they saw me roughly push my plate away and stare stupidly at the sector of the table which for them was empty. But, at that moment, I saw only the sharp faces and frightful attire of the three women. For, as I quickly noticed, they weren’t really dressed in mourning but in black dance costumes, overly elaborate with ribbons and trimmings, but so torn and filthy that the women seemed to have just come from a bacchanal or a crime. The same disorder was apparent in their dishevelled hair; among their locks there still gleamed fragments of diadems, bits of gold leaf, and scarabs of silver. And the same filth could be seen in their throats bubbling with laughter and in their long fingers ending in black-painted nails that stood out against the white tablecoth. Looking back on it now, I recall that it didn’t occur to me to doubt the reality of the women — hard to doubt with the harsh light seeming to expose them! What I did sense, in my distress, was that they were there with some definite purpose, and that I ought to confront them, take heed of the prodigous evil they were no doubt bringing, and put up an invincible resistance against them, a tough shell of disdain. Resolved in this decision, I dared to give them a challenging look; and only then did I notice that the women’s eyes were not inquisitorial but terribly wise; and only then — madman that I am! — did I realize their laughter expressed no evil at all, but rather a knowledge so terrifying that when I sensed it I felt cold drops trickle down my forehead. “No, no!” I suddenly shouted. “Not that!” And, picking up a wineglass, I hurled it at the fateful females. Right away I felt myself surrounded, helped, consoled by friendly voices. But my attention was still on the three women observing me and laughing; now they whispered among themselves; now they turned again to fix meditative eyes upon me and laugh the somber laugh of those in the know. Then I got to my feet and fled the room, leaving six astonished commensals who turned their gaze to the empty sector of the table.

”That whole afternoon I was locked in a hard battle with terror. My mind, in its new state of dread, had to clear a path through the veil of madness pressing down upon me, in order to discern, without the interference of panic, what secret lay beneath that vision. But toward evening, a dazzling insight lit up the chaos: undeniably, the revelation of the three ghastly women had coincided exactly with the hour when I was coming back to life and also forgetting. Not surprisingly, the offended spirits of Bellona had appeared to me at the very table where we were celebrating my betrayal of her memory. The three women, then, had wanted me to know that my destiny and Bellona’s were still linked, that Bellona would continue to stir up within me the strange war presaged in her name, beyond and in spite of death.

”Remembrance of Bellona: that was the heavy, sleepless, penitential toil that entirely occupied my hours in the days following. I had to reconstruct her image line by line, volume by volume, gesture by gesture, and maintain it under the gaze of my soul, night and day, without lapses or distractions. I had to evoke every instant of her life, one by one, with the tremendous precision of the cinema, and then put them all together in a living synchronism, so that my heart might thus contemplate them, even if it were to break in anguish. You can’t imagine to what extremes of detail I went in trying to achieve the impossible reconstruction of Bellona. In my madness, I pursued traces of a colour or odour that had been hers, in her dresser drawers, in her cold forgotten clothing, in the familiar objects she had touched so many times. What’s more, those favourite objects of hers soon acquired a magical prestige that for days on end had me indulging in the grossest fetishisms: I would adore a comb, venerate a gem, or kiss a satin slipper. Thus passed exactly one week since the unforgettable luncheon. My many acts of contrition and reparation had exhausted my inner resources, but in exchange had brought me the sweet ache or painful pleasure that is the customary fruit of penitence.152

“That afternoon I at last broke my voluntary imprisonment and went outside to walk along the seashore, along the deserted beach stretching beyond the Lighthouse, amid the warm sand dunes and the cool spray from the waves. Tough marine birds pecked at the cresting swells. A black bull that had waded into the sea up to his knees was sniffing the salt spume and lowing softly. A few dead sharks lay here and there, half-buried in the sand, and their rotting stench, mingled with the bitter saltpetre smell of the marsh, assailed my nostrils but fortified my spirit with a certain healthy rigour. The immense peace coming down from on high was met by the peace of the earth in repose; and a desire for union with the peace of earth and sky filled my tranquil and triumphant soul, which, redeemed and consoled by its possession of an eternal Bellona, wandered without fear along the shore, sighing with relief, and daring once again to look at things calmly. And just as these emotions were beginning to soar within me like a grateful prayer, I suddenly sensed the green fly buzzing in front of my eyes. When I shooed it away, I saw the three fateful women come forward, stand in a line ahead of me, stare at me with their hard, knowing eyes, and laugh, and laugh, and slyly laugh. For a moment I stood petrified: all the constructions built up by my madness collapsed inwardly in a dreadful heap. And again I felt naked before the three implacable women who stood there observing me and laughing, their luxurious rags and snarled locks blowing in the wind. I attempted to face them down, tried taking a few steps toward them, but they didn’t back away. I threw fistfuls of sand in their faces, but could not make them swallow their abominable laughter. Then, just as night was falling, I took flight, my feet sinking into the soft clinging sand and my ankles getting entangled in treacherous seaweed. But this time the females gave chase: they flew after me, hooting like obscene banshees, laughing offensively, panting like repugnant beasts. I can’t tell you now how long my flight lasted among the darkened dunes, but my memory retains the impression of an infinite fugue.

”Henceforth, and until the happy day of my liberation, I led an existence that, unhinged though it may have seemed, had a meaning and a plan: to destroy in myself every last vestige of intelligence, to drown out all claims of memory, and to bend my will, consciously and in solitude, to the operation of the inner hardening I wanted for my being. So I sought out not friends, exactly, but the company of strangers who often saw me drinking at orgies as an absent guest of stone,153 or whirling at their wild dance parties with the automatism of a dead star. Truth be told, that period is an obscure blur in my memory. Which lights up violently when evoking and assembling the details of the scene that put an end to so much pain.

”The case of Bellona’s death was pretty well settled, and had only to be judicially closed. I recall the boring preliminaries of the legal proceedings: the courtroom, with its dais for the judges and its big bronze crucifix on high; the hard wooden benches, the curtains of worn velvet and the carpets ruined by ten generations of litigants. And then all those official hands shuffling papers, the magistrates and witnesses filing by, the procession of familiar and unknown faces looking at me with compassion and curiosity. Okay! Fine! Nothing would matter after that. Bellona’s body was already just a fistful of disintegrating matter, far away, deep in the ground. Her lamentable story, too, would soon die, along with those papers which, being pawed over now, would eventually turn as yellow as dead leaves and fall prey to the gnawing teeth of big, furtive, silent rats… So much the better! Then oblivion would fall upon me, layer upon layer, like an interminable rain of ash. As I was ruminating on these thoughts, the inquest had begun. I vaguely heard mumbling voices reading from documents, and the monotonous testimony of witnesses. Then, as if in a dream, I heard myself recounting the same old story I’d repeated so many times before. Get it over with! Yes, quickly! And just as the pace of my declaration was accelerating, I sensed again for the third time the buzz of the green fly. When I batted it from before my eyes, I saw the three females sprawling like Bacchantes on the benches in the front row; I saw the three fateful women contemplating me and laughing more than ever, pointing grubby index fingers at me, gesturing and winking with terrible sarcasm. Some hidden spring snapped at last within me, perhaps some inner wire wound too tight: I got to my feet, and before the astonished gathering, I waved my hand at a pile of idiotic papers lying on the dais and sent them flying. Then, freed from the chains and walls in which I’d kept it prisoner, my soul cried out: “I killed her! I killed her!”

”Then I told all, before gloomy faces and the scratch of pens noting the horrors vomited up by my conscience. I told the story of the tragic night: how I’d slipped stealthily out of the Casino, sought and found Bellona on the rocky spur, how in our final quarrel I’d treacherously shoved her down onto the rocks below, how her last cry had been drowned out by the clamour of the waves; then my return to the Casino, under cover of the crowds streaming in and out; and finally the hours of darkness ticking by, and how I’d wished to stop them bearing me forward to the dawn.

The Man with Intellectual Eyes bowed his head and went silent.

— And afterward? Schultz asked him.

— The green fly has not come back to buzz before my eyes, answered the man.

— It hasn’t come back?

— It couldn’t come back any more. Nor have the three ghastly females returned.154

— It is just.

— You said it, affirmed the man. Now there reigns within me a peace as of an evenly balanced scale. Yes, some invisible weigh-scale has come to rest, its two pans at the same level.

He turned his disquieting eyes toward me:

— Does the gentleman not know the story? he asked me, as if in a daze. Well then, let me tell you about Bellona!

I backed away in horror, for I realized the Man with Intellectual Eyes was condemned eternally to repeat the story of his love and his crime.

XII

The eighth circle of hell corresponded to Pride; naturally, for Schultz was aware that Pride, being both cause and sum of the other passions, holds first place in the hierarchy of evil. As we headed for this new stronghold of human folly, I was admittedly feeling an inexpressible lassitude, only slightly mitigated by the thought that the end was nigh. Half-asleep, eyelids drooping, feet dragging, I was vaguely aware of the astrologer’s censorious perorations against that greedy impulse, which can afflict even the angelic hosts.

As I drifted along in this state of twilight awareness, we came to a halt in front of the portal to the eighth spiral. Contrary to what one might logically expect in such an eminent circle of hell, my eyes beheld no solemn gate, no frowning tribunal, no pompous entrance; instead, there was a big, grey-velvet curtain falling to the ground in rigid perpendicular folds. The hellish vestibule was bathed in a silvery, moon-cold light. At first, the spiritless luminosity made me even sleepier, but gradually it possessed my eyes and forced them awake, cleared my mind of mist, and shook every vestige of lethargy from my will.

More lucid than I’d ever been, body alert and soul tense, I was just reflecting on the effects of this light, fancying it to be the glimmer of intelligibility itself, when I saw something stir behind the curtain. From among its folds, a head protruded, then a pair of cautious arms, and finally the entire person emerged, clad in ostentatious garb full of numbers and allegories, in the manner of a magical robe. Great was my dismay when I recognized Samuel Tesler’s kimono, and greater still when I identified the philosopher of Monte Egmont Street himself in the man’s austere countenance. Samuel Tesler came toward us, head held high, hair a-glitter with golden bees, the dual horns of the initiate poking out from his locks.

— Thank God I’ve found you here! I cried jubilantly, stepping forward with my hand outstretched.

The philosopher’s hand stayed where it was:

— Sir, he told me with pompous dignity, such familiarity was acceptable in the physical world above. But here more formal protocols of address must be observed.

— Eye of Baal! I rejoined in a pained voice.

A pleased smile came over Samuel Tesler’s face:

— That’s better, even if that isn’t my real name, he said at last, recovering his ceremonious demeanour. I have climbed Mount Carmel and contemplated the truth facie a facie. My current address is number 50 Via Unitiva, Apartment 3. The light in this vestibule doesn’t do much for me; otherwise, you two would have noticed the mystical radiance surrounding my cranium, especially in the frontal and occipital zones. Nevertheless, I hope your noses haven’t missed the odour of myrrh emanating from my person.

He looked around him warily. Then he brought his enormous head close to our noses and said:

— Smell this perfume. It’ll knock your socks off!

We sniffed Samuel’s head. It really did smell, I had to admit, but not of sacred lotus or mystic rose. It reeked of a lotion they used to sell on Triunvirato Street, fancifully labelled Nuit d’amour.

— What do you think? the philosopher asked us, raising his hornèd forehead again.

Noticing we weren’t as entranced as he must have expected, he smiled, half scornful, half indulgent:

— I see the olfactory test hasn’t worked for you. What a pair of mulattos! We’ll try the visual test. You ought to know that through intensive practice of the most gruelling austerities I’ve inwardly achieved the reintegration of the Primitive Androgyne. Having restored the harmonious balance between the male and female principles of the manifest universe, I’ve abolished within myself all contradictions and have come to a comfortably paradisiac situation. My true name is Adameva.

He took another wary look around. Then, with a modesty verging on the sublime, he opened the front of his kimono to show us his naked body. I can still hardly believe what I saw: Samuel Tesler’s frame exhibited the double nature of a hermaphrodite. His right, masculine, half comprised a hirsute semi-thorax, half a paunch, one coarse thigh, and a single bandy leg on which a man’s garter secured a cheap red-and-blue-striped sock. His left, feminine, half boasted one Venusian breast of rosy nipple, one ivory flank, half a silken-fleeced pelvis, and one sleek thigh covered all the way up with a transparent stocking held in place by a sea-green garter with little rococo roses. If the philosopher was intending to astonish us, he succeeded with flying colours. Before our crazed gaze, he closed his kimono back up; savouring his triumph, he looked at us with severity:

— Now that the proper hierarchy has been restored, he scolded through clenched teeth, tell me what it is you want here.

— Entry to this inferno, answered Schultz, indicating the backdrop.

Samuel laughed heartily:

— Entry! he chortled. What nerve! A guy busts his ass studying metaphysics, and along comes a pair of mulattos wanting in, just like that!

— I demand it, rejoined Schultz with energy.

Grumbling, Samuel Tesler reluctantly began to come down off his high horse:

— You would qualify to enter, he admitted to the astrologer, even though your metaphysical education is strictly nil. Ha! Only a mulatto like you could have made such a hash of distributing the four elements thoughout this Helicoid. Someone else might have ordered them hierarchically and according to the nature of the passions described herein: earth first, followed by water, air, and finally fire. As for ether, source and matrix of the other elements, it should have been reserved for the sinister character who reigns in the Great Pit. But what’re ya gonna do? We live in a country full of mulattos.

With a mixture of severity and irony, Samuel Tesler turned to me:

— As for you, he grumbled, no merit qualifies you to visit the eighth circle.

— Effendi! I cried, stung to the quick.

— The only card you can play in your favour is your poetry, with its laughable stabs-in-the-dark at philosophy. True, lately you’ve been flirting with the two Eves and have even perpetrated the metaphysical murder of a certain Solveig, woman of the earth. But there’s no indication any of it goes beyond a paltry exercise in literature.

— In any case, Schultz told him, you will allow him to pass under my guarantee.

— He’ll have to pass a test, cackled the philosopher, immovable.

— What test? I said, tired of all the haggling.

— Decipher the figures on my back!

Samuel turned on his heels. On the back of his kimono, a figure halfman and half-flower leaned over a pool of water fed by a spring gushing from the roots of an emblematic tree.

— What do you see? the philosopher asked me.

— Bah! I answered. It’s an ordinary, garden-variety image of Narcissus.

— What is Narcissus doing?

— His boring old routine of leaning over the waters.

— What waters?

— The waters that spring from the fons vitae or fons juventutis, at the foot of the Tree of Life, in the centre of Paradise.

Samuel Tesler could not hide his pique:

— Fine, he said. Though, of course these are very common notions that everybody knows about. But tell me: according to the mythologists, didn’t Narcissus drown when he tried to see his image in the spring?

— There are two Narcissuses, I answered. The one who drowns and the one who is saved. The one depicted on your back is the one who is saved.

— How is he saved?

— The first Narcissus, the one who drowns, manages only to see his own image, his closed ego, his individual form. When he looks at himself, he falls in love with himself and doesn’t get beyond his ego: he’s a non-transcendental Narcissus. The second Narcissus, when he leans over the fons juventutis, sees the first Being, cause and motor of all that is manifest. Then he forgets his limiting ego and loses sight of himself; and losing sight of himself, he becomes enamoured not of his ego but of the Being whose immutable unity, beauty, and infinity he sees now in the mirror of the waters. This Narcissus leaves his form to take on the form of what he loves: he’s a transcendental Narcissus.

I can admit it now: the tone of my speech, whether or not it was the product of a direct inspiration, apparently rubbed Samuel Tesler the wrong way. Turning around to face me again, the philosopher glared at me like a basilisk:

— You’ve been peeking at my notes! he shouted. More than once I’ve caught you poking your nose into my papers.

— Eye of Baal! I protested. That’s defamatory!

The philosopher grunted mistrustfully a moment longer.

— Hmm! he muttered as if to himself. These mulattos’ll plagiarize a guy right down to his style of walking!

All obstacles having apparently been overcome, Samuel Tesler, still growling, ordered us to follow him. And so we did, first through the grey curtain I’ve already mentioned, then through a confusion of draperies of increasingly subtle material. When we finally got clear of the last one, we found ourselves in a city whose cold pulchritude confused me: grave architectures, arithmetical gardens, severe sports facilities were arranged there — I noticed this immediately — in a malignantly rigorous order. Later, at journey’s end, musing over everything and everybody I’d seen in the Hell of Pride, it was this unrelenting order that struck me as perhaps the most perverse of all Schultz’s inventions, for it suggested a rigid regime of automatons leaving no room at all for the exaltation of truth or the play of life. Samuel, meanwhile, whose job had been to guide us into this part of hell, showed no signs of going back to his curtain. On the contrary, tightly enfolded in his kimono, horned brow held high, he made a gesture inviting us to follow him. I looked at Schultz, as though asking whether the philosopher had any business here; and at Schultz’s nod, I understood that Samuel Tesler was to be our mentor in the City of Pride.

So we set out walking along a gleaming cobblestone street, bereft of the slightest human murmur. I was wondering if the city was deserted, when Samuel, rounding a bend in the road, showed us the first contingent of prideful souls. I recognized a stadium like the ones they use for track meets: an oval-shaped cement track girded by railings and amphitheatrestyle seating. A team of men in track shorts and shoes were running laps, mechanically jogging along and making no effort to overtake one another. When we got closer to the track, I noticed the runners weren’t even sweating: abstract, machine-like, they trotted endlessly round and round before the empty seats in a nightmarish silence. Samuel Tesler pointed an implacable index finger in their direction:

— And they call themselves philosophers! he burbled with laughter. A bunch of black beasts! But take a look now!

He searched feverishly until he found he what he seemed to be looking for — a lengthy pole.

— Now watch! I plan to knock two or three of these mulattos on their arses. Upon my word, I’ll rub their noses in the dirt of the track!

Without another word, the philosopher stuck his pole out at the runners. One of them tripped, tumbled off the track, and quickly got up again.

— Despite all obscurantist manoeuvres, panted the runner, the truth remains intact!

— What is the truth? Samuel asked him.

The athlete raised a professorial index finger:

— In the beginning there was matter (in Greek, hile), he said, no matter what the inventors of worlds-beyond may preach, as Comrade Friedrich^155 would say. I look around me with these eyes that cannot lie. What do I find? Living matter, nothing more than matter!156

Samuel Tesler turned to us:

— A mulatto of the finest kind! he exclaimed gleefully.

And confronting the athlete again, he asked him:

— So you still believe in that blasted nebula? And that the nebula started spinning out of diddly-squat? And that out of diddly-squat sprouted all the excellent things of this world, the vermiform beginnings, the animalia reptilia, the corporal immensity of the whale, the flying creatures of strong wing, the quadrupeds of ponderous gait, and at last man, the microcosm?

— It’s the scientific truth, said the runner.

Without hiding his boredom, the astrologer Schultz intervened affably:

— Let him go, and find me another one, he told Samuel. We’re not here to listen to those old wives’ tales.

After stamping a tender kiss on the athlete’s forehead, the philosopher turned him round with infinite care, and with a cordial boot in the behind sent him back to the circle of trotters. Then he extended his pole again until he’d tripped up another jogger. This one, getting back to his feet, rebuked Samuel mildly:

— You have no right to sabotage this Olympiad of sufficient reason! Who are you? I don’t recognize you.

— Take a good look at me, it’s well worth it! answered Samuel, showing off the figures on his kimono.

The runner looked at him a moment, went closer and sniffed, and then wrinkled his face in skepticism:

— It’s no use, he muttered at last. I detect in you a series of visual references: two horns, a clown’s outfit, volumes, colours, and lines. I smell you, and receive some olfactory data (which aren’t particularly pleasant, by the way). But I cannot reach “the thing in itself”: my sufficient reason will never attain it.157

Proffering no comment at all, Samuel Tesler lifted his trusty pole and brought it down on the runner’s head.

— Why do you hit me? said he, not especially indignant.

— I’m not hitting you, answered Samuel. It’s a message sent from my thing-in-itself to your sufficient reason. Was the message received?

— Only a tactile reference, the runner sadly rejoined. The “thing in itself” remains isolated: I am an island, you are an island, he is an island, we are…

And he began to trot again, conjugating that rather cheerless verb. Samuel then stretched out his infallible pole for the third time. Two more runners kissed the cement track. One of them, fat and serene, got up without difficulty. The other was wearing horse blinkers, and seemed to be trying to decide whether to get up or not. This was the one Samuel spoke to:

— Nice fall, he said amiably.

— Fall? retorted the man in blinkers. I don’t know yet whether it was a fall or not. That’s why I hesitate between getting up and staying prone on the ground (supposing, of course, that I am indeed lying down). Imagine how absurd it would be if I tried to stand up after a non-existent fall!

— An agnostic! exclaimed Schultz in wonder.

— Nothing is knowable, said the man in blinkers. The prudent course, in my judgment, is to adopt no opinion about anything and to cloak oneself in a shell of fundamental doubt, which, if you give it some thought, has a certain comfort about it.

— And so why were you running? Samuel asked him.

The blinkered fellow, still lying on the track, gave him a cold look:

— It has yet to be demonstrated whether I was running or not, he rejoined. The fact that I may not have fallen could allow us to surmise that I may still be on my feet. A dangerous temptation! And even if that were true, it would be impossible to affirm whether I’m standing still or running.

— Zeno’s arrow nicked this mulatto bang on the noggin, laughed Samuel Tesler.

— Let him be on his way, suggested Schultz. That is, if you can get him to admit that he hasn’t left already.

Our kimono’d philosopher lifted up the blinkered runner, showed him the track, and told him:

— You may leave now. Good night.

But the blinkered one, before rejoining the circle of runners, prudently objected:

— Is it night or day? Or neither? That’s the question. And even if it were night, I see no reason to describe it as good or bad, or to assign it any other dubious qualifier.

And he went trotting off. Then the fat runner, who had kept his distance, came up to us and said indulgently:

— Just look at what sectarianism can lead to! Good Lord! Reading world history, what do we find? Sectarian wars between religions that believed they were different, between philosophies that imagined themselves at odds. Absurd! Zoroaster, Lao Tsu, the Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mohammed: all were initiates and found a piece of the truth. So, why should brothers knock each other’s brains out? I gather all those pioneers of the truth and put them into the cocktail shaker of the Absolute; I add a zest of tolerance, give it all a good shake, and serve it chilled with fruit to the brothers whose thirst needs quenching. “Don’t get too deep”: that’s our motto. It’s enough to get pleasantly drunk on the odour of metaphysical truth, though not to the point that we lose our business sense. No need among brothers to tear each other’s beards over an ideological contradiction already resolved in my cocktail shaker! And above all, let the soul’s jaws open up wide and gluttonously devour everything with a vague whiff of mystery to it. Nothing wrong, for example, with practising black magic in the drawing room, as long as the ladies don’t get spooked and faint all over their satin divans. Nor does it bother me if those excellent disembodied spirits are put to work shaking chairs, three-legged tables, and other domestic furniture. Moreover, conversing through a medium with Alexander the Great, Caligula, Borgia, or Napoleon is sure to be edifying and bring all kinds of historical materials to light. In a word: eclecticism. And let the time come and manna fall from heaven! When all’s said and done, God is an excellent person.

Samuel Tesler had been listening to this speech with much gravity. As soon as it was over, he inquired:

— May I ask, sir, with all due respect, and harbouring absolutely no intention to pry into your private life, which I solemnly swear by the profound laws of discretion: might you by any chance be what they call — if you’ll excuse my presumption — a theosophist?158

— You said it, answered the athlete.

— Just as I feared! moaned Samuel sadly.

And in a sudden fit of indignation:

— Get outta here! And take your bloody cocktail shaker with you!

The theosophist went off without a word. Seeing this, Samuel Tesler used his rod yet again to knock another runner down and off the track. He was an Adonis of almost feminine features, whose beauty was marred by blinks and nervous tics as various as they were frequent. He got to his feet, looked reproachfully at the philosopher, and told him:

— It’s cruel to put obstacles before a man who suffers from the Step Complex.

— What complex is that? Samuel asked him.

— It consists, answered the Adonis, in a phobia manifested by my subconscious every time it encounters an obstacle, whether it be a step, fence, door, or curtain. I underwent psychoanalysis, and after much diligent rooting around in my subconscious, I discovered the phobia had originated at the very instant of my birth, because of the narrowness of the maternal portal.

— That’s delving really deep, commented Samuel.

— But the search was not in vain, rejoined the Adonis. Because in the process I discovered within me the Scissors Phobia, the Mattress Phobia, the Poodle Phobia, the Houndstooth Overcoat Phobia, the Security Guard Phobia, and the Olive Pit Phobia. I suffer as well from the following complexes: the Oedipus Complex, the Queen of Sheba Complex, the Nebuchadnezzar Complex, the Michelangelo Complex, and the Catherine de Medici Complex. Furthermore, thanks to the vagaries of my internal secretion, I have several exquisitely wrought sexual problems, not to mention a repressed inclination to homicide and a culpable penchant for literature.

— Good for internal secretion! said Samuel. And what can be inferred from all that?

— A revolution in morality! exclaimed the enraptured Adonis. Imagine that everyone’s predestination is written in their glands. It means that I can commit murder, paint the Mona Lisa, or write the Critique of Pure Reason, all with same unconscious irresponsibility.

Samuel Tesler raised his arms heavenward:

— We are on the eve the Superman! he announced religiously. The wheat is ripe, and old Zarathustra takes up his sickle.

But the Adonis made a face showing his displeasure:

— My satisfaction would have been complete, he grumbled, if you hadn’t put that untimely stick in front of me. In fact, before I fell, I was trying to work out the symbolism of a dream I had last night. I was lost in a forest, searching in anguish for a way through hostile trees and creeping vines. All of sudden, an Australian kangaroo appeared before me; sitting on its lower legs, he stared at me long and hard out of its profound melancholy. I briefly closed my eyes. When I looked again, the kangaroo was gone, and in its stead was a triple armoire. I went to search for an intimate garment inside it, but as I drew near it vanished into thin air, and the Australian kangaroo came back in its place. Then I took off running. The kangaroo followed hard on my heels. Finally, no longer hearing its leaps and bounds behind me, I turned around and again found myself before the armoire.

— Curious, admitted Samuel. Have you found any hidden meaning in that dream of yours?

— Not yet, answered the Adonis, but the kangaroo’s got me worried.

Samuel Tesler showed a glimmer of human sympathy.

— Don’t be alarmed, he said in a confidential tone. Last night I had a worse dream, and yet here I am.

— What did you dream? the Adonis asked him.

— I dreamed my arse was a rose and you were sniffing it.

The Adonis became pensive, as if speculating or reviewing texts.

— Hmm! he said at last. The rose is worrisome, and that arse smells a bit fishy to me. If I were you, I’d have myself psychoanalyzed.

These words, in Samuel Tesler’s opinion, conveyed an insult to his investiture. He lifted his pole with the obvious intention of bringing it down on the Adonis’s head. But the Adonis, tipped off perhaps by one of his many complexes, escaped to the track and rejoined the circle of joggers.159

The astrologer and I left the area; in vain did Samuel invite us to witness the fall of a few more mulattos, who in his opinion were the best of the lot. We adamantly refused, especially Schultz, who declared his boredom and went on to censure Samuel Tesler for his loose language when talking with the Adonis, a slight against both the majesty of the place and the dignity of his visitors. Hanging his head, Samuel took the lead again, though grumbling inwardly, and led us to the portico of a monumental building situated among the gardens. The road leading up to it was flanked by numerous statues of salt: figures dressed in tuxedos, pot-bellied and rigid, proudly erect on pedestals of saltpetre, they ceremoniously doffed their felt hats as we passed by.

— Who are those pompous personages? I asked Samuel.

— The Grey Presidents, answered the philosopher sporting an enigmatic expression.

We arrived at the portico of the building, where three black porters in uniforms luxuriously festooned with buttons were each sucking on a gigantic mate, completely oblivious to our presence. Samuel opened the door; behind it I saw neither hall nor vestibule nor corridor but rather a space of grand proportions evoking the exact notion of a parliamentary chamber, complete with benches arranged in a semi-circle, presidential rostrum, press gallery, and a railing in the upper reaches. As soon as we entered, I noticed everyone was in place: Members of Parliament on their benches, House Speaker at his rostrum, reporters at their desks. Appearances notwithstanding, as I realized moments later, the Parliament was actually in session, though soundessly, enacting a series of dehumanized gestures that put me in mind of a well-oiled machine. What first caught my attention was a character perched on a pedestal facing the chamber — a rustic man with weathered features and a stunned expression, clad in baggy, country-style trousers and a very threadbare vicuña-wool poncho. At the base of the pedestal were baskets of roses and marble plaques that read: “In homage to Juan Demos,160 from his passionate admirers.” When I tried to get closer to the man on the pedestal, Samuel Tesler stopped me:

— Stay put! he ordered me. And open your ears. The session is in full swing.

— But I can’t hear a thing! I rejoined.

Nevertheless, by paying close attention to the assembly’s whispering, I managed to hear a few fragments of the debate which I now transcribe with the help of the typescript Samuel gave me when we left the chamber:

MR UNGULA:161 How many members of parliament are present?

MR SPEAKER: Right now there are seventy-eight members present.

MR OLFADEMOS:162 I observe, Mr Speaker, that this way of counting quorum is anarchic. I call for the roll be called aloud. The count must include only those indicating their presence.

MR LUNCH:163 I second the request of the honourable member Mr Olfademos.

MR PLUTOPHILE: With the three members who have just left there was quorum.

MR OLFADEMOS: Which means the Ministry is not doing its duty.

MR ASINUS: At this moment I think there are seventy-nine members present.

MR PLUTOPHILE: Let the three members who just left be asked to return to the chamber.

MR OLFADEMOS: Speaking from a minority position, I hereby note that the House Speaker made a faulty count.

MR SPEAKER: I’m going to propose that we wait another fifteen minutes, inasmuch as the member who presented the motion to close the session has left the room and cannot vote.

MR UNGULA: I’m in favour of closing the session.

MR SPEAKER: The roll will be called again. To that end, will the members without a key please stand up.

MR ASINUS: I move that the roll be called.

MR SPEAKER: The rule will be adhered to.

At this point, the Honourable Member Olfademos spoke up to address the man on the pedestal who, all wrapped up in his poncho, was following the debate without understanding a word:

— What do you say, Mr Demos? asked Olfademos. Did you see how I’ve gone all-out on your behalf?

— Nice! answered the man on the pedestal. Although, to be honest with you, I didn’t understand a whole lot of what the honourable members were saying. One thing’s for sure, though, I’m real cold: this old poncho’s about as good as an onion skin.

At those words, the legislators shook off their lethargy and got to their feet.

— For shame! thundered the Honourable Member Ungula. Mr Demos is cold? Then I move that a window be closed in the chamber.

— What do you mean, a window? cried the Honourable Member Aristophile. Are we in the Middle Ages? I move that two windows be closed.

— Let all the windows in the chamber be closed! vociferated the Honourable Member Lunch. It’s no time to be scrimping on resources when Mr Demos’s health is at risk!

The Honourable Member Lunch’s motion was put to a vote and adopted by a crushing majority. Lunch then turned to the man in baggy trousers and shouted:

— What d’you say, Mr Demos? Are we on or aren’t we?

— That’s sheer demagoguery! grumbled the Honourable Member Aristophile. Two windows were enough!

The debate then continued, muffled and cold.

MR SPEAKER: We shall deal with items of business on the agenda.

MR UNGULA: Let them be referred directly to the committees.

MR SPEAKER: If there is consensus, so it will be done. (Agreement). Now the Honourable Member for Santa Fe has the floor, for a few words of homage.

MR VULPES: We ought to vote on Mr Aristophile’s motion.

MR ARISTOPHILE: I had made a motion to deal in session with the projects of declaration that are on the table.

MR PSITTACUS:164 Mr Speaker, I have applied at the Ministry for intervenor status on a point of privilege.

MR PLUTOPHILE: The Honourable Member has not asked for the floor, because he was out of the room when the session opened.

MR ASINUS: One must ask for the floor orally.

MR SPEAKER: There is a motion on the table to deal in session with the projects of declaration.

MR PSITTACUS: A point of privilege takes precedence according to the regulations.

MR SPEAKER: We are going to vote on the motion tabled by the Honourable Member for the Capital.

MR ASINUS: What is the motion?

SEVERAL MEMBERS: We are voting!

MR ASINUS: How can we vote on a motion when a point of privilege has been raised? (Several members speak at once; the bell sounds.)

MR SPEAKER: We are going to vote on the motion on the table.

MR ANTHRAX: What are we voting on?

MR SPEAKER: The motion put forward by the Honourable Member Aristophile.

MR ANTHRAX: What is the motion?

MR VULPES: If you had been in the room, you would have known!

MR ANTHRAX: That’s no reason not to inform me as to what it’s about.

MR VULPES: One may not impede the working of the Chamber.

MR ANTHRAX: It’s absurd that I have to vote on a motion without knowing what it is.

MR ARISTOPHILE: It is a motion to deal in session with the projects of declaration.

MR ASINUS: Points of privilege come first.

MR SPEAKER: We are going to vote on the motion moved by the member for the Capital.

MR X: I would ask that the Speaker of the House inform us as to whether the vote about to take place — the third vote on this matter — is or is not an amended version of the one already approved.

MR CACAPHONE: It cannot be an amended version of any vote, because without a proclamation there was no vote.

MR ALLPHA: Could the Speaker inform us as to whether the vote has taken place or not?

MR CORNO: It’s best that we vote without further deliberation.

MR CACAPHONE: I would ask for information on whether a motion has been made to amend the vote.

MR VULPES: Information had previously been requested so that the Chamber might know what had been voted on.

MR SPEAKER: There was a vote, but the result was not proclaimed because of the disorder reigning in the Chamber.

MR CACAPHONE: So, if there was no proclamation, there was no vote.

MR SPEAKER: The vote will be taken again.

Here the Honourable Member Cacophone addressed Juan Demos triumphantly:

— Don Juan, do you see what a battle my faction has won for you?

— Yes, yes, answered the man on the pedestal. I’m starting to catch on now. It’s like throwing the taba,165 ain’t it? One time it lands wrong, another time it comes up lucky. Real nice! But…

The man on the pedestal scratched his neck dubiously.

— Spit it out, Don Juan! the Honourable Member Cacophone encouraged him.

— People’s talkin’, Juan Demos drawled. They say youse guys’ve been sellin’ me out to the gringos on the sly.

— That’s the opposition slandering us! exclaimed Mr Lunch.

— I ain’t sayin’ I believe it, rejoined Juan Demos. But the thing is, I’m gettin’ hungry. Why not come right out and say it?

Once again, and in great agitation, the legislators got to their feet.

— Hungry? squealed the Honourable Member Equis. And this country being the bread basket of the South! I move that Mr Demos immediately be served a café con leche and some bread and butter.

— What a lack of respect for Mr Demos, observed Mr Vulpes. The café con leche must be served with three croissants.

— Only three? barked Mr Alpha. Five croissants, and then some!

— Let him be served all the croissants left in the buffet! wailed Mr Asinus.

A tedious process of voting on the motions gave victory to Mr Asinus’s motion. He turned to Juan Demos, holding his emotion in check and showing only his tear-filled eyes. The legislators once again resumed their mechanical attitudes, and the debate recovered its tone of unspeakable monotony:

MR SECRETARY: Out of a total of 123 members of parliament…

MR ANTHRAX: What? Before, only 120 voted.

MR SECRETARY: Eighty-one members voted in favour and forty-two against.

MR CACAPHONE: Before the proclamation is made, I request a compulsion, so as to know if the vote…

At this point I turned to Samuel and said:

— Enough, sir! This is an opiate.

— Have you only just realized? he responded mildly.

And gesturing that we should follow him, he crossed the room to a door which, like the one before, opened unexpectedly onto the street.

We followed Samuel out of the strange Legislature to go for another trot through avenues that brought us to a building of grand proportions, seemingly like all the buildings in this fine City of Pride. The Doric columns of the portico, as well as the pediment decorated with artistic figures in bas-relief, inspired great expectations for both the building and its inhabitants. But once we’d passed between the Greek columns and through the bronze door behind them, disappointment struck and my spirits fell through the floor. True, the ground floor was an enormous open area rendered cathedral-like by the light streaming through the stained glass of arched Gothic windows. But unfortunately, in barbaric contrast to the noble architecture and mystical light, men in bloodstained lab coats and tortoise-shell glasses were busy at tasks better suited for a morgue, hospital, or butcher shop: the lab coats, bent over operating tables, wielded shiny scalpels to slice open the outstretched bodies and extirpate organs, then feverishly sewed up the incisions and rushed on to the next body, paying no attention to the cheers and applause coming from an ecstatic mob gathered in a kind of grandstand or amphitheatre.

Whether or not it was a School of Medicine, it held little interest for me, a literary type. It’s well known that sawbones, from time immemorial, have enjoyed scant favour in literature, and I didn’t want to be the exception to such a venerable tradition. So I was just deciding how best to make myself scarce, when Samuel Tesler and the astrologer Schultz pointed out one of the surgeons, in whom I recognized the bright, self-satisfied young medic, Lucio Negri, busily exploring the viscera of a human being. No longer in evidence, it must be said, was the showy elegance for which Doctor Lucio Negri was known in Saavedra. We drew closer and watched him plunge his rubber-gloved hands into the prone body he’d just sliced open. Seemingly full of holy curiosity, he yanked out heart, lungs, liver, every anatomical part possible, and examined them one by one, avidly sniffed at each, and with grand gestures of dismay finally tossed them aside:

— It’s no use, he moaned to himself. I can’t find it!

— What are you looking for? asked Samuel, with a touch to his shoulder.

Lucio Negri turned around. Recognizing us, he vented his anger:

— It’s your fault! he shouted. An “immortal soul,” you used to say in Saavedra! Don’t make me laugh! I’ve looked for the soul, am still looking for it. And I can’t find it, it doesn’t exist. Look for yourselves! See if you can find it!

And in a fit of rage he started throwing the human organs he’d just pulled out at our heads.

— Take at look there! he roared. If you find an immortal soul, send me a letter! Two-bit charlatans! A soul!

Full of hypocritical commiseration, Samuel Tesler turned to us:

— Poor wretch! He’s confusing the soul with a kidney ulcer.

Lucio’s shouting had caught the attention of the other scalpel-operators, and their work being interrupted, they noticed us. Then a fat surgeon took the floor:

— Esteemed colleagues. For now, I’ll not comment on the intrusion of these profane persons into this sanctuary. The three fine young gentlemen who have barged into this room are not, as far as I can see, in pre-operatory condition, for which reason I hold them in profound disdain and consider them unworthy of the electric scalpel. But, dear colleagues, the day will come, thanks to our scientific fervour, when all humanity will be in pre-operatory condition, from newborn babes to old men with one foot in the grave. And what I’ve just affirmed is not a vow, but a prophecy.

A salvo of applause burst forth from the grandstand, and excited voices rang out:

— That’s what I call a speech!

— A real master!

— Shhh! Shhh! Listen!

The fat surgeon resumed his peroration:

— My real purpose just now is to denounce before this College the strange conduct of our young student Lucio Negri. Prey to retrograde influences, he has regressed to the dark ages in the grip of a reprehensible mania; to wit, that of searching for a soul in the very anatomies this College has so generously put at his disposition.

Laughter and shouts resounded now:

— Reactionary!

— Throw him out of the College!

— Inexplicable anachronism!

The fat surgeon gestured impatiently for silence.

— No, my esteemed colleagues! he said. What worries me is not our young disciple’s fantasy or his anatomical soul-searching. My real fear — and I’m absolutely serious — is that by dint of searching Dr Lucio Negri may end up discovering it.

A wave of astonishment rippled over the surgeons and audience in the amphitheatre.

— What?

— The professor’s gone mad!

— What’s he saying?

The fat surgeon looked at them coldly:

— Doctors! he expounded sadly. With unspeakable sacrifices we have invented and disseminated a mystique of the body. You will recall that for centuries humanity witnessed a shameful spectacle: the Soul, duking it out with the Body, resorted to low blows. All to the great satisfaction of ugly theologians who, lounging in plush seats at ringside, presided over the boxing match, jeering at the Body and cheering like crazy for the Soul. Fortunately, we came along and set ourselves up as the Body’s trainers. By means of gargles, massages, and adulation, we managed to bring him around; and in the final rounds the Body got the Soul on the ropes and won by a clean knock-out.166 So now the Body is the idol of the multitudes. So successful was our rehabilitation of the body that all of humanity now depends on our scalpels. Have I got it right, or am I exaggerating?

— Right on, you’ve got it! came the exclamations from the stands.

— Well then, concluded the fat surgeon. What would happen if, thanks to treachery or madness in a few colleagues, the Soul came back into the ring and rained on our parade?167

Silence dominated the room for about half an hour:168 those present had trouble digesting the fat surgeon’s question. But once the lightbulb of comprehension lit up, all hell broke loose. The College fell en masse upon Lucio Negri, who was now struggling at the hands of the scalpel operators. Body parts fell down on us like a shower of projectiles. All was shouting, fighting, and confusion in the room.

We took our leave, Samuel out in front, Schultz and I bringing up the rear. The best thing might have been to escape through the bronze door out to the open air. But Samuel, who must have had his itinerary, led us to another door off in a corner. On it was a sign reading Do Not Enter. Ignoring the order, Samuel opened the door, ushered us through, and closed it stealthily behind him. Now we found ourselves in a room with tiled walls and a linoleum floor. Over to the left, someone was taking a shower, a little bald man with abundant body hair. To the right, a male nurse sat at an upright piano, languidly playing Schumann’s Traümerei. A roly-poly female nurse was bustling here and there, now laying out clothing or tending to the sterilizing apparatus, now observing the pianist or darting sharp glances toward the shower stall. At the back we could see the grille-door of an elevator.

When she saw us come in, the female nurse just about choked with rage:

— There’s a sign on the door! she yelled. How dare you interfere with Dr Aguilera when he’s preparing for work!

Samuel laughed abundantly, crowing between guffaws:

— So here we have the illustrious, the fantastic, the incomparable Dr Aguilera?

— Quiet! whispered the nurse. Dr Aguilera is about to go up to the Operating Room.

And indeed, the little man emerged sputtering from the shower. The nurse draped a towel around him, dried him from head to foot, sprayed eau de cologne on his furry torso, and finally handed him a pair of immaculate white trousers.

— Why are these men here,? said Dr Aguilera, looking at us askance. What are they doing here if their livers are in good shape?

The astrologer Schultz contemplated him unkindly:

— Dr Aguilera, he said. Have you forgotten a certain Señora Ruiz?

— A colossal specimen, recalled the little man as the nurse put two frightful surgical boots on his feet. Señora Ruiz may have looked timid, but she has given science the most disconcerting faecal bolus seen this century.

— Enough of the faecal bolus, grunted Schultz. Dr Aguilera, did you not poison that lady’s mind?

— How?

— Did you not declare, strutting before her like a peacock, what you would or would not have done if, instead of God, it had been up to you to organize the human body? Finding fault with the Creator — you, a dime-store demiurge!

Here Samuel Tesler laughed again, shaking his horned head:

— Dr Aguilera, he said. Describe for us your famous artificial heart with seven valves, or your gutta-percha lungs with the reinforced buttonhole.

But Dr Aguilera wasn’t listening for, at that moment, with all the majesty permitted by his stature, he was suffering the nurse to enfold him in a snow-white surgical gown.

— Liturgy? Schultz asked him bitterly. I see now the information I had was correct. Did you not reckon on how Señora Ruiz’s simple head would be turned by your surgico-religious ravings? Just thinking about it, I hardly know whether to laugh or cry. You imagined you were the Grand Priest of a cruel but necessary rite, and said as much. What a delicious shiver ran down Señora Ruiz’s vertebrae when you spoke to her of the Grand Priest’s morning preparations, your ritual shower, your pompous donning of the sacred robes — the surgeon’s boots, the virgin gown as yet unbloodied, the ominous gloves, the theatrical surgical mask — all reverently served up by acolytes mute as stones! All that was missing was the incense and organ music.

— No pipe organ, but I do have my piano, said Doctor Aguilera as he pulled on his surgical gloves. As for the incense, you’ve given me an idea and I’ll think it over in due course. Although I’d prefer Oriental sandalwood burning in censers.

Dr Aguilera was now fully dressed. At a silent order from the nurse, the pianist began to play the March from Handel’s Theseus. Dr Aguilera coldly saluted. Then, making an “O” with thumbs and index fingers, he proceeded as stately as a Grand Priest toward the elevator, already being opened by the nurse. As if communing with himself, Dr Aguilera stopped for moment at the door, then stepped inside. But the nurse, as though she’d forgotten an important detail, ran to snatch a rose from the vase on the piano, then rushed back to the elevator to hold it beneath the doctor’s nose. Hermetic, solemn, Dr Aguilera inhaled the rose’s perfume. Slowly the metal door closed: enclosed within the box, Dr Aguilera rose like a star in the heavens.

Back we went to the main room. The rumpus was over and done with, and the scalpel-operators had gone back to work. The bronze door invited us to vacate that slaughterhouse, and so we left it behind, on our way to new revelations of which I hadn’t yet the slightest inkling.

The fourth building Samuel showed us was non-descript on the outside, its architecture grey and neutral. But then the hornèd philosopher had us push our way through swinging doors like the ones in neighbourhood movie houses, and we found ourselves in an area of orchestra seats crammed with people silently waiting in front of the stage, its curtain drawn. Schultz, Tesler, and I went up to the front row and sat down in Pullman seats that wheezed and sighed under our weight. We were still getting settled, when a little man in a tuxedo came out on the proscenium and bowed:

— Ladies and gentlemen, he said, in a moment I’ll present to you the famous ventriloquist Professor Franky Amundsen, with his no less famous automaton Homo Sapiens. I hardly need draw your attention to the mastery of the one and the brilliance of the other, since man and puppet have conquered both continents, earning tremendous ovations, record box-office sales, and high praise in the press. Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please!

I promptly turned to Schultz and whispered in his ear:

— Didn’t we leave our comrade Franky in the Hell of Violence? Can he play a role in two places at once?

But the impresario left the proscenium, the public stirred in their seats, the curtain went up, and a truly deafening round of applause greeted Franky Amundsen. He came on stage dressed in tails, his face heavily powdered and looking more severe than solemn, carrying under his left arm a large puppet with moveable joints.

— Gentlemen, he said, the automaton I am honoured to introduce to you looks nothing like those hideous scarecrows^169 that some colleagues, against the dignity of our art, are wont to offer up to public derision in shabby little theatres. Gentlemen, in building my automaton, I’ve endeavoured to incarnate a mystery, the mystery of Homo Sapiens, that humble simian who, after a great deal of crawling around, one fine day got to his feet, raised his brow to the heavens, and soared to the loftiest heights of intelligence. Here you have Homo Sapiens: listen to him and be amazed. No need to fear fainting from the wonder of it, because in the vestibule we have a certified nurse standing by with first-aid kit and all, at the service of our honourable spectators.

Ignoring the fresh round of applause from the multitude, Franky Amundsen sat down on a stool, put the automaton on his lap, and felt around on its back for the hidden springs. The audience waited ecstatic; you could have heard a pin drop.

— Homo Sapiens! the ventriloquist addressed his puppet at last. Say hello to our audience!

The automaton raised his head, revealing a face in which a certain indefinable malice was depicted, then let his blinking eyes roam over the room.

— What’s this buncha good-for-nothings doing here? Why’re they gawking at me like I was from another planet?

— Say hello, Homo! insisted Franky.

— A gang of good-for-nothings! grumbled the puppet. Lemme at ’em so I can punch their lights out!

And, just like that, he tried to leap free into the audience. But Franky Amundsen held him back in mid-air and restored him to his knee. Settled once more, the automaton again let his gaze sweep over the spectators, as though looking for something. Suddenly he turned to Franky, gave him an unwholesome wink, and crowed in his ear:

— Did you get a load of the babe in the front row? What a pair of legs!

— Behave yourself, Homo! Franky reprimanded. We’re here to work.

— Lemme go chat her up! begged the puppet, and for the second time he tried to jump off the stage.

Meanwhile, the public was showing signs of great excitement. Noticing this, Franky Amundsen firmly placed the automaton on his knee and spoke to him thus:

— So, Homo, why don’t you treat these ladies and gentlemen to a few of your impressions of the Neozoic Era.

Obediently, Homo Sapiens arranged his facial features into an expression of innocent and crass bestiality.

— Me, Jumbo, poor monkey, he pronounced thumping himself on the chest. That Orang-utan real nasty: him eat bananas all day long and all day long make coochie-coochie with real pretty females, oooh! That Orangutan big tyrant: him no let Jumbo eat bananas, no let Jumbo make coochie-coochie, oooh! So Jumbo eat oysters and give shelled nuts to females. So Jumbo eat and Jumbo make coochie-coochie, oooh! That Orang-utan real stupid — him never become man.

He paused suddenly at this point, and resuming his normal demeanour, he cried out to one of the spectators:

— Hey, bub, gimme a tip on Sunday’s races!

— Gentlemen, explained Franky gravely. The exciting story my ward was recounting has just experienced some interference from civilization. You must have guessed that Jumbo and Orang-utan are two actors in the sublime drama of prehistory: Jumbo is the progressive monkey and Orangutan is the retrograde ape. Just imagine the incredible effort Jumbo had to make to finally arrive at the Morse Code! No doubt about it, it’s enough to bring tears to your eyes!

Here the ventriloquist pulled out a great purple handkerchief and daubed his weeping eyes. Religiously, with scientific decorum, the whole audience sobbed tenderly. Then Homo Sapiens winked at the blonde in the front row:

— Don’t cry, sweetie! he cried. I’ll take you out to the Pigalle: drinks, dancing, and “et cetera,” like that Frenchy used to say. And you, ya buncha namby-pambies, knock it off with the waterworks! Holy smokes, you’d think we were at a funeral!

After saying which, the puppet turned to Franky:

— Hey, how ’bout we blow this popstand and go get some drinks.

— Well then, gentlemen, announced Franky. Homo is now in the thick of civilization. But thanks to my art, we’ll make him go back to the time of the cavemen. Listen up, Homo! We want a scientific account.

The automaton sat up straight on Franky’s knees. He looked around, at once fierce and tender. Then he exclaimed:

— Brrr! I — Ach — draw reindeer on cave wall. Woman no sweep cave, woman let flank of mammoth burn, brrr! Woman covered in furs, still wants furs. Woman shave legs with flint knife. Ach hungry: mammoth flank burnt, brrr! Ach pick up club, Ach hit woman, Ach furious. Woman cry, woman sweep cave, woman roast mammoth flank. Ach eat, Ach give furs to woman, Ach draw reindeer in clean cave.

The puppet stopped talking, and Franky smiled at the enthralled public:

— Ah, gentlemen, what a portentous scene and what an admirable lesson in psychology we’ve just received from Ach, the primitive man. Very good, Homo! And now, tell them about the final stage. Dazzle them with the science of Homo Sapiens! Let them bust a gut in amazement!

The automaton cleared his throat, adopted an air of sovereign intelligence, and spoke thus:

— Okay, guys, here goes the speech. Want some advice? Don’t get your knickers in a knot; just take things nice ’n’ easy. What ya gotta do is salt away a few bucks. A nice apartment, a blonde on the side, and an eight-cylinder car to pick up broads in, that’s the life. Did I say something? If you wanna know my opinion, French cuisine ain’t what it used to be, vitamin-wise. Take care of your stomach, and the rest is literature. Stick with permanganate until they discover sulfonamides. Listen, guys…!

— Enough! ordered Franky, covering the puppet’s mouth.

— Watch out for the spirochaetes!170 concluded the automaton in a strangled cry.

At that moment, Samuel Tesler got to his feet and, with all eyes on him, spoke thus:

— Ladies and gentlemen, I would be remiss in my duty if I were to endorse through guilty silence the vile things just said here. The individual calling himself Professor Amundsen is a knave of the worst ilk, a blasphemous puppeteer who, respecting neither the divine nor the human, brazenly traffics in his own shamelessness and the naivety of others. He’s as much a professor as I am an archbishop: truth be told, this two-bit actor scarcely got past the ABCs of even rudimentary studies; and his readings have never gone beyond the detective genre, which is no doubt where he acquired the abominable penchant for truculence you’ve just witnessed.

Hearing such harsh words, the audience was stunned. And Franky Amundsen, leaving his automaton on the floor, seemed to fall into deep sadness:

— Fine, he sighed at last. That’s how the artificer is rewarded, gentlemen! Rack your brains to come up with a work of art! Bust your ass studying the most obscure sciences! Then, sure enough, some benighted bonze will come along and spit most foully on the delicate rose of genius!

More sad than indignant, Franky got to his feet, picked up his automaton, and put him under his arm:

— Gentlemen, he concluded, pointing at Samuel Tesler. That man and I cannot be in the same room.

And he initiated an extremely honourable exit. But at last the audience reacted: they exploded into irate shouting and shook menacing fists at Samuel, who was yelling back without being heard. At that point, the astrologer and I stood up. Taking the hornèd philosopher in tow, we dragged him away kicking and screaming as we fled the hall and the hissing and booing of the crowd.

Once we were back out on the street, I refused to visit any more infernal buildings. In the last two, we had again encountered a violence I didn’t like, and I told Samuel so, in polite but no uncertain terms. Hearing this, the philosopher guided us into a garden or park filled with flowers so oversized as to quite astonish me. We were looking for the way out of the garden, and thought we’d found it, when a gigantic insect landed in a heap at our feet. It shook the dust from its bedraggled wings, managed to straighten up into an almost human posture, and stood looking at us for a moment.

Simply, unexpectedly, the monstrous creature told us its name: Don Ecuménico. The astrologer didn’t bat an eye, and Samuel Tesler’s gaze remained steady. I alone showed signs first of consternation and then of amazement, not so much because of the creature’s unusual name, scarcely blameworthy for its wholly innocent archaism, but rather for the astounding fact that a humble beast, little more than a worm with wings, was actually talking to us. That’s why, ignoring its name, I began to examine the physical details of that insect whose pretensions to humanity were, in my view, quite ludicrous. Its head was something like that of a common butterfly, with a pair of protruding, multi-faceted eyes, two fuzzy palpi, and a spiral-proboscis that rhythmically extended and retracted. However, I soon noticed a disturbingly human expression peering out from those bestial features, and an intelligent light flashing in those faceted eyes. Next came the thorax; from it sprouted feeble little legs and vast wings covered in yellow, red, and blue powder, clouds of which were shaken loose at the slightest tremor of the wings. Finally, there was the abdomen: its thick-ringed form still bore the imprint of the worm it had once been before it acquired its flying apparatus. A granular pollen of unhealthy hue fouled its head and thorax, as though the ungainly creature had entered a hundred prohibited flowers, brushing past poisonous stamens to get at accursèd nectars. But most disconcerting of all, the freakish thing had a story to tell, and it recounted its tale not just shamelessly but with gusto, which in my view was not at all appropriate in a talking bug, even if its name was Don Ecuménico.

— To understand my situation, the creature began, one ought to recall the ancient metamorphoses described in memorable pages by Ovid, Apuleius, and Lucian. Contrary to what lacklustre scholarly tradition has maintained, the theme of metamorphosis belongs not only to the classical mind, but to all men gifted with metaphysical antennae who intuit the possibility or risk of a transformation in the permanence of their being and in the ephemeral quality of their human structure. Now then, a metamorphosis may be a mere exchange of forms undertaken as naturally and innocently as the serpent changes its skin every year. Or it can be a mutation extraordinarily imposed as a punishment. My metamorphosis, gentlemen, is of the latter type.

After this exordium, the wingèd bug who gave his name as Don Ecuménico paused. I won’t say his initial tone was pedantic, irritating, or smugly pompous, since such nuances of expression are not easy to detect in a voice issuing from a ridiculous spiral-proboscis. What I will affirm, without risking injustice, is that when Don Ecuménico spoke of “punishment” his tone was shamelessly cold and academic, with none of the contrition that would have been good to hear from a creature thrown by the gods into the eighth circle of an inferno, even if such a creature was a laughably gawky butterfly with a name rusted out from sheer age.

— I was born in the barrio of San José de Flores,171 the insect continued. My father was a dour watchmaker from Turin, and my mother a tender young Spanish woman. I was the youngest of three brothers — the weakest, the odd-one-out in that abode of precisely ticking clockwork. We lived in a big old house; the workshop gave onto the street, and the other rooms were immense. Behind the wisteria-canopied patio was a wild backyard that my mother insisted on calling the “garden,” which was really a dense thicket of trees, creepers, and weeds crammed together in the tightest of brotherhoods. Not without anguish do I recall how I lived out my childhood in my father’s workshop (a room full of tick-tocks, monotone chimes, pendulums swinging obsessively, circular clocks chattering the hour, shouting out the hour, in dehumanized unanimity); or the rooms in the old house, always abuzz with conversations and games I didn’t share in; or the tangle of the garden, where my solitude found shelter and roundly ripened like a delicious fruit. I was barely nine years old, and — unlike most children, who embrace the strong, sweet, well-painted illusion of worldly things — I was already fretting with doubts and fears, guessing at secret realities behind what seemed to me the deceitful veil of actuality. So in my eyes the world was a concurrence of forms and deeds uncertain in nature, inexplicable, gratuitous, and thus always frightening. I recall that my metaphysical distrust grew to the point that I came to doubt the regularity of natural phenomena, and more than once woke up with my heart pounding in the grip of fear, suspecting that when I opened my eyes I’d be in another world, surrounded by different objects and abominable entities. Of course my childish intuitions never found any expressive outlet; rather, they made me sad and heartsick; my emotional excess tended to find release in tearful outbursts impossible to hold back, especially at the family dinner table when suddenly, inexplicably, the meal would strike me as the saddest and most absurd of human rites. Then, when asked to explain my tears, I wouldn’t know what to say and would doggedly cling to silence, which only made my father grunt his displeasure, my brothers poke fun at me, and my mother smile and favour me with a look full of kindly divinations. Later on, wanting to avoid the humiliation of that mockery and scolding, I invented for my tears a series of such far-fetched causes that, rather than convincing anyone, they only increased the already considerable notoriety of my “sob-fests.” Less abstract episodes contributed as well to the strange reputation that had grown around my sensitivity. I recall that my father, who as a good watchmaker was enthusiastic about new mechanical inventions, had bought one of the first phonographs to come to Buenos Aires. It was a shrill monster, with its nickel-plated horn and its metal mandrel into which one inserted a hollow cylinder etched with the song of one’s choice. Among the recordings my father had amassed, there was one that made the primitive phonograph my torture machine — a Spanish carcelera with a jailbird’s dark tale. The first lines went like this:

Because I killed a woman

I got the ultimate sentence;

the king’s signed the order

and my suffering begins

manacled to a chain.172

Whether it was the sad story, the heart-rending melody, the prisoner’s mournful voice, or all three together distorted by the rudimentary mechanism, the fact was that from the first hearing I got choked up and couldn’t hold back my sobs. As usual, the initial surprise among the family was followed by my brothers’ laughter and my father’s indignation. The good watchmaker, who loved experimental science, insisted on playing the carcelera a few more times; realizing that it invariably produced the same effect on me, he gave up on the experiment, certain he had come up against the unintelligible. But — alas! — my brothers had caught on: for months on end, with the meticulous cruelty of children, they spied on my soul, picked my happy moments, rushed to the phonograph, and forced me to hear the carcelera. And this, with mathematical precision, activated my crying mechanism.

”I don’t know if those childish manifestations were signs that I had a curiously premature “tragic sense of life.”173 And as this suspicion forms in my mind, I recall another childhood episode, also considered funny, though not by me. Every year at Christmas, my mother made us all write greeting cards to our Aunt Ursula in the town of Rauch. The cards showed a dove carrying a message in its beak, and one year my mother urged us to write a “thought” as was the custom in those days. My brothers resorted to commonplaces like “Fly, little card, fly!” or the phrase “When you open this card” followed by the appropriate good wishes. I, however, after chewing a good while on the tip of my pen, wrote the following aphorism in the upright, well-rounded hand for which I was praised:

Whatever they may say,

Death isn’t as terrible

as it’s made out to be.174

”Don’t imagine, however, that my childish soul systematically ignored calls of joy. I too heeded the periodic seasons of pleasure and easily surrendered to their madness. But, by dint of self-observation, I then noticed that mine were always anticipatory joys, pleasures that withered before reaching maturity. Among the kids in the barrio, for example, I was the one who prepared the effigies to be burned in the famous bonfire at the Fiesta de San Juan.175 Gentlemen, what preludes of jubilation my heart would sing as I stuffed old clothes with paper and wood shavings, painted faces on the puppets, and stuffed their big goofy heads with the fireworks whose explosion would signal the end of the bonfire! But the long-awaited night would arrive; the kids would gather a heap of combustible objects; I would place my puppets on top; the bonfire would rise up amid the deafening shrieks of kids dancing around the crackling flames; and I, with one foot already on the threshold of happiness, would suddenly grow still and feel my heart shrivel like a leaf as I stood by the fire of Saint John the Baptist. The upshot was that I’d creep away surreptitiously to look on from afar, the rejoicing of the other children now strange and incomprehensible to me. The build-up to Carnival likewise aroused my expectations of joy. I had a clown suit. A few days before the fiesta, my mother would fetch it from the trunk to air it out and give it the ritual ironing. You can’t imagine how I trembled with anticipated happiness at the tinkle of the costume’s bells, the smell of its cloth, the capricious designs on what was meant to be the livery of my shenanigans. Finally the great Sunday of Sundays would arrive. Along with my brothers — they too donning costumes and glass beads — I would stuff myself into my tinkling disguise and let my face be daubed with vermillion, cobalt, and burnt cork, as though in liturgical solemnity. Then I took off into the street, my imagination teeming with the pirouettes and antics I’d perform, the crazy things I’d say before the astonished eyes of the crowd. But once outside, face to face with the already gleeful and noisy multitude, I would suddenly feel my heart shrink, a strange internal chill abruptly deadening the effervescence of my enthusiasm. Slumping down on the doorstep of our house, there I would sit, still and alone, my chin resting on my fist, my wandering gaze observing in the others the elation of soul which seemed, alas, to be systematically denied me.

”Nevertheless, I wasn’t what they call a “a man without a childhood.” In my imagination I too lived those boyhood adventure stories that fill us with longing for the faraway. Especially in the seclusion of the tangled thicket of the back garden, where I played at Robinson Crusoe on his island, savouring the taste of paradise. My maritime adventures took place on an old, dislodged trunk-lid; aboard this ship of mine, I set sail for fabulous unnamed seas, singing made-up barcaroles or menacing pirate songs. My heroic experience was limited to a single episode, a fanciful version of the Battle of San Lorenzo; playing the role of Sergeant Cabral, from the roof of the chicken coop, I’d keel over and flop down onto a gutted, cast-off mattress, crying out his historic words: “I die content, we’ve beaten the enemy!” One time, my brothers tricked me by pulling away the mattress, and my heroics were dashed, to my great chagrin, on hard tiles of the patio.

The insect paused again at this point. I had closed my eyes to avoid the contrast between the touching human story and the bestial face recounting it. Reopening them, I found myself once more in front of the mobile spiral-proboscis, along with two faceted eyes regarding me in way I’d have to call… well, tender. Perhaps Don Ecuménico (if that really was the prodigious bug’s name) was waiting for a question, an objection, any sound at all from us that might encourage him to carry on with his story. He waited and hoped in vain, for none of us had ever conversed with a beast. His hope exhausted, he continued:

— If I’ve gone on about my childhood longer than I should have, my intention was that you glimpse in those episodes the beginnings of an uncommon personality, or the dawn of a soul whose intuitions and longings might have found expression in metaphysics or art, had they been channelled at the opportune moment. Unfortunately, no one in my home detected those revelatory clues; and my soul, its natural impulses repressed, was henceforth docile material for the sin that much later would launch it on the most curious of metamorphoses. But I’m getting ahead of events, and the sinister House of Books is still far ahead in my story.

”My childhood days came to an end. My two brothers acceded to my father’s wish and were initiated into the intricacies of the watchmaker’s trade. Averse to all manual work, and having no other skill than my elegant handwriting and a headful of useless knowledge, I was assigned to a desk at a nearby sawmill. Nothing from those adolescent years has stayed in my memory except a slight recollection of monotonous duty, the sensation of impalpable sawdust getting into our noses and mouths, a taste of tannin on the tongue, and two or three brutish faces gone grey and murky with time. Truth be told, my life story really only picks up again at a precise moment: when as a young man I met Dolores. I’ve forgotten the circumstances of that wonderful encounter, but at the time I had no doubt that for all eternity some studious angel had been pulling strings behind the screen of events so that Dolores and I would meet face to face at a certain place and time with the mathematical exactitude of an astral conjunction. Dolores had blond hair as warm and fragrant as ripened wheat swaying in the sun. Her green eyes were the colour of willow reflected in still waters, and my mother would have said her face bore the sun on one cheek and the moon on the other. If love were a woodturner, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that the maiden’s arms had been turned on the very lathe of love. I can’t describe her further, since Dolores was for me only a face, two arms, and a blue dress whose secret I dared not unveil even in imagination: so pure, back then, were my eyes, and so chaste the nature of my love! But what unprecedented shivers, what delicious presentiments of delight! And at the same time, what unspeakable anguish was caused me by the revelation of that woman! Gentlemen, in evoking this puerile story, I tell myself that man has an essentially metaphysical capacity for love: man’s love is a wing of love that errs, and wounds and defiles itself in this world, because it is a wing created only to ply the heavens. At first, there was nothing between Dolores and me but an exchange of artificial words and eloquent silences. The second revelation came to me when I received her first verses of poetry, written on pink paper and signed “Dolores”; the sentiment in her name moved me to the depths of my soul.176 Never had I heard words as musical and sorrowful as those in her poem; reading them again and again, I seemed to hear the exultation of a soul lost in this world of sawdust and smoke, a soul finding its twin, crying out in jubilation, and already casting a shadow of dire premonitions. Sure that Dolores was a creature more divine than human, I decided to rise to her level and respond by writing her my own verses. So I stayed up nights counting syllables and searching out impossible rhymes. Such grand work came to occupy my whole day, as I sat at the grimy desk in the sawmill under the inquisitive gaze of my three office-mates, Mouse Face, Ox Face, and Fox Face, all of them entertaining serious doubts about my mental health. The draft of my poem finished, I would type it out on the ancient office Remington; though rheumatic from so many bills and memoranda, the old machine, under my fingers, seemed fairly to trot with gallant lyricism. Dolores received my hymn and responded with a madrigal that left me speechless: thus did we begin a poetic dialogue whose sublimity alienated me from the terrestrial globe and made me forget the most elemental dictates of prudence. One day, as I was typing out a few stanzas on the old Remington, the sawmill manager caught me: he tore the paper out of the machine and turned red as he perused it. Without even opening his mouth, he pointed a righteous index finger at the door; Mouse Face, Fox Face, and Ox Face blanched, silently witnessing the catastrophe. It’s true that I lost my job, but on the other hand, after a brief storm at home, I felt free to devote my time entirely to the cultivation of ideal love, to encounters with the sublime woman, and above all to our exchange of poems, which promptly became frenetic. I soon discovered that it was in this lyrical correspondence that all the charm of our idyllic relationship lay. Dolores and I met less and less often, for shorter and shorter visits. The fact was that in face-to-face encounters, we had little to say to each other; on the contrary, physical proximity hindered rather than favoured the subtle commerce taking place between our souls. Given this state of affairs, I began to avoid meeting her, my interest limited to the musical epistles brought me twice a week by the mails. Dolores’s eventual disappearance was as mysterious as Dolores herself: the stream of lyrical messages simply stopped one day. I looked for her in vain, made inquiries among her neighbours. True to her enigmatic nature, Dolores had vanished without a trace. I won’t tell you now about all the weeping, idolization, and sleeplessness the eclipse of that woman caused me; nor how adoringly I applied myself to rereading and worshipping her admirable poems written on pink paper. Years later, in the sinister House of Books, I discovered that Dolores had cribbed her verses from Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer;177 and I forgave her sincerely, from the bottom of my memories. What I still haven’t forgiven Dolores is that her mysterious disappearance (which had me dreaming of an abduction by angels) was linked, as I was told later, to her sudden marriage for money to an obese importer of wines.

Here, Don Ecuménico (beast, man, or whatever he was) paused, apparently in silent communion with his memories. In the second part of his talk, I’d detected a dash of irony, a goodly dollop of rapture, and quite a bit of resentment, all of which made me realize that his spiral-proboscis was getting excited. Then he took up his tale again:

— My adolescence was over, and I entered manhood with vigour. One thing and another led me to a career as an insurance broker — a perilous occupation. But I made a go of it, helped along perhaps by my rich imagination, or by the eloquence acquired through my epistolary dialogues with Dolores. My tendency to abstract thought waned little by little; concurrently, I felt as if roots sprouted avidly from the bottom of my being, sinking proboscis-like and absorbent deep into the humus of life, into the juicy matter of humanity, into the concrete clay of actuality. Then I met Raimunda and fell cautiously in love with her. Our marriage was a paragon of circumspection: if Dolores had been like a daydream with all the trappings, Raimunda seemed like the living image of reality, with its inflexible but reassuring laws, its horizon limited but secure. Raimunda was like a plot of good earth to be ploughed and fertilized for a harvest of flowers and fruits, and upon whose breast one lays oneself down to rest deeply, the way children and farmers do. And I clung to that earth and her continuance in children; gradually, I renounced my own being and its non-transferable longings, in order to live the life of those around me, to care for the sleep of others, to suffer their sorrows and witness their joys. Then I made an observation and discovered a truth. I observed that, through love, all my rights had been turned into duties. I discovered that, by loving and extending the life of that earth, I had only enlarged my territory of sorrow and my area of vulnerability.

”Nonetheless, a solid world had formed around me. My day began with Raimunda bustling about and the kids squealing happily; it ended in a to-and-fro of children’s potties and the sixth edition of a daily paper, mechanically read. Between these two parentheses, I sold insurance, negotiated contracts, rushed up and down streets, climbed staircases, encountered faces and voices, always the same ones. The upshot was that, through sheer repetition, I gained a blind faith in the stability of that little universe. And suddenly, when I believed most firmly in that stability, death set to work — unannounced, with no logic, stupidly, like a blind reaper who’d snuck into a wheatfield and indiscriminately hacked at green stalks and ripe ones alike. But the scythe cut and cut: the wife and a boy-child were felled. I still wonder what terrible laws or what dark necessity required that extraordinary destruction.

A tremor became perceptible in the narrating voice. I looked at the insect’s face; moisture was condensing around his polyhedron eyes, swelling into a big, round teardrop. A moment later, every trace of sentimentality had been erased from his face, and Don Ecuménico assumed an air of abstraction, as though his story was about to enter the arid terrain of geometry:

— After my home had come tumbling down around me, he continued, I went through a period of death-like stupor. As I said earlier, by renouncing my being I had taken on the form of the creatures I loved. No sooner was I alone than I found myself in a disconcerting situation. On the one hand, I was now without my ego, which had been converted into love for others; but on the other hand, I could hardly go looking for it beyond the frontier of death in the creatures I’d loved, now rapidly decomposing to bits, remnants of the flesh of my flesh. That state did not last long, naturally. In having a family, I had embarked on a movement of dispersion, or alienation. There now followed a movement of concentration, thanks to which — in an evil hour! — I was able, in solitude, to recuperate my powers. I then began to reflect on the mysterious cause, the invisible motor that so easily built up and tore down the things of this world. In childhood, thanks to my mother’s zeal, I’d acquired the idea of a God who rules his creatures with love; I even recall making quite a fervent first communion. That notion had persisted in my soul, but like a seed that does not find favourable soil, its power to germinate remained latent. And now the seed was sprouting within me, unfolding leaves and extending roots — not with the carefree innocence of my early years, however, but as though under the querulous surveillance of a mad gardener. My recent experience, coloured by a resurgence of the metaphysical mistrust that had tormented my childhood, made me see in the decay and mutability of things an obscure sin, now urgently in need of redemption. At the same time, I no longer saw the merciful, benevolent face of God, but rather his harshness, and now feared him as an unknown force or an enraged Demiurge to be mollified and contained through self-mortification. To that end, I took up a life of penance as exacting as it was absurd. For everyone else, I was still Don Ecuménico the insurance broker, the guy who worked the same old pitch, the same jokes and witticisms, all of which had become second nature for me. But now my wit was an automatic reflex, my quips mechanical. In my own eyes, I was a chastened soul who no longer took part in the illusory game of the world, who closed his eyes to deceitful images and his ears to phantom allures; a man who systematically repressed, in his skin, smell, and taste, the tendency of the senses to be carried away by the grand deception of worldly things.

”And so, without knowing it, I imitated the ancient ascetics and eventually came round to an act that others had once made sublime and which in my case turned out to be a miserably sad comedy: self-flagellation. I recall, not without shame, the first time I stood before the ironic mirror in my room and coolly stripped down; still cool, I gave myself fifteen or twenty lashes to the buttocks with an old belt, a gift from Raimunda, its steel buckle engraved with my initials. The still silence of midnight, the ascetic cold of my room, the indignant astonishment of my body groaning under the lashes, and the satisfaction of my triumphant soul all produced in me a certain intoxication that faded into tranquil slumber. The acts of flagellation continued the following nights. But it wasn’t long before I noticed that, far from leading me to great revelations, those belt-blows were degenerating into a glacial mechanism, and that my intoxication was limited to a certain prideful complacency. Later, I noticed in alarm I was no longer alone in my chamber of self-torment; invisible eyes were following every one of my gestures, malevolent voices were whispering here and there, abominable laughter erupted and subsided in the corners. At last I realized how dangerous and absurd my game was, when not conducted under the tearful gaze of the angels. Meanwhile, news of my penitence had leaked into the rooming house I lived in then — it was run by a miserable harpy ironically named Doña Consuelo.178 Apparently, through the thin walls, my neighbours’ ears had picked up the swish-swash of nocturnal whippings and caught snippets of the monologues I unconsciously muttered to spur myself on. Alarming rumours were circulating, glances and knowing gestures were exchanged, until finally the painful truth came out: “Don Ecuménico has gone bonkers.” Thanks to my remaining shred of prudence, I renounced the belt-lashings and recovered my sanity. It didn’t require any big effort. Once again I let myself drift on the dreary river of happenstance. But my struggle with the Divinity wasn’t over, merely postponed: it resumed when I entered the sinister House of Books and met the Librarian Who Peered Out from Hazy Distances.

Don Ecuménico, that incredible bug, paused theatrically. He’d cackled these last words in a tone that rang pitifully false, redolent of who knows what rancid literatures; and yet his words resonated with poetry and humour as well. Then he continued:

— It was some demon that led me by the hand to the House of Books, no doubt about it. A venerable old Buenos Aires mansion with an oil-painted facade and barred windows, it looked the most innocent place in the world. As the Librarian Who Peered Out from Hazy Distances later told me, the philanthropic founder of that species of institute had gathered there tome upon tome, in the grip of a strange compulsion — perhaps the passion of a genius or a miser who mindlessly amasses his treasure; or perhaps simply the collectionist mania of the empty man who mechanically fills the hours of his day. The bust of the Founder, moreover, graced the hall of the library; and I can assure you neither his marble features nor his hollow eyes nor his clothing, which the sculptor had respected right down to the tie pin, allowed me to discern whether the man had been an intellectual or an idiot.

”The first reading room was devoted to children, and was usually populated by a legion of restless brats fidgeting among their childish papers under the bovine gaze of a woman security guard whose neckless head appeared to be screwed directly into a torso exuberant in its haunches and udders. The second room was spacious, with ceiling-high stacks, comfortable reading tables, and ancient woodcuts on the walls; there I met the Librarian Who Peered Out from Hazy Distances; and there, in a clear well-lit space, I first tested my mettle as a reader, not suspecting the future disaster in store for me as a result of this innocent exercise. Let me clarify that Room Number Two specialized in literary works — novels, plays, and poetry lined its shelves. And I began to devour everything, my soul wading in up to its knees in those fictitious worlds. But, gentlemen, I had previously renounced the deceitful parade of images, passions, and sentiments that constitute a human existence — and what did literature do, if not multiply those images, stylize the passions, and fictionally prolong the colourful lie of worldly things? Yes, yes! What my being longed for was to live within a hermetic cube, amid figures and solids invented by geometry, and to surrender myself to abstract ideas, where not even the ghost of a rose might intrude! I had a fight pending with the Eternal, and I could only fight it on enemy territory, which is to say, on the wide, glacial, silent plains of the Abstract. That was when, without intending to, I began to look at the little padded door.

”It was a neatly quilted little door; an insignificant little door off in one corner of the second room; an almost invisible little door, like the ones concealed in catacombs, pyramids, and secret alchemical fortresses. It was quite plausible that behind the little door lay only a poky little storage room filled with brooms, feather dusters, and the like. But if that was the case, why the severe padding on the little door? For an entire week I obsessed over this mystery. Finally, I resolved to sound out the Librarian Who Peered Out from Hazy Distances. The Librarian was a man of indeterminate age with no discernible tendencies, a strictly neutral man about whom nothing could be affirmed or denied. He was enveloped in the deep but calming silence of plants; he expressed no emotion, ever. His cold, moist eyes seemed to slide over things, alas, smoothly, without penetrating them, the way a stream slips over pebbles. Was he dull-witted, or was some secret concealed within the reserve of that obscure man? When I gently broached the subject of the little door, the Librarian, as I recall, remained stubbornly mute. But hadn’t two strange glints flashed in his eyes? Be that as it may, he turned on his heels without a word and returned to his metal filing cabinets. The next day I again asked about the door, and again the man listened to me with vegetable indifference. But this time something began to slacken inside him, something like a strict resolve that has not quite decided to relax. At last, as distant as ever, he proffered these four words: What do you seek? He uttered them with a sort of tired, rusty voice, as though for all eternity he’d had no other mission than to ask of men: What do you seek? Then, in a fit of trustingness, I told him all. And the Librarian Who Peered Out from Hazy Distances listened for a long while, as coldly as a pair of scales that receives and registers weights. He didn’t encourage me to tell my tale; neither did he approve or disapprove of its terms. When I finished, he made no comment at all, turned his back on me, and went back to his olive-green filing cabinets. But the following day, that fateful man, that inscrutable man, that absurd man opened the little padded door for me; and he did so as mechanically as a guard, without breaking his silence, not a single line of his face stirring.

”Behind the little door loomed a foggy space lit by a kind of glass skylight whose near opacity might have been due to the caretakers’ negligence or just to the ineluctable grime that time continuously deposits on things destined to die. But once accustomed to the ghostly light, I observed not neglect but a state of almost exaggerated order reigning in Room Number Three. Against the walls rose the imposing architecture of three full bookcases. Opposite the skylight was a desk of carved wood, furnished with a lectern, an ancient friar’s chair, and a green lamp. The floor was covered by a large carpet, which swallowed the sound of footsteps and seemed to admonish one to use stealth. Neither paintings nor prints distracted one’s eyes; on the contrary, the furniture, books, rug, even the sky-blue damask covering the walls had lost their original colours and faded to a single tone, indefinite, shabby, dead. Such was Room Number Three, the room hidden behind the little door, the laboratory of a risible transformation, of an evil without glory, of the obscure metamorphosis you behold in me now. But what abomination lurked in that room?

”In Room Number Three, the Founder had collected thick, stiff-spined volumes with yellowed pages: books containing all the illuminations of the soul, all the mad flights of the intellect, all the prudent discourses of reason and the blasphemous audacities come up with by mortal man in his attempts to plumb the Absolute. Well then, gentlemen, I was seeking the Absolute, whether on the wings of love or of rancour, I wasn’t too sure; and I threw myself into reading those books with a voracity that grew keener every time I found an image of what I felt or an answer to my old inner questions. And, sure enough, it was a well-laid road to perdition.

”Before telling you what happened in Room Number Three, I must explain something about the insurance broker called Don Ecuménico, still subsisting within me. At first, my incursions into the Mansion of Books took place in the afternoon and evening. In the mornings, I’d take a run through the oyster beds of my clientele, then rush to the office, deposit the fruits of my labour, and make myself scarce until the next morning. Even though my new work habits weren’t exactly orthodox, I was still good enough at my job that the company didn’t get alarmed; I brought in the normal amount of business, and nobody asked what Don Ecuménico was up to when he was off work. But things changed after the revelation of the little door and what lay behind its precious quilting. I would read till nightfall, at which point the Librarian would drive me out. Then I’d eat something at my rooming house; meals took place amid phantom faces, with me chewing away on Doña Consuelo’s stews along with the latest problem I’d brought from Room Number Three. After supper, I went straight to bed, and the problem bedded down with me, getting into my dreams, keeping me awake, gnawing at my grey matter, and finally releasing me at the threshold of the new day. Exhausted in body and soul, I went back to my morning rounds; but an unspeakable force dragged me against my will back to the Mansion of Books, a force I struggled with for a long time before it finally overcame me. At first I gave in once a week, then twice, finally three times. At the Insurance Company, astonishment and consternation reigned. They began by gently admonishing me, then came the bitter tirades, and then a shameful dismissal that left me jobless and without benefits. Fortunately, I had my savings and lived a very frugal life. I decided then to steer clear of all occupations except the one that took me, morning and afternoon, to Room Number Three. For my bliss was now summed up in the following luxuries: to sense, with a shiver of pleasure, the little door closing discreetly behind me; to feel how my soul opened its petals to the unreal luminosity coming from the skylight; to breathe in the odour of bindings, ancient papers, and disinfectants against gnawing insects; to place a book on the lectern and then wrestle with the Divinity, in a struggle of unequal arms but inebriating in that very disparity.

”It was a marvellous road to perdition! It was a mortal leap of pride, in three somersaults which I will now briefly describe:

”First somersault: Immersing myself in the texts of orthodox theologians, I go back to the infantile notion of a Divinity who regards us tenderly. I weep with love over the delectable old pages. I fall into an unctuous piety that makes me laugh at my former self-flagellation and leads me now into subtle ways of temptation. Yesterday, as I passed through the children’s room, I caressed the dear little head of a child cutting out figures; today I looked at the jugs of the woman security guard with the merest hint of indulgence. Careful, Don Ecuménico! Watch out for the big lie!

”Second somersault: I’m now devouring the big series of books in folio format. Strange conceptions about the Divinity. What’s this? God is no longer absolutely impassive, but rather the Being obliged to exteriorize his possibilities of manifestation! And I, Ecuménico, am one of those possibilities! Bravo, Ecuménico! That’s putting it to the old boy Up There! Give’m the old one-two! I go striding around Room Number Three. Then I stand in front of the skylight and let fly with a metaphysical speech that rattles its glass panes. The Librarian from hell unexpectedly comes in, glances around, and goes away. He hasn’t noticed anything, or pretends not to notice!

”Third somersault: a ravenous hunger has me exploring the moth-eaten tomes shelved in the stacks at the back. I laboriously reconstruct lines of prose riddled with holes. And my mind is dazzled, it staggers, it lurches into unfathomable abysses. Great God, what has your vast divinity been reduced to! They used to say you were Being, beyond which nothing existed. And now it turns out there is a Non-Being anterior to you, a Non-Being fabulously rich in metaphysics, a Non-Being of which you are only an affirmation! How brainy those damned Orientals are! Laugh, Ecuménico! And, sitting on the friar’s chair, I laugh my head off, long and loud, till I’m weeping and sniffling with laughter. What a victory, Ecuménico! A lowly insurance broker! And again the Librarian comes in, examines the room, and turns back. He’s heard nothing, or pretends he’s heard nothing.

Here the infernal bug paused, panting. Madness flamed and sparked in his faceted eyes; his spiral-proboscis, completely out of control, alternately slackened and wound itself back up; his thorax was thudding erratically, and a slimy sweat oozed from the fat rings of his abdomen. Then he began to speak in an insufferably shrill, pedantic voice:

— Silence, everyone! Here begins the Book of Don Ecuménico’s Transformations. A hurrah for Being, and two more for Non-Being! Hip-hip-hurrah! Would anyone care for a cup of ambrosia bottled and zealously sealed by the Eternal?

He paused again, as if disoriented. Clearly, Don Ecuménico was raving and he knew it. With an effort of human will, he restored order to his agitated insectoid physique. Then he spoke thus:

— We come now, gentlemen, to the hardest part of my story. It’s no big deal to recount the metamorphosis of a soul, but to describe a body’s transformation is a monstrous task, and thankless to boot, for the narrator must deviate from the usual laws that govern the famous human biped and thus risk foundering on the reefs of his listeners’ incredulity.

”I’d be lying if I claimed to know at just what point my metamorphosis began, though I sometimes wonder if the transformation both in body and soul didn’t start at the same time and develop in tandem. My first clue that something was out of the ordinary was in the behaviour of the Librarian, about whose true identity — man or demon — I was beginning to have my doubts. He’d been in the habit of suddenly showing up in Room Number Three, slipping in stealthily with some excuse that poorly concealed his intent to spy on me; we would sneak oblique glances at one another, then he’d leave shrouded in his eternal air of indifference. But later I noticed that my man, upon entering, would stand there looking perplexed, his eyes searching the entire room until they located me. And yet, there I was, right in front of his nose, sitting as always in the same chair under the skylight! What was wrong with him? Was he going blind? Things came to such a pass that one morning, facing the Librarian, I had to shout to get him to notice my presence. I immediately questioned him about his eyesight — and I’ll never forget the needling irony in his voice when he assured me that it was excellent! I got worried. If there was nothing wrong with the man’s vision, it was logical to suppose that the cause of his optical aberrations wasn’t in him but in me. At once, a clear suspicion, an unutterable fear invaded me. I used to carry around this little mirror for the purpose of inspecting my teeth; well, I spent the better part of the morning fending off the temptation to look at my face in the mirror. Finally, half frightened, half curious, I overcame my qualms and took a look. At first, I couldn’t see my face at all. Straining my sight, I eventually picked out my eyes, nose, mouth, and hair, but they were faded and ghost-like. Then I observed my bottle-green suit, my blue overcoat, my chestnut shoes, and realized they too had lost their factory-made colours and had taken on the unique, indefinable, dead tone characteristic of all things in Room Number Three. No doubt about it! It was a case of mimetic adaptation, comparable to the way certain varmints adopt the ambient colour of the foliage, stones, or stagnant water of their habitat.

”Far from alarming me, the phenomenon redoubled my sense of security and so my confidence. By this point I was spending the whole day in Room Number Three, minus a fifteen-minute break to go out for a glass of milk with vanilla biscuits. My life had organized itself into two isochronic phases: one of metaphysical voracity, which inevitably declined into another of profound lethargy. The truth is, at first, under cover of my recently discovered invisibility, I had fun startling the Librarian, sneaking up on him and blowing a raspberry right in his ear. But finally that little game got boring, and I ended up giving myself over entirely to reading and sleeping. When night fell, I went home to the rooming house, my last link to the realm of men. But one day that link broke, too. It happened like this:

”After one of my spells of post-reading lethargy, I woke up as usual in Room Number Three, curled up in the leather armchair in the light of the green lamp. I stood up, went over to the skylight, and was surprised to discover that outside it was as dark and still as midnight. I opened the famous little door, went into the second room and then on to the children’s room: I roamed through the entire mansion. All was dark and empty, the doors locked, the balconies bolted. No doubt about it: the Librarian, at closing time, hadn’t found me in Room Number Three and, assuming I’d left, had inadvertently shut me up in the big deserted house. Midnight! Alone! The whole mansion was mine! You can’t imagine the dark rapture that came over me at this realization, the intellectual orgy to which I then abandoned myself throughout that night of nights. What legendary proportions, what mythological hues graced the poor little insurance broker called Don Ecuménico!

”From then on, I didn’t go back to my rooming house. I don’t know whether my definitive eclipse alarmed Doña Consuelo, whether she reported it to the police, or whether they looked for me in morgues and hospitals. Henceforth, day and night, Room Number Three was my only residence, the place of my banquets and fits of lassitude. I still went out for fifteen minutes a day to the dairy bar. But later I managed to do without those outings by stocking the pockets of my blue overcoat with enough chocolate, biscuits, and caramels to last me two weeks. Whether negligently or wisely, the Librarian almost never looked in on the room. Moreover, a hard winter had arrived and not many readers were coming to the library. Settled deep in my armchair, I listened to the pitter-patter of the rain on the panes of the skylight. My periods of being awake were growing shorter, my lethargies longer and deeper.

”One night I awoke with a start: in my soul I felt more lucid than ever before. But my body felt a tremendous weakness. I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep, and with increasing alarm I noticed my clothes were ridiculously big on me, my bottle-green suit was falling off my shoulders, my extremities were either no longer there or had shrunk prodigiously within their sleeves and trouser cuffs. Was it a nightmare or not? Careful! My intelligence was wide awake, my eyes registered no other reality than the very reassuring presence of Room Number Three, with its reading table, green lamp, familiar bookshelves, and the skylight drummed by the rain. And yet, it was as though I were tied to the armchair; something held me in place, an inertia dominating my little bit of a physique and prudently warning it against any attempt to stir! But I had no intention of staying stuck there like an oyster; come what may, I had to snap out of it and get back to my studies. Up you get, then, Ecuménico! Back to work! And when I tried to get up, the second revelation of the night occurred. I attempted to place my hands on the table and my feet on the floor, like any creature trying to stand up from a sitting position. But my arms and legs wouldn’t obey the order. Actually, it wasn’t just that my limbs weren’t responding; it felt as if they were no longer even there. As my body attempted to right itself, I lost my balance, tumbled out of the leather armchair, and fell in a muffled, insignificant little heap, the softness of my landing due, I thought, to the ample padding of my clothes. And what a pile of clothes! I felt trapped and suffocated inside them, as if a tent had fallen on top of me. Twisting and turning with a rather disconcerting flexibility, I clambered my way through the stack of familiar garments until I emerged into the light and saw myself naked on the carpet. And what I saw was certainly curious: Don Ecuménico, former insurance broker, had been transformed into a beautiful little creature with a vermiform body, a worm with plump rings gazing in wonder at his new structure!

”For you mustn’t think that the discovery of such an uncommon metamorphosis caused me the slightest hint of panic. True, I was concerned at first about what I imagined to be the awkward aspects of my new constitution. But when I crawled comfortably, and not without elegance, across the carpet; when I dared scale the walls with the same aplomb; when I crawled across the ceiling upside down, disdaining the daunting old laws of gravity; when I looked at things from hitherto unknown perspectives and measured the wealth of my new possibilities, then a joyous exultation came over me, lasting throughout the night until the break of day. But then, seeing daylight filtering through the skylight, I remembered the Librarian: would the blind man notice my scandalous transformation? There lay my clothing in a heap on the floor, the discarded garments recovering their original colours now that they’d left me. Inevitably, the Librarian would have to see them when he came to Room Number Three! Fortunately, I had a renewed attack of what I described earlier as infinite voracity, except that now it wasn’t for intellectual substances: I hungered for material solids, stuff I could gnaw on and swallow. So I ate up all my clothes. Then, returning to my leather armchair, I watched for the Librarian’s arrival. He came in at last, looked around vacantly, and left. Deo gratias!

”After that I devoted myself to the pleasant work of gnawing and physically devouring the volumes in the room, the luxurious bindings, the delicious gilt, the papers from Japan, Flanders, and Italy. I chomped away and surfeited myself as before, but now I did so at a bestial pace, given over to the rudimentary laws of hunger and sleep. Springtime went by, and the ravages to Room Number Three became alarming even to me. The Librarian, however, showed no sign of concern. At first his indifference reassured me at first, but it soon caused me a dull anger. That man or devil was trying to ignore me, or was pretending to ignore me! I decided to provoke him somehow: one day I crawled furtively into Room Number Two, climbed the hat rack, and ate the Librarian’s pearl-grey Stetson, which had no doubt cost him an arm and a leg. Returning to my domain, I awaited, not without emotion, the surely inevitable reprisals. But the Librarian acted as if nothing had happened; and so, going back to my feasting, I forgot all about him.

”I gorged myself and slept, my abdominal rings grew dangerously fat, and as I lay collapsed in the friar’s armchair I sensed that my periods of sluggishness were growing longer. The day finally arrived when I could no longer get out of the chair. I fought against lethargy, managed to wake up for a moment, then soon succumbed once again to my terrible drowsiness. My ringed body began to break out in cold sweats, and the sweat immediately hardened, until finally it formed a secure crust around me, a closed cocoon, an inviolable sleeping chamber. And I slept in my cocoon for a long time. Until one day I woke up, in the grip of unfamiliar impulses and a kind of mad strength. I turned within my narrow prison and at last scratched through the hard shell encircling me. I emerged fluttering, drunk on light, avid for heights. How ridiculously tiny was Room Number Three! I beat my wings, took flight, and bumped head first into the walls, the bookshelves, the ceiling, the closed skylight, as though the room were another cocoon and I had to break out of it, too. Then appeared the Librarian Who Peered Out from Hazy Distances: distracted as ever, draped in silence, with his vegetal indifference, his terrible apathy, that man, if indeed he was such, opened wide the skylight. And out I flew to the open air, only to descend into this Inferno.

Don Ecuménico had finished telling his story. He looked at each of our faces, fixedly, anxiously, as if waiting for an objection, perhaps a question, or even a look of consolation. But Schultz and Tesler maintained their distant air, and I couldn’t find a thing to say to him. Seeing which, Don Ecuménico flapped his wings, managed to achieve lift-off, and flew away heavily, flitting among monstrous flowers.

XIII

A big, plain iron door led from the eighth to the ninth and final circle of hell. There we took our leave of Samuel Tesler who, after a rather cold handshake, turned his back on us and returned to the City of Pride. Schultz bade me enter through the open door. One after the other, we descended a spiral staircase that took us to the very edge of the Great Pit yawning at the end of Schultz’s Inferno. I peered over the edge into the maw. Deep down I saw a great shuddering mass of something like gelatin, which gave the impression of being a gigantic mollusc, though it wasn’t.

— It’s the Paleogogue, Schultz gravely informed me.

I turned again to contemplate the monster, and although I noted no particular evil, it seemed that all forms of wickedness were synthetically united in its undulating mass, and that the abominations of Schultz’s hell found both their origin and their meaning in the gelatinous beast writhing in the Great Pit.

— What do you think? Schultz asked me, pointing at the Paleogogue.

I answered:

— Nastier than a fright at midnight. Got more gills than a dorado. Serious as a monk’s codpiece. More ingratiating than a rich man’s dog. Sharp-pointed, like an old man’s knife. More puckered than an immigrant’s tobacco pouch. Shit-smeared, like the boot of a Basque dairyman. More ornery than a draw-wheel nag. Uglier than a pig’s somersault. Tougher than a vizcacha’s paw. Skittish as a washerwoman’s pony. Solemn as the fart of an Englishman.

Glossary

balín (< bala, “bullet”) — small-bore bullet; argot term for penis; by metonymy, homosexual.

bandoneón — musical instrument like a small accordion, typically used for tango music.

bombilla — a short metallic tube used as a straw to drink the mate infusion from the mate (gourd). The lower end is fitted with a sieve to prevent the mate leaves being drawn in.

café con leche — coffee with milk.

caften — pimp.

camoatí (Guarani, “wasp”) — a kind of wasp found in the river valleys of the Paraná, the Paraguay, and the Uruguay.

caña quemada — caña is liquor made from cane sugar; caña quemada is from burnt sugar.

carcelera (< cárcel, “jail”) — an old flamenco song-form whose lyrics sing the tribulations of life in Andalusian jails.

chajá — bird native to north and eastern Argentina; crested screamer.

che! — informal interjection that adds emphasis to a statement, whose meaning changes according to the context: hey!; come on!; brrr!; phew!; etc.

china (< Quechua, “female”) — in gaucho language, an affectionate term for girl or woman; in other social contexts, pejorative for girlfriend or mistress.

chiripá (< Quechua) — a kind of blanket that gauchos wore over their pants, which they passed between the legs and wrapped around the waist.

chorizo — seasoned pork sausage.

churros y chocolate — fritters and hot chocolate. Roughly, the cultural equivalent of coffee and doughnuts.

ciruja — garbage-picker; down-and-outer, tramp.

comadre — godmother; in colloquial usage, friend and neighbour.

compadre — in standard Spanish, the godfather of one’s child. On being absorbed into the city, the gauchos living on the outskirts called one another compadre in a friendly way. Later, the term came to designate a braggart and brawler, a tough-guy.

compadrito (dim. of compadre) — young man who imitates the compadres; well-dressed tough-guy, dude, dandy, pretty-boy.

confitería — originally, a cake shop; in Argentina, a tearoom or café.

conventillo — boardinghouse where poor immigrants lived, usually in overcrowded squalor.

criollo — in colonial times, Spanish colonials born in the Americas; after Independence, their modern-day descendants; native-born Argentines.

dientudo (“big-toothed,” “toothy”) — a voracious fish of the Oligarsarcus species, native to the River Plate region.

dorado — a long spindle-shaped fish with a large mouth, indigenous to the Paraná River.

facón — a large knife with a straight blade ending in a point, used by gauchos for butchering cattle, but also as a weapon, especially in duels.

franelero (argot) — someone who goes to the brothel to hang out, drink, and converse, without paying for sexual services. In early twentieth-century Buenos Aires, large numbers of lonely men had no other social life than the café or the brothel.

gallego — a native of Galicia, the northwestern province of Spain. Gallegos were the most numerous contingent of Spanish immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Argentina, the gallego was stereotyped as hardworking and honest, but gullible and unsophisticated.

gringo — foreigner, usually referring to the very numerous Italian immigrants.

linyera — in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Argentina, a poor itinerant farm labourer (usually Italian); by extension, tramp or hobo.

malambo — a folk dance in northern Argentina, executed by single men who compete in footwork.

malevo (< abrev. of malevolente, “malevolent”) — bad guy, bully, thug.

malón (< Mapuche) — an attack by group of aboriginals on white settlers.

mate (< Quechua mati, “little gourd”) — (1) the gourd in which the tea-like infusion yerba mate is prepared and then drunk; (2) the drink itself.

mazamorra — a traditional Argentine dish made of corn mashed and boiled in water.

milonga — a popular dancehall or party where people dance tango.

nene — literally, a small boy; in Buenos Aires argot, by antiphrasis, a fearsome tough-guy.

padrinos (plural of padrino, “godfather”) — in rural Argentina, horsemen who assist the horsebreaker.

pampero — a wind that blows across the pampa or plain in Argentina that brings fine weather.

paraíso (“paradise”) — bead-tree.

parrillada (< parrilla, “grill”) — barbecue; an assortment of cuts of beef, including internal organs, from the grill.

payar (verb) — to improvise verses in counterpoint with another in a kind of poetic duel.

payador — gaucho troubadour; popular country-style singer.

pesado (“heavy”) — a man who acts tough and walks with a swagger.

pompier (French, “fireman”) — a codeword coined by the French avant-garde to denote vulgar, emphatic, or pompous conventionality in art; the 1920s Buenos Aires avant-garde used it pejoratively against the preceding generation of poets and artists.

porteño (adj. or noun) — refers to a person or thing from the port city; that is, Buenos Aires.

pulpería — an all-purpose general store / liquor store / pub, prevalent in rural Argentina and elsewhere in Spanish America until the early twentieth century.

puna (< Quechua) — a high Andean plateau.

ranchera (< rancho, a rural hut of mud and straw with a peaked roof) — in Argentina, the ranchera is a dance and song form, in 3/4 time, dating from the late nineteenth century in the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

sainete — a theatrical genre, usually a one-act comic or melodramatic sketch, very popular in early twentieth-century Buenos Aires.

taita (< tata “Dad”) — a gaucho term, then suburban argot: a man respected for his courage and audacity, especially in knife fights.

tertulia — a group gathered in a café or private salon for informal discussion.

tano — slightly pejorative term for Italian immigrant.

truco — a traditional Argentine card game played with a Spanish deck in which three cards are dealt to each player; the points won by betting are added together with the points won in each hand.

tuna — a group of strolling student musicians, in a Spanish university tradition dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

vizcacha — a large rodent with a tough hide which lives in underground colonies on the pampa; considered a pest by country folk.

yerba (mate) — see mate

zaguán — in Hispanic architecture, a kind of vestibule serving as an intermediary space between the street door and the interior of a building or house.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1 Marechal, poet and playwright, wrote only three novels. Adán, his chef d’oeuvre, was his first; it was followed by El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo (1965) [Severo Arcángelo’s Banquet] and the posthumously published Megafón, o la guerra (1970) [Megafón, or War]. A comprehensive biography of Leopoldo Marechal (1900–1970) has yet to be written. The most complete chronology of his life, compiled by María de los Ángeles Marechal, is available at the website of the Fundación Leopoldo Marechal http://www.marechal.org.ar/Vida/Vida/cronologia.html (English version accessible).

2 Unless otherwise indicated, I quote from the English translation of Cortázar’s review.

3 Respectively, Leo Ou-fan Lee’s reading of Midnight (1932) by Mao Dun (in Moretti 687–92); and Ernest Emenyonu’s reading of People of the City (1954) by Cyprian Ekwensi (in Moretti 700–5].

4 James Scobie’s Buenos Aires: Plaza to Suburb, 1870–1910 is a classic English-language social history of Buenos Aires. A good sequel is Richard Walter’s Politics and Urban Growth in Buenos Aires: 1910–1942.

5 European visitors, especially French and Spanish, praised Buenos Aires as the most important Latin city after Paris. In Adrián Gorelik’s view, this enthusiasm was due in part to their anxiety to find an equivalent to anglophone New York, and in part to a view to assuring a place of continuing importance for their own old-world “Latin” cultures in a world whose future looked to be increasingly American (Gorelik 86–8).

6 Berg disagrees with the classification of Adán as a Großstadtroman. Although he agrees that it offers a “ ‘total’ panorama” of Buenos Aires in terms of scriptural and discursive space (99), he feels it is a mistake to compare Marechal’s novel with those of Joyce, Dos Passos, or Döblin, opining instead that Adán affords a “non-modern” vision of the well-ordered, familiar barrio, or at most — Berg concedes to the peril of his argument — of the arrabal [suburb] (101–2). But barrio and arrabal, it must be noted, are two very different spaces, whose agglomeration adds up to the modern big city. Navascués’s view of the matter, though expressed in an article concerned with Marechal’s “mythical cartography” rather than his treatment of urban space, tends toward the same position as Berg (Cartografías 111–12).

7 Given the quasi-autobiographical nature of Gamboa’s novel, it seems plausible that Salim may be based on Abdellatif Limami.

8 Borges never forgave Marechal for his caricature as Luis Pereda and refused even to acknowledge the novel’s existence.

9 For English-language treatments of Adán vis-à-vis Ulysses, see Fiddian (29–31), Gordon, and Gerald Martin’s brief but useful contextualization (138–9). Martin finds Adán Buenosayres particularly notable because “the book was scarcely read until the 1960s, by which time the so-called New Novel had retrospectively rendered it legible, thereby underlining its extraordinary pathbreaking achievement” (139).

10 “Books this incoherent are rare” (20). And yet, just over a decade later, Cortázar in his great novel Rayuela [Hopscotch] would experiment with textual fragmentation to a far greater degree than did Marechal. In both Adán and Rayuela, fragmentation, displacement, and centrifugality take place under the author’s sure artistic control; in neither case does incoherence result.

11 For Vicente Cervera Salinas, for example, there is no doubt that Adam’s Notebook “traces the novel’s centre of articulation” (202). Cervera Salinas’s very erudite gloss on Marechal’s version of “the Beatrice Syndrome” (chapter 7, “La estirpe de Solveig Buenosayres”) is the rare, thorough-going “metaphysical” reading of the novel that takes on board the lessons of modern theory, rather than evading or outright shunning them.

12 Marechal presents his second novel, El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo (1965) [The Banquet of Severo Archángelo] by noting that he left his hero Adán Buenosayres stranded in the last circle of Hell and proposes to show with his new novel a way out (Banquete 9).

13 Marechal wrote in 1941 that future novelists would see in Joyce “an enlightened precursor and… approach Ulysses as a strange and beautiful monument” (James Joyce 302). In an interview in Spain shortly after Adán was published in 1948, Marechal said of his novel: “It is a gigantic autobiography linked to the life of the city. I consider it a key novel, its architecture Mediterranean and Latin, free in its language, [based] on the Aristotelian canons of the epic form. The Mediterranean novel is the modern epic and must continue in this line. Perhaps the only one who may be considered an interpreter of this way of feeling is James Joyce” (qtd. in Andrés 81).

14 See also Javier de Navascués, “Marechal frente a Joyce y Cortázar.”

15 By virtue of a curious textual juxtaposition in the same issue of Sur (November 1949), Lanuza’s screed against Marechal and his novel immediately follows Arturo Sánchez Riva’s celebratory review of Ernesto Sábato’s first novel, El túnel (1948) [The Tunnel], a short cogent tale attuned to postwar French existentialism. The novels are utterly dissimilar in tone, narrative technique, and length. To his credit, however, Sábato always defended Marechal.

16 The violent animus of Marechal’s contemporaries gave way to the more serene assessment of Adán in the 1950s by the Contorno writers Noé Jitrik, David Viñas, and Adolfo Prieto (the latter frankly admiring of the novel). In the sixties Marechal was partially rehabilitated thanks to the success of his second novel, El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo (1965) and his public support of Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba. Abelardo Castillo (b. 1935) has always championed Marechal; when awarded the Grand Prize of Honour by SADE in 2011, he again denounced the injustice done to Marechal (Silvina Friera, “Abelardo Castillo, Gran Premio de Honor de la SADE.” Página 12. Cultura & Espectáculos. 16 Dec. 2011).

17 The version of this quasi-mythical incident best known in North America is Emir Rodríguez Monegal’s tendentious take on it (Jorge Luis Borges 392). Martín Lafforgue (49–50) neatly summarizes the story’s variants and the historical context. Jorge B. Rivera, examining thoroughly the extant documentation, concludes that the incident in fact occurred before Perón’s presidency (29, 39) and does a good deal to separate propagandistic fiction from the facts of the case. In any case, when Perón was overthrown and exiled in 1955, the triumphant military regime assuaged the affront by appointing Borges director of the Argentine National Library (Rodríguez Monegal 429).

18 A front-page article of Martín Fierro (5 May 1925) complains that in Argentina “the railways are English, the banks Yankee, and the electrical companies German”… “Nothing is ours; those who own Argentina are throughout the world. But the only thing these owners know is that Argentina is the source of a very good thing called dividends”… “A friend of mine who studied at Oxford was asked by the young Englishmen there if Argentina was an English colony” (Revista Martín Fierro 103–4). Here the anti-English sentiment is still fairly muted in comparison with what it would become in the 1930s and 1940s in both right- and left-wing Argentine nationalism, but the indignation is already evident.

19 Words spoken in Gustavo Fontán’s documentary film Marechal, o la batalla de los ángeles (2002). Horacio González was appointed director of the Argentine National Library in 2005.

20 The terms “traditionalist” and “metaphysical,” as well as “initiate,” are continually used by Marechal’s characters (and ironically by the novel’s narrator) in the special sense given them by René Guénon (1886–1951). The French author believed in an ageless esoteric tradition that underlies all exoteric religions. The alleged tradition bears a single, unified metaphysical doctrine available only to initiates. The same terms crop up in the literature of occultism, theosophy, etc., though Guénon tends to distance himself from such cultural movements.

21 Although his article is titled “Antisemitism in Modern Argentine Fiction,” Schwartz does not even mention Adán, either because he considers the novel unremarkable in this regard or because he was not aware of its existence — a distinct possibility, given that most of the North American academy scrupulously ignored it. The Argentine-Israeli critic Leonardo Senkman, however, did consider the question: “Obviously, it is not our intention to include Marechal among that fanatical and militant fraction of Catholic intellectuals who at that time raged as much against the capitalism-of-Jewish-gold as against its mythical inversion, the Bolchevik-Jew” (10), though he does point out that the sin of avarice, in the Plutobarrio of Cacodelphia, is satirically condemned less harshly in the Italian capitalist Don Francisco Lombardi than in the Jewish capitalist Don Moisés Rosenbaum (11–13). Susana Bianchi, in her study of the complex relations between the Catholic Church and Peronism, traces the gamut of positions among Catholics in the thirties and forties, from integristas [authoritarian fundamentalists] to the católicos democráticos, inspired by Jacques Maritain’s Humanisme intégral (1939); the former tended toward varying degrees of anti-Semitism, the latter conscientiously rejected the prejudice (Bianchi 39–51; see also Cheadle, “Twentieth-Century homo bonaerense,” 19–21).

22 Sur published Kahn’s article in February 1948, a few months before Marechal’s novel came out in August. Eduardo González Lanuza’s attack appeared in the November issue of Sur 169 (1948): 87–93.

23 For example, Juan José Sebreli gleefully celebrates a provocation he attributes to Borges, who once “dared to proclaim over Christmas that he didn’t celebrate it because he wasn’t religious, and if he were religious he wouldn’t be Christian, and if he were Christian he wouldn’t be Catholic” (341). Sebreli quotes Borges indirectly, and I have not been able to track down the original comment.

24 Samuel Tesler is perhaps Marechal’s most engaging character. Abelardo Castillo, in his novel El que tiene sed (1985) [He Who Is Thirsty], named his protagonist Jacobo Fiksler, thus honouring both the real-life poet Jacobo Fijman and the philosopher of Adán Buenosayres. Rodolfo Fogwill, in his novel Vivir afuera (1998) [Life Outside], invents for Samuel Tesler a fictional nephew, a Jewish doctor from Villa Crespo called Saúl Schonfeld, who wonders whether or not his crazy uncle was a Peronist (172).

25 Late in life, when discussing the evolution of his novel, Marechal pointed to Don Quixote as his model for Adán and recalled reading it even as a child: “Ever since that time I thought that the paradigm of the novelist was Cervantes, and the paradigm of the novel was, of course, Don Quixote” (Autobiografía 63).

26 See Mario Boido’s interesting discussion of these pieces (42–8).

27 Solanas’ road movie El viaje (1992) [The Trip] has a strong Marechal flavour. His best-known film outside Argentina (aside from his 1968 agitprop documentary La hora de hornos) is Sur (1988), with original music by Astor Piazzolla. In an interview with Horacio González, he allows that Adán Buenosayres could have influenced this film, since he is “a great admirer of Marechal” and “likes to tell stories the way [Marechal] does” (Solanas 93–4). Eliseo Subiela gave the name Leopoldo to the protagonist of his film No te mueras sin decirme adónde vas (1995) [Don’t Die Without Telling Me Where You’re Going], in homage to the author of “the great adventure of Adán Buenosayres” (Subiela 48).

28 Fernando J. Varea. Entrevista a Manuel Antín. Espacio Cine. 6 Dec. 2009. Accessed 7 Dec. 2009. http://espaciocine.wordpress.com/.

29 I am particularly grateful to Nicola for having dissuaded me from rendering the euphonious title “El Cuaderno de Tapas Azules” (as difficult to do in Italian, apparently, as in English) as The Blue Notebook. The Wittgensteinian association, as Nicola pointed out, is quite inappropriate, especially since Marechal was surely unaware of the Cambridge philosopher’s work.

THE “INDISPENSABLE PROLOGUE”

1 Martín Fierro (1924–1927) was a brilliant avant-garde literary journal in Buenos Aires in the 1920s, where many subsequently famous writers intervened, among them Jorge Luis Borges, Oliverio Girondo, Francisco Luis Bernárdez, Jacobo Fijman, Raúl González Tuñón, Norah Lange, Marechal himself, the legendary Macedonio Fernández, and others. Caricatures of some of these writers appear in Adán (see note 647n19). Marechal suppressed this note in the 1966 edition of Adán.

2 The Cementerio del Oeste (the Western Cemetery), or La Chacarita, was traditionally the cemetery of the common people, as opposed to the upper-class Cementario del Norte (the Northern Cemetery), or the La Recoleta. My thanks for this information to Alberto Piñeiro of the Museo Histórico de Buenos Aires Cornelio Saavedra.

3 The first sentence of the novel uncannily echoes the first sentence of José Mármol’s novel Amalia (1851): “The fourth of May, 1840, at half past ten at night, six men crossed the patio of a small house on Belgrano Street, in the city of Buenos Aires” (Mármol 3). Both sentences begin by specifying the date and the hour; both introduce in media res narrative action protagonized by a group of six men. The latter element is slightly obscured in English translation. In Marechal: “seis hombres nos internábamos”; in Mármol: “seis hombres cruzaban.” Thus the first sentence of Adán seems to signal Marechal’s parodic intent; Adán can be read, on one level, as a counter-Amalia, an earnest Manichean melodrama serving as a vehicle for an extended diatribe against the regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas (see 635n34). Amalia became a canonical text for the culture informing the modern liberal Argentine nation-state, politically consolidated under the presidency of Bartolomé Mitre (1862–68); a silent movie version of the novel was made in 1914 and a feature-length sound version in 1936 (dir. Luis José Moglia Barth).

4 “Tobiano” refers to the light-and-dark colouring of certain pinto horses. Barcia (144n) reads this allegorically: Buenos Aires is both light and dark, spiritual and material.

5 Villa Crespo is a barrio located in the geographical centre of Buenos Aires. Marechal’s family lived at 280 Monte Egmont Street (now called Tres Arroyos). The Church of San Bernardo still stands at 171 Gurruchaga Street, but the statue of Christ has been repaired.

6 In the original: “los perfectos.” The perfecti, “perfect ones,” were initiates of the heretical Cathar or Albigensian religion. Denis de Rougement translates the term as “les ‘Parfaits’ ” in his book L’Amour et l’Occident (65), which explores the relations between the Cathar heresy in twelfth-century southern France and the poetic tradition of courtly love. René Guénon, an author much read by Marechal, uses the same term in his L’ésotérisme de Dante (1925), citing [Dante Gabriel] Rossetti (1828–1882) and especially [Eugène] Aroux (1793–1859), author of such provocative titles as Dante hérétique, révolutionnaire et socialiste (1854; republished 1939); La Comédie de Dante, traduite en vers selon la lettre et commentée selon l’esprit, suivie de la Clef du langage symbolique des Fiels d’Amour (1856–57). Octavio Paz, in his essay on love and eroticism (Double Flame 102ff), respectfully disagrees with de Rougemont’s ideas on the Cathar connection to courtly love, but Marechal and his preferred authors — and certainly the quasi-autobiographical Adam Buenosayres — are closer to the former than to the great Mexican essayist. In his “Claves de Adán Buenosayres,” Marechal refers to the secret sect of the Fedeli d’Amore, who practised the courtly-mystical cult of a symbolic Dame, named by Dino Compagni (1255–1324) as the Madonna Intelligenza or transcendent Intellect (Claves 11). Dante himself refers to “los fieles de Amor” [the faithful in Love] in a commentary on one of his sonnets in the Vita nuova (Dante 567). Late in life, in 1968, Marechal quotes, word for word, the verses from Dante’s Divine Comedy which Guénon cites at the outset of L’ésoterisme de Dante: “O voi che avete gl’intelletti sani, / Mirate la dottrina che s’asconde / Sotto il velame delli versi strani!” (Andrés 35) [O you of sound intellect, / Look to the doctrine that hides / Beneath the veil of these strange verses]. Like Guénon, Marechal then refers to the nineteenth-century authors Rossetti and Aroux, before underlining the importance of Luigi Valli’s Il linguaggio segreto di Dante e dei Fedeli d’Amore (1928–30). Thus the two direct sources for Marechal’s notions on Dante — the secret cult rendered by the Fedeli d’Amore to a transcendental Madonna Intelligenza — were Guénon and Valli. In 1969 Marechal averred in a public conference that “Dante belonged to that mysterious sect called the Fedeli d’Amore, along with Guido Cavalcanti, Cino Da Pistoia… a whole group of metaphysical poets who belonged to a secret organization. But it seems that they were all members of the heterodox sect of the Albigensians, enemies of the Catholic Church, which in their language they called the chiesa corrotta, that is, the corrupted church” (Autobiografía de un novelista 67). The Cathars/Albigensians, of course, were not just heterodox but outright heretics against whom the Roman Church launched a military Crusade (1209–29). That Dante’s cult of Beatrice may have been heterodox or even heretical is a sensitive issue for Adam Buenosayres, Marechal, and his conservative Catholic critics. Barcia, for example, gives rather short shrift to the subject, preferring to emphasize that very little is known about the alleged Fedeli d’Amore (72). In sum, it is significant that the narrator of the Indispensable Prologue discreetly uses the code-word perfectos, a veiled reference to Adam Buenosayres’s mysticopoetic construction of a transcendental feminine Figure in his “Blue-Bound Notebook”; that the narrator renounces the way of the perfecti amounts to a — perhaps equivocal and reluctant — disavowal of the heterodox doctrine of the Fedeli d’Amore.

BOOK ONE, CHAPTER 1

1 “El pañuelito blanco / que te ofrecí / bordado con mi pelo.” “El pañuelito” was a popular tango brought out in 1920 by the famous Juan de Dios Filiberto and his Orchestra. Music by Filiberto (1885–1964). Lyrics by Gabino Coria Peñaloza (1881–1975). Irma will sing two more snippets of the same tango.

2 In 1536 Pedro de Mendoza named the original settlement Santísima Trinidad [Holy Trinity] and its port Santa María de los Buenos Aires.

3 The Riachuelo (“brook, small river”) forms the southeastern boundary of the city proper and is an important feature of the port of Buenos Aires.

4 Avellaneda is an industrial working-class suburb located to the south of the Riachuelo. Belgrano is a well-to-do residential area to the northwest of downtown Buenos Aires.

5 Bernardo Rivadavia (1780–1845) and Domingo F. Sarmiento (1811–1888), two founding fathers of the modern liberal Argentine nation. Sarmiento’s book Facundo: Civilization or Barbarism (1845) has quasi-official status as a foundational text of Argentine national identity.

6 La Jove Catalunya (its original name in the Catalonian language) was group of Catalonian nationalist-separatists founded in 1870.

7 These children would be playing soccer with a ball improvised by stuffing an old sock or stocking with rags.

8 “Fue para ti, / lo has olvidado / y en llanto empapado / lo tengo ante mí.” In the original: lo has despreciado (scorned) rather than olvidado (forgotten), according to José Gobello (Letras de tango I, 41).

9 River Plate and Boca Juniors are to this day two rival soccer teams among the many teams in Greater Buenos Aires. The English introduced soccer to Río de Janeiro (Brazil), Montevideo (Uruguay), and Buenos Aires in the late nineteeth century; hence, the English team names, as well as many Hispanicized soccer terms: gol, referí, pénalti, etc.

10 Evaristo Carriego (1883–1912): Buenos Aires poet whose verses sang of ordinary people and their cares. He helped create a mythology of suburban types. Jorge Luis Borges in turn mythified the poet in his essay Evaristo Carriego (1930) (Borges OC I, 97–172).

11 “Triste cantaba un ave, / mi dulce bien, / cuando me abandonaste…”

12 In the original, “cada objeto buscó su cifra”: each object sought its cipher or code. Adam’s metaphysical worldview stems from Neopythagoreanism and Neoplatonism and their derivatives. Numbers, codes, logos — in a word, the symbolic order — precede and give form to the manifest, material world. This runs counter to the modern view of the semiotic/symbolic as a set of arbitrary signifiers assigned descriptively to the materially existing world.

13 Empedocles (c. 493–c. 433 BCE) was an important pre-Socratic philosopher, the first to oppose a pluralistic theory of being to the Eleatic conception of being as unitary and immobile. According to Empedocles, two contrary impulses — Love (Philia) and Strife (Neikos), translated by Marechal and by Barcia (154n) as love and hate — work on the four “roots” of the All (fire, air, water, earth) and make them mingle and separate, thus causing mortal things to arise and perish (Oxford Classical Dictionary [hereafter, OCD] Clarendon, 1961).

14 Anaximander (c. 610–540 BCE) held that the origin of all things — the Divine Infinite, eternal and ageless — surrounds and governs the innumerable worlds. Each world is the product of a number of pairs of conflicting opposites that separate themselves out from the Infinite and, in his words, “pay due compensation to each other according to the assessment of Time for their injustice” (OCD). Hence, the “guilt” Adam attributes to the differentiated things in existence. Anaximander is the first to conceive the universe as a cosmos subject to the rule of law (OCD).

15 The name Solveig may be taken from Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt (1876) in which Solveig is the obedient elder daughter, as noted by Navascués (AB 103n) and others. The surname Amundsen evokes the famous Norwegian discoverer of the South Pole; the Amundsen family is based on the Lange family (see 644n1), also of Norwegian provenance.

16 “El amor más alegre / que un entierro de niños.” Adam’s couplet occurs as single verse in Marechal’s “Poema del sol indio” [Poem of the Indian Sun] from Días como flechas (1926) [Days like Arrows] (OC I, 113). Adam goes on to explain why the burial of a child is a happy occasion. Barcia (158–9n) amplifies Adam’s explanation by referring to a belief in Argentine folk culture that a dead child’s soul, being free of sin, goes directly to heaven, where s/he will intercede in favour of the other family members. However, the original poem by Marechal is a bitter-sweet ode to the “Indian” sun of America; the poet’s evocation of this folk belief can hardly be construed as a lesson in naive Christian theology, as both Adam and Barcia do.

17 Maipú is a small rural town in the interior of the Province of Buenos Aires, about 280 kilometres south of Buenos Aires. Marechal spent his childhood summers there.

18 “Angelito que te vas / con una gota de vino, / Angelito que te vas / con una flor en la mano.” Verses of a traditional folk song sung at funerals in rural northeastern Argentina. In the song, the dead child is asked to pray for his godparents and for his siblings. As Director General of Culture from 1944 to 1950, during the Peronist government (1946–50), Marechal promoted the study and diffusion of Argentine folklore (Barcia 160n).

19 De profundis (“out of the depths”) are the first words of the Latin Vulgate version of Psalm 130: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!”

20 Adam is referring to the passage in the Revelation to John of Patmos in which the Lamb (Christ) opens the sixth of the seven seals: “the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree drops its winter fruit when shaken by a gale. The sky vanished like a scroll rolling itself up” (Rev 6:12–14). The last image is rendered in Saint Jerome’s Vulgate version as: “et caelum recessit sicut liber involutus.” Later, in Book Two, Adam will cite another passage from the Latin Apocalypsis. Thus Adam has apparently been reading the medieval Catholic version of the Bible, rather than a modern vernacular translation. The autobiographical basis for this odd circumstance would be Marechal’s “return” to Catholicism and his involvement with the Cursos de Cultura Católica (CCC), a Thomist college or university founded in 1922 and transformed by papal decree in 1947 into the Instituto Católico de Cultura. According to the Argentine Esteban Trento’s erudite and informative webpage Santo Tomás de Aquino, the CCC’s mission was “to teach subjects in philosophy, history of the Church, and the Holy Scriptures to young students” because they were being systematically denied these teachings by the “secularism, positivism, and liberalism prevailing in the Argentine university system” (http://www.geocities.com/tomistas/c_c_c.htm.Accessed10Jan2006). Secularism, positivism, liberalism are what Adam, in Book Two, sums up under the term modernismo.

21 The name of Adam’s pipe, connoting the poetry of courtly love (Eleanor of Aquitaine was the patroness of several famous twelfth-century poets), is most likely taken from the short story “Eleonora” by Edgar Allan Poe, to whom Adam refers a few pages later. The standard Spanish version of the name Eleanor is Leonor, but Marechal uses a Hispanicized spelling of the French Éléonore, since he would have read the story in Baudelaire’s translation (though Baudelaire tries to conserve Poe’s spelling: Éléonora). In Poe’s story, the first-person narrator-protagonist swears to his beloved as she approaches death that he will remain faithful to her and “never bind [him] self in marriage to any daughter of Earth” (The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Vol. 2 of The Raven edition. Project Gutenberg online). Adam, for his part, will desert the “earthly” Solveig in favour of her “heavenly” form. Moreover, Poe cites words of the thirteenth-century Catalan mystic Ramón Lull as an epigraph to his story: Sub conservatione formae specificae salva anima [“The salvation of the soul depends on the conservation of the specific form”]; Lull’s sentence might well serve Adam in his project to conserve the form of Solveig in his poetry and thus “save” her from mortality.

22 “Cuatro palomas blancas, / cuatro celestes, / cuatro coloraditas / me dan la muerte.” This traditional folksong appears as the epigraph to Marechal’s poem “Elegía del Sur” [Elegy for the South] in Poemas australes (1937) (OC I, 195).

23 “Cucú, cucú / cantaba la rana, / cucú, cucú, / debajo del agua.” A traditional lullaby.

24 Manitou has usually been translated by Europeans as the Creator or Great Spirit; Barcia (164n) perpetuates the missionary spirit by equating the term with the Hebreo-Christian Dios (God). Manitou, or Manitú, as Marechal writes it in Spanish, is the European deformation of a term currently transliterated as Mnidoo, according to Mary Ann Noakwegijig-Corbiere, translator and native speaker of Nishnaabemwin (Ojibwe). This word is specific to the Nishnaabemwin, one of the languages in the Algonkian language group spoken in most of Ontario and parts of Quebec. Barcia assumes that Oppavoc means tobacco, which seems logical. The word does appear to be a variant of uppovac, “tobacco” in the language spoken by the Virginia tribes (Dixon 24), but it is not even close to the Nishnaabe word for tobacco, semaa. However, the Nishnaabe were great travellers who worked a continental web of trade connections in the pre-Columbian era and afterwards; the Nishnaabe word for pipe, opwaagan, is not too far removed form the Virginia tribes’ uhpoocan, in turn related to uppovac (Dixon 24), a similarity that would be explained by the northward transfer of the pipe technology through trade relations. Thus, it seems a happy accident that Adam’s flight of fancy not only personifies his pipe Eleonore, but also metonymically conflates a gift of nature (tobacco) with the human artifact devised for its consumption (pipe). [My thanks to Dr Noakwegijig-Corbiere (University of Sudbury) and linguist J. Randoph Valentine (University of Wisconsin at Madison) for generously sharing their expertise on this point.]

25 paraíso — literally “paradise,” but here referring concretely to the bead-tree.

26 The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) wrote: “[Through the sexual impulse] the will of the individual appears at a higher power as the will of the species… But what appears in consciousness as a sexual impulse directed to a definite individual is in itself the will to live as a definitely determined individual. Now in this case the sexual impulse, although in itself a subjective need, knows how to assume very skilfully the mask of an objective admiration, and thus to deceive our consciousness; for nature requires this strategem to attain its ends” (Schopenhauer, The World 340–1). The theme is a constant in Schopenhauer. In his late work, Parerga and Paralipomena, he writes that “sexual desire, especially when through fixation on a definite woman it is concentrated to amorous infatuation, is the quintessence of the whole fraud of this noble world; for it promises so unspeakably, infinitely, and excessively much, and then performs so contemptibly little” (Parerga 316). Elsewhere, Marechal chastises Schopenhauer for his misogynistic “grosería” (“Victoria Ocampo y la literatura femenina,” OC V, 296).

27 Rose of Lima (1586–1617) was the first canonized saint to have been born in the Americas. Lines from Marechal’s hagiographic Vida de Santa Rosa de Lima (1943) appear in Adam’s discourse on poetics in Book Four. As María de los Angeles Marechal notes (126), Adán came out on 30 August in honour of Santa Rosa’s liturgical feast day.

28 Koriskos or Coriscus was one of Plato’s disciples in the Academy. However, as becomes evident in the second chapter of Book One, Adam is likely recalling a passage in Aristotle’s disquisition On Dreams. To illustrate the case of a dreamer who is aware that he or she is dreaming, Aristotle writes that “something within him speaks to this effect: ‘the image of Koriskos presents itself, but the real Koriskos is not present’ ” (Aristotle 734). Adam decontextualizes the Aristotelian passage and (mis) applies it to his own situation: in the next chapter, he will see Samuel’s sleeping body and note that Samuel, being asleep, is not really present. Barcia (166n), in what seems rather a stretch, proposes to conflate Koriskos with Choricus, king of Arcadia and father of the inventors of the art of wrestling and the palaestra. [I am grateful to Dr Louis L’Allier of Thorneloe University in Sudbury for sharing his expertise on this point.]

29 Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938), modernist poet of the generation prior to the 1920s avant-garde that included Marechal. The image of a “telepathic cock” is from Lugones’s poem “Claro de luna” [Moonlight], in Lunario sentimental (1909). In his “Retrueque a Lugones” (Martín Fierro 26, December 1925), Marechal famously, and cheekily, polemicized with Lugones on the issue of traditional rhyme and metre (defended by Lugones) versus free verse, championed by the avant-gardists.

30 General José de San Martín (1778–1850), a hero of the South American wars of independence. From Buenos Aires he led the Expedición de los Andes, crossing the mountains to liberate Chile in 1817 and proceeding north to meet Simón Bolívar finally in Guayaquil in 1822. Known as the Santo de la Espada [Saint of the Sword] for his honourable conduct as a revolutionary military hero, he apparently harboured no personal political ambitions. He is commemorated in public monuments throughout South America. In Buenos Aires, the Plaza de San Martín, a large, beautiful park in the heart of the city, features an immense statue of the general on horseback. In his essay “Narrar a San Martín” (2005) [Narrating San Martín], Martín Kohan looks at the mythification of San Martín as a founding father of Argentina.

31 Spanish translation of Cuore (1886) [Heart], a sentimental children’s novel by the Italian Edmondo de Amicis. Barcia (171n) notes its great popularity in Argentina. Navascués (AB 113n) notes that part of the plot takes place in Argentina.

32 “Viernes Santo, Viernes Santo, / día de grande Pasión, / cuando lo crucificaron / al Divino Redentor.”

33 Juan de Garay, the Spanish explorer who founded Buenos Aires in 1580. (A failed attempt to found the city had been made by Pedro de Mendoza in 1536.)

34 Juan Manuel de Rozas (or Rosas), a Federalist with rural and popular support, upon assuming power named himself the Ilustre Restaurador de las Leyes [Illustrious Restorer of Law and Order] and ruled his Santa Federación [Holy Federation] with an iron fist from 1829 to 1852. The Mazorca (so called because their emblem was a mazorca or ear of corn) was his ferocious police force. The political enemies of the populist-nationalist Federalists, allied with the Catholic Church, were the Unitarians — urban, liberal, Europhile.

35 Amalia, by José Mármol (see 628n3). A few elements of Grampa Sebastián’s story seem to be taken from Mármol’s novel. Mármol always characterizes Rosas’s people as ferocious and bestial, like the two Mazorca agents in Sebastián’s story; Mármol describes one Federalist soldier, for example, as having “a physiognomy in which one could not distinguish where the beast ended and the human began” (Mármol 65b). At the outset of Marmol’s novel an initial group of six Unitarians are attempting to cross the river in a whaleboat to reach Uruguay and join the army of General Lavalle, who was preparing to attack Rosas in Buenos Aires; hence, Rosas’s suspicion that Sebastián has been smuggling “savage Unitarians.” The latter insult is endlessly repeated by the Federalists in Amalia. Manuelita, daughter of Rosas, is portrayed by Mármol sympathetically as a victim of her paranoid and despotic father; her task was to guard his person and “keep watch over the house, the doors, and even his food” (Mármol 291a). Sebastián’s passage through an entrance hall or zaguán to a patio where a mulatta mashes corn recalls the episode in Amalia set at the house of Rosas’s sister-in-law, María Josefa Ezcurra (an important figure in Rosas’s police apparatus); the zaguán and patio of the house were swarming with a “multitude of negresses, mulattas, chinas, ducks, hens, and every other animal created by God,” as well as a group of men condemned to the gallows (64b), the fate that Adam Buenosayres’s Grampa Sebastián escapes.

The neutral evocation of the mulatta in Marechal’s text contrasts with the overtly scornful racism in Mármol’s novel. Rosas did indeed enjoy the support of the lower classes, including Afro-Argentines, and his plebeian support-base only served to disqualify Rosas’s legitimacy in the eyes of the cultivated and patrician Unitarians. That Sebastián declares himself a good Federalist is an index of Marechal’s sympathy with the historical revisionism of Catholic nationalism, first given expression in Julio Irazusta’s Ensayo sobre Rosas (1935).

36 In the original: tocarle el violín [play the violin on him]. As Navascués (AB 115n) explains, this was a torture called la refalosa in which a knife is slowly drawn back and forth, like a violin bow, across the victim’s throat. Hilario Ascasubi immortalized the practice in his poem “La refalosa” (1839), in which one of Rosas’s mazorqueros describes this torture in detail.

37 Rosas insisted that his followers and partisans wear a red insignia in the form of a tie or ribbon to indicate their Federalist allegiance. The Unitarian colour was blue.

38 According to rural custom, a gaucho who arrived at a ranch would ask for permission to dismount. Permission granted would usually mean that the stranger would be fed and lodged among the ranch-hands for the night, and his horse allowed to graze.

39 Navascués (AB 116n) reads in this phrase, which Adam will repeat in Book Five, a nod to Joyce’s Ulysses. In “Telemachus” (chapter 2), Stephen Dedalus says inwardly, “Weave, weaver of the wind” (30). In J. Salas Subirat’s 1945 translation: “Teje, tejedor del viento” (56).

40 Boethius (480–524), author of De Consolatione Philosophiae [The Consolation of Philosophy], a Neoplatonic dialogue between Philosophy and himself (OCD).

41 Reference to Río de la Plata, literally “River of Silver,” traditionally (mis)translated by the English as the “River Plate.”

BOOK ONE, CHAPTER 2

1 General José de San Martín (see 634n30). According to Argentine tradition, the Sargeant Juan Bautista Cabral saved the life of his leader, San Martín, in the Battle of San Lorenzo (Feb. 3, 1813) against royalist forces. In his Historia de San Martín y de la emancipación americana (1887–88), Bartolomé Mitre immortalized the scene in which Cabral, after freeing San Martín from beneath his fallen horse, was mortally wounded by the enemy and died saying: “Muero contento! Hemos batido al enemigo!” [I die happy! We have beaten the enemy!].

2 The poet Jacobo Fijman (1898–1970), on whom Samuel Tesler is based, was born in Uriff in Russian Bessarabia (Bajarlía 11). In the parenthetical passages throughout this chapter, Marechal deliberately parodies Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, by Diogenes Laërtius (Marechal, Claves 14).

3 Santos Vega: a legendary gaucho and payador (cowboy minstrel), immortalized in nineteenth-century Argentine gauchesque poetry, where he becomes a Romantic icon of the spirit of life on the pampa.

4 Otium poeticum: leisure for poetic contemplation (Navascués, AB 127n). Incorrectly rendered in the original as ocius poeticus due to inference from the Spanish ocio poético.

5 Galician Spanish immigration accounted for 17 percent of the total number of immigrants to Argentina between 1857 and the 1930. The gallegos, in popular culture, came to be known by several stereotypical features, both positive and negative. According to María Rosa Lojo, they were seen as honest and hard-working, but also as gullible and unsophisticated (Los “gallegos” 34–5).

6 Quo usque tandem, Catalina, abutere patientia nostra? [How long will you abuse our patience?] The sentence is from Cicero’s first speech against Catiline, who proposed his candidacy for the Roman Senate after having been implicated in a political plot.

7 Samuel’s note is lifted almost straight from René Guénon’s book Le symbolisme de la Croix (1931): “ ‘When this yod has been produced’, says the Sepher Yetsirah, ‘that which remained of the mystery of the hidden Avir (ether) was aor (light),’ and in fact, if yod is removed from the word Avir, what is left is Aor.” According to Guénon, following the ancient Kabbalistic text Sepher Yetsirah, the yod “hieroglyphically represents the Principle, and all the other letters of the Hebrew alphabet are said to be formed from it, a formation which, according to the Sepher Yetsirah, symbolizes that of the manifested world itself” (Guénon, Symbolism 25). Marechal was an avid reader of Guénon’s books (Coulson 8, 97). Cf. 626n20, 628n6, and 677n70.

8 This seems to be a reference to G.K. Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). Chesterton was quite popular in Buenos Aires. Borges wrote about him in “Sobre Chesterton” (OC II, 72–4). Although he respected his style, Borges argues against Chesterton’s views in “De las alegorías a las novelas” [From Allegory to Novel] (OC II, 122–4). César Pico (see 680n102) was known as the “Chesterton porteño.”

9 Macedonio Fernández (1874–1952): an eccentric personality, witty metaphysician, literary and aesthetic theoretician, brilliant conversationalist, and avant-garde novelist. He corresponded for several years with the American philosopher William James. Macedonio was adopted as a mentor by the literary avant-garde in 1920s Buenos Aires.

10 Sentence attributed to classical Greek author Menander (341–290 BCE), as noted by Navascués (AB 133n). In the next paragraph, Adam continues in a mock-classical vein by referring to Castor and Pollux, twin sons of Zeus and Leda.

11 Crítica [Critique] and La Razón [Reason] were two popular daily newspapers in Buenos Aires. Barcia (198n) notes that when Ortega y Gasset visited the city and heard the vendors hawking these papers on the street, he remarked: “It’s the hour of Kant” in reference to The Critique of Pure Reason. But in his article “La Pampa… promesas” written in Buenos Aires in 1928, Ortega qualifies his verbal association as a comical accident, a calembour (Ortega 630) whose absurdity underlines what he had written in 1924 in his “Carta a un joven argentino que estudia filosofía” [Letter to a Young Argentine Student of Philosophy]: “You Argentines are more sensitive than precise, and as long as that doesn’t change, you will be entirely dependent on Europe in the intellectual realm” (340). In a second article written in 1928, “El hombre a la defensiva,” he is even more sharply critical of Argentine men (he carefully distinguishes them from the women). Gloria Videla, discussing Ortega y Gasset’s intertextual presence in Marechal’s novel, aptly proposes that Marechal “co-elaborates” Ortega’s ideas, accepting them, refuting them, recreating them (Videla 166). The theme deserves more study, but it would seem that Marechal also turns Ortega’s ideas against him (see 641n25 and 645n3). In any case, the two were hardly friends; when Marechal visited the Spanish philosopher in Madrid in 1926, he was given a “glacial” reception (Andrés 26). In 1927, the “Madrid meridian affair” — occasioned by Guillermo de Torre’s claim that Madrid was the intellectual meridian of the Spanish-speaking world — provoked the collective ire of the martinfierristas; but Marechal directed his retort specifically against “Ortega y Gasset and his tribe” (Andrés 23).

12 Mulattos: Samuel Tesler’s favourite insult (see 649n30).

13 The coat-of-arms of the city of Buenos Aires indeed shows a dove symbolizing the Holy Spirit, which hovers above two ships at anchor, signifying the city’s twofold founding, first by Pedro de Mendoza (1516) and definitively by Juan de Garay (1580) (website of Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires). Barcia (200n) notes that the cover illustration of the second edition of Adán Buenosayres (1966) reproduces the city’s coat-of-arms, but in Samuel’s satirical version with the dove replaced by a hen.

14 Catamarca is a province in the northwest of Argentina, bordering on Chile. Irma would likely be an internal migrant, having left her economically depressed home in search of employment in Buenos Aires.

15 In the original, Samuel ironically addresses Adam with the honorific Musajeta, a term correctly spelled in Spanish as musageta (< Greek and Latin, musgetes “guide of the Muses,” one of Apollo’s epithets). The orthographic change is sly: jeta in Spanish means “snout” and is used as a jocular term for nose.

16 The Amundsen tertulia is a fictional version of the Lange family tertulia, which was held every Saturday afternoon, not Thursday. Besides the liturgical resonance of (Holy) Thursday, Marechal may have chosen Thursday rather than Saturday in homage to his admired nineteenth-century writer Lucio V. Mansilla (1831–1913), whose weekly newpaper column Causeries del jueves [Thursday Chats] was bound and published in five volumes under the title Entre nos (1889–90).

17 “El primer cuidao del hombre / es defender el pellejo.” The two lines are from stanza 2,313 of La vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879) [The Return of Martín Fierro], by José Hernández, sequel to his narrative poem Martín Fierro (1872). In the poem, the speech is pronounced by the Viejo Vizcacha, a wily and unscrupulous character named after a rodent, considered to be a pest, indigenous to the Southern Cone.

18 Ricardo Rojas (1882–1957): a writer of the Novecentista generation, notable for its celebration of the 1910 centenary of Argentine independence. Rojas wrote an eight-volume history of Argentine literature and culture, La literatura argentina: Ensayo filosófico sobre la evolución de la cultura en el Plata (1917–1922). In this passage Samuel pokes fun at one of Rojas’s literary ticks.

19 Gloria Videla (174), discussing the intertextuality between Ortega y Gasset, Eduardo Mallea, and Marechal, relates Samuel’s contrasting cities of the chicken and the owl to Mallea’s thesis of the two Argentinas, one visible and vulgar, the other invisible and spiritually superior. Residents of the former enjoy “an eminently bourgeois satisfaction… a state of comfort… a contentment without glory”; the latter are “profound, subterranean, called to a tragic existence.” The former, “garrulous and happy,” are merely play-acting or faking [representando]; the latter are creating (Mallea 365).

20 Samuel spoofs the conventions and stereotypes of the sainete, the popular, melodramatic theatrical form that in 1920s reflected the dramas of the lower classes, many of whom were immigrants (Navascués, AB 142n).

21 Perhaps a parodic allusion to the angel with whom Jacob wrestles in Genesis 32:23–32.

22 The bucolic project is surely a reference to the East-European Jewish settlement in the Argentine pampas in the late nineteenth century, a project sponsored by the Jewish-Belgian Baron Maurice de Hirsch, as well as to that settlement’s literary consecration in Alberto Gerchunoff’s book Los gauchos judíos (1910) [The Jewish Gauchos]. The redemptive vision of Jewish farming was part of the same European Jewish ideology that gave birth to Zionism. Gerchunoff aimed to achieve Jewish assimilation and acceptance by Argentine society by rhetorically marrying Jewishness to gaucho-ness, the latter being a contemporary symbol of Argentine authenticity. As Edna Aizenberg observes (20), Gerchunoff deliberately employed linguistic archaisms, quoting medieval Sephardic texts and paraphrasing Don Quixote, in an attempt to reaffirm the Jews’ historical roots in the Hispanic world and thus legitimate their presence in Argentina. The book, along with its assimilationist project, was enormously successful among Argentine Jews and Gentiles alike, spawning imitations and movie versions. It effectively founded the lineage of Argentine-Jewish literature.

23 An allusion to Count Hermann Keyserling’s South American Meditations (1932), which devotes an entire chapter to “Sorrow.” Keyserling’s rather patronizing thesis is that South American humanity is stuck in the “Third Day of Creation,” a vegetative, chthonic reality imbued with a passive, suffering sadness. In a dialectical twist, however, he praises this condition: “South American sadness is worth more than all North American optimism and all Neo-European idealism” (310; Keyserling’s italics). Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz (real-life model for Bernini) took up the notion of Argentine sadness in his famous essay “El hombre que está solo y espera” (1931) [The Man Who Is Alone and Waits/Hopes]. Keyserling was one of many prominent European thinkers and writers who were attracted to visit Buenos Aires in the 1920s and 1930s: among them were Spanish literary critic Guillermo de Torre, Spanish avant-garde writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, French Fascist intellectual Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, French Catholic intellectual Jacques Maritain, and Italian Futurist poet Filippo Tomasso Marinetti.

24 Macedonio Fernández (see 637n9). The original phrase, from his experimental metaphysical essay “No toda es vigilia la de los ojos abiertos” (1928) [Not All Consciousness Is of the Waking Kind] is a poetic formulation of his doctrine of “absolute subjectivism or idealism.” Being, writes Maedonio, is “un almismo ayoico” (25), literally: a non-selfish soul-ism or soulishness. One of Macedonio’s chapter titles is “El mundo es un almismo.” Marechal has combined the two phrases: “El mundo es un almismo ayoico.” This neologism is consonant with Macedonio’s assertion that the Yo [the “I,” the Self] is an invention of our “grammatical genius,” but that it lacks all substance or content. Samuel Tesler’s reply is: “El mundo es un yoísmo al pedo,” which more literally translated would be: “The world is a vain egoism, useless as a fart.”

25 Twice Samuel insists on giving Adam Buenosayres a lesson in frankness, the second time assuming the mantle of the European master. This looks like a satirical allusion to Ortega y Gasset’s contention in “El hombre a la defensiva” that “in normal social intercourse the Argentine [man] does not let himself go; on the contrary, at the approach of another, he locks up his soul and goes on the defensive… Whereas we [Europeans] let ourselves go and lose ourselves with complete sincerity in the theme required by the conversation, our [Argentine] interlocutor adopts an attitude” of petulant self-importance (Ortega 643). Ortega goes on to develop at length the metaphor of the mask behind which the insincere Argentine defensively hides. But in a sly manoeuvre, Marechal has Samuel, master of the masks, impersonate the “sincere” European.

26 Philography (Sp. Filografía): a term denoting the Neoplatonic Renaissance genre of “writing about love” initiated by the exiled Iberian Jew León Hebreo in his Dialogues of Love (1535), which take the form of allegorical conversations between Sofía (Wisdom) and Filón (Lover). León Hebreo was forcibly exiled from Portugal in 1483 and then from Spain in 1492. His work was published posthumously in the Tuscan dialect in Rome in 1535. The best (re)translation to Spanish is Diálogos de amor (1587), by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca princess, Garcilaso remains in the Latin American imaginary as a powerful figure of racial and cultural mestizaje. León Hebreo’s book and its various translations ended up on the index of books prohibited by the Inquisition.

27 Besides the appropriation of Ortega y Gasset’s mask metaphor in this episode (641n25), at this juncture there is likely a more respectful allusion to the same leitmotif in Jacobo Fijman’s best-known book of poetry, Molino rojo (1926). The figure of masks, always in the plural, is key in the poem thus titled, “Máscaras” [Masks], as well as in “Feria” [Fair], but perhaps most significantly in the famous first poem of the collection, “Canto del cisne” [Swan Song]: “Oficios de las máscaras absurdas; pero tan humanas” (Poesía completa 36) [Offices {in the sense of liturgical offices} of masks that are absurd but so human]. This line follows upon the first two verses of the poem, the most oft-quoted of Fijman’s poetry: “Demencia: / el camino más alto y desierto” [Dementia: the highest and most deserted road]. For a perceptive commentary on this poem, see Melanie Nicholson (105–8).

28 Ombú or Phytolacca dioica: a large tree of immense girth (up to fifteen metres) and luxuriant foliage. Considered to be the only tree native to the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay, it has thus become their symbol. The tree’s sap is poisonous; hence the folk wisdom, alluded to by Adam, about the unhealthy quality of the ombú’s shadow.

29 Federico Lacroze (1838–1899): owner of Tramway Central, the company that established the first streetcar line in Buenos Aires in 1870.

30 In the neo-colonial economy of Argentina during the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, the large market share enjoyed by English woollen products, in detriment to locally produced woollens, was an especially sensitive issue.

31 Natura naturata (nature as created entity or system) and natura naturans (nature as creative force or process): medieval Latin terms, the latter attributed by the OED to a translator of Averroes and later associated with Spinoza.

32 Sofrosyne: ancient Greek term for healthy-mindedness and serenity through moderation.

33 This invented name is a Rabelais-style joke: Asinus (Latin “ass”); Paleologos (Greek, “versed in things ancient”).

BOOK TWO, CHAPTER 1

1 “Argentine epic,” for argentinopeya in the original (see 642n9).

2 Antaeus, in Greek mythology, was son of Poseidon and Gaia, and of gigantic strength.

3 Saint Vitalis, whose feast day is 28 April, was martyred in Bologna in the third century. Titular saint of the basilica at Ravenna.

4 Teatro Colón. Magnificent opera house and theatre in downtown Buenos Aires, inaugurated in 1908, two years before the centenary celebration of Argentina’s nationhood. A proud symbol of Argentina’s wealth and success in its project of liberal modernization.

5 The quote from Hamlet is in English in the original Spanish text.

6 Quia tempus erit amplius (Vulgate Bible, Apocalypsis 10:6), phrase spoken by an angel to the seer of Patmos. In the NSRV: “there will be no more delay” (Rev 10:6); the angel continues: “but in the days when the seventh angel is to blow his trumpet, the mystery of God will be fulfilled” (Rev 10:7).

7 “¡Melpómene, la musa de la tragedia viene!” First verse of “Pórtico de Melpómene” from Melpómene (1912) by Arturo Capdevila (1889–1967), whose romantic poetry appealed to a wide public.

8 Berta Singerman (1901–1998), singer, reciter, and stage and film actress. A Russian immigrant to Argentina, she was famous for her recitations throughout Spanish America (Barcia 242n). She starred in the silent film La vendedora de Harrods (1920 or 1921) [The Salesgirl at Harrods].

9 Chrysopæia means, etymologically, the “making of gold.” The term comes from the medieval science of alchemy, the source of Adam’s metaphor. The Spanish crisopeya echoes the neologism argentinopeya, coined in Adam’s interior monologue above, which etymologically means the “making of silver,” though the term in its context further suggests a combination of the words Argentina and epopeya (“epic”) or the Argentine epic that will fuse the many disparate ethnicities into the noble metal of a national identity. Later, Marechal will didactically distill this metal symbolism in a poem (“Didáctica de la Patria” in Heptámeron [1966]): “El nombre de tu Patria viene de argentum […] En su metal simbólico la plata / es el noble reflejo del oro principial. / Hazte de plata y espejea el oro / que se da en las alturas, / y verdaderamente serás un argentino” (OC I, 311; Marechal’s italics) [The name of your Nation comes from argentum […] In its symbolic metal, silver / is the noble reflexion of the original gold. / Make yourself silver and mirror / the gold of the heavens, / and truly you will be an Argentine].

10 The allusion is to Arturo Capdevila, native of Córdoba, who had a doctorate in Law and Social Sciences. Capdevila’s poem “Pórtico de Melpómene” (see 642n7) allegorizes the poet’s pursuit of the tragic muse (Melpomene) as a chase through the woods at midnight ending in erotic violence: “Después, junto a la margen de una fuente, / cayó… ¡Caíste! ¡Puesto que eras tú misma! Estabas / pálida como ahora… Temblabas… ¡Oh, temblabas / como ahora!… Caíste vencida, agonizante… / Y yo rodé por tierra, demelenado, hipante, / y comencé a besarte, y comencé a morderte, / como quien va a matarte, por fin, o a poseerte!… (Primera antología 30) [Later, by the side of a fountain, / she fell… You fell!… Because it was you! You were / pale as now… Trembling… Oh, you were trembling / as now!… You fell in defeat, agonizing… / And I tumbled to the ground, dishevelled, gasping, / and I started to kiss you, and to bite you, / like someone about to kill you, finally, or to possess you!…]. In his next comment, Adam parodies this episode. Capdevila’s poem alludes to Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon in the tragedy by Aeschylus, from which Ruth will presently recite a few lines.

11 Allusion to the 1928 tango “Duelo criollo,” a ballad recounting the duel between a payador and a card shark over a suburban girl known as the “flor del barrio” [flower of the barrio]. Both men get killed, and out of grief the pretty girl opens her wings and flies up to heaven.

12 Free translation from the original: “— ¿Quién se comió el puchero?” [Who ate the stew?] / “— El del sombrero” [The one with the hat].

13 “Entre San Pedro y San Juan / hicieron un barco nuevo.”

14 El Hogar, El Gráfico, Mundo Argentino. Popular magazines in 1920s and 1930s Buenos Aires.

15 Carmen (1875), opera by Georges Bizet. Cavalleria rusticana [Rustic Chivalry] (1890), by Pietro Mascagni.

16 Río Negro. A fertile region of Patagonia (southern Argentina), famous for its fruit. Ironic transposition to Argentina of the legendary apple that started the Trojan war.

17 Which-from-a-metal-takes-its-name. Reference to Argentina, derived from the Latin argentum “silver.”

18 Maldonado Creek. The arroyo Maldonado was originally one of several large ditches that drained excess rainwater into the Río de la Plata. Urban development has covered over most of them. Since 1937 the Maldonado has been running through pipes beneath Juan B. Justo Avenue. Marechal’s characterization is obviously ironic.

19 La Paternal. A barrio or neighbourhood adjoining and to the west of Villa Crespo.

20 “All is quiet for half an hour.” Curious allusion, passed over by most of Marechal’s commentators, to the Book of Revelation (8:1): “When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was a silence in heaven for about half an hour.” This is one of many other, more obvious allusions in the novel to the New Testament Apocalypse.

BOOK TWO, CHAPTER 2

1 Captain Amundsen (see 631n15). The tertulia at the Amundsen house recreates the ambience of the Lange tertulia, famous in the annals of Argentine cultural history. After the death of her Norwegian husband, Mrs Lange held weekly social gatherings at 1756 Tronador Street with her five beautiful daughters in attendance: Irma, Haydée, María Cristina, Norah, and Ruth (Ruti). (A younger son, Juan Carlos, died young.) In the novel, the five sisters are reduced to three — Ethel, Haydée, and Solveig — Haydée Lange corresponding to Haydée Amundsen. In real life, the very beautiful Haydée Lange enamoured many of the tertulia’s male vistors — including Borges and Xul Solar, according to at least one biographer of Norah Lange. Ruth Lange is novelistically transposed to Ruty Johansen; Irma, the reader will recall, is the name of the cleaning girl who seduces Adam at his rooming house. It has been conjectured that Solveig Amundsen corresponds to Norah Lange (1905–1972), the sole female martinfierrista and dubbed in those years the “Muse of Martín Fierro.” But the passive Solveig bears scant resemblance to the real-life Norah, who was outgoing, exuberant, and highly articulate. Franky Amundsen does not correspond to any male Lange, but bears some resemblance to Oliverio Girondo (1891–1967), who later married Norah Lange to form one of the most storied couples in Argentine literary history (see http://www.girondo-lange.com.ar/, website maintained by Susana Lange).

2 Maimonides (1138–1204) was a Spanish Jew born in Córdoba. A great rabbinical authority and physician, prolific writer and scholar, in his philosophical masterwork, the Guide of the Perplexed, he attempts to reconcile religion with secular knowledge. Samuel’s boutade is not entirely such: Maimonides in his Guide claims that “before Plato and Aristotle introduced science and philosophy to the Greeks, the patriarchs introduced it to Israel” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [online]).

3 “El estado actual de la doctrina de las secreciones internas” (1922) [The Current Status of the Doctrine of Internal Secretions] was the title of a lengthy address given by the prestigious Gregorio Marañón (1887–1960), both a humanistic intellectual/writer and a medical doctor/researcher who pioneered the science of endocrinology. But Marechal might have left the phrase alone, had not José Ortega y Gasset, citing a 1915 article by Marañón, glorified it in his 1921 essay “El Quijote en la escuela” [Don Quixote in the School Curriculum]: “No other chapter of contemporary science, perhaps, is more revolutionary of old ideas than the doctrine of internal secretions” (Ortega 279), a sentence apparently echoed by Lucio Negri.

4 Santos Vega: a gaucho legendary for his talent as a payador whose historical existence (still debated) dates to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century in the Province of Buenos Aires. The young Bartolomé Mitre was the first to make him a symbolic figure of the newly independent Argentine nation in his 1838 poem “A Santos Vega.” Toward 1850 Hilario Ascasubi wrote a novel in verse titled Santos Vega, o Los mellizos de La Flor. Eduardo Gutiérrez’s serial novel Santos Vega (1880) and its sequel Una amistad hasta la muerte (1881) [A Die-Hard Friendship] make the character an outlaw gaucho like his own character, Juan Moreira (see 645n28). With this moreirización of the legendary payador, Santos Vega enters the imaginary of populist criollismo (see 649n27) much to the chagrin of the cultural elite represented in gentlemen-writers such as Rafael Obligado, who published his four-part poem Santos Vega in 1885.

5 Perhaps a veiled reference de José Ingenieros (1887–1925), famous psychologist, criminologist, and socialist intellectual who wrote a “Scientific Interpretation and Therapeutic Value of Hypnotism” (1903). (The Spanish ingeniero means engineer.) But Navascués (AB 211n) has found a manuscript note indicating that Valdez corresponds to the ingeniero Acevedo, a maternal uncle of J.L. Borges.

6 Barcia (293n) points out that this passage cites two lines from Marechal’s poem “De la Patria joven” (from Odas para el Hombre y la Mujer [1929]): “Un pie arraigado en la tierra en la niñez y el otro / ya tendido en los bailes de la tierra.” In the poem, the youthful Argentine nation is thus figured as a young girl; the transposition of these verses may suggest a national-allegorical dimension in the character Solveig.

7 Schultz is based on Xul Solar (1887–1963), avant-garde painter, musician and musicologist, writer, astrologer, and “visionary” aesthetician. His biographer, Álvaro Abós (173), finds that Schultz, unlike the caricatures of other notable cultural figures in the novel, is a fairly accurate reflection of Xul and of the way he was regarded in his milieu. Cintia Cristiá, in her musicological study of Xul Solar, appears to share this view. Schultz’s distaste for Beethoven and Grieg, Cristiá observes (62), indicates that Marechal would have been aware of Xul Solar’s indifference toward nineteenth-century music (with the exception of Wagner) and his preference for Bach and twentieth-century avant-garde composers.

8 Cristiá’s comment on this passage: “This hyperbole, consistent with the parodic tone of the novel, is not so hyperbolic if one considers that on the traditional pentagram, without alterations or additional lines, it is posible to write only eleven notes, whereas Xul Solar’s hexagram… accommodates twenty-six distinct pitches” (69).

9 As early as 1929, Xul Solar was attempting to redesign the piano keyboard. See Cristiá (76–84).

10 In an autobiographical note penned by Xul Solar, he claims that he is a “recreator, not an inventor” (qtd. in Artundo 43).

11 Norah Lange in a 1934 speech attributes the flower-eating gesture to the poet Amado Villar (1889–1954) (Estimados congéneres, 11–12).

12 A covered fruit-and-vegetable market, inaugurated in 1893, on the avenida Corrientes in Buenos Aires. Since 1999 it as been a mall, el Abasto Shopping.

13 Xul Solar did indeed invent a new language named neo-criollo [sic], a streamlined composite of Spanish and Portuguese. Later he abandoned neocriollo and concentrated on inventing the panlengua, which was to incorporate features of several languages (Lindstrom 244). Xul also spoke, however, about his plans for certain “anatomical improvements” in the human type to produce a “Homo Novus” (Artundo 49). Schultz’s discourse conflates in the Neocriollo these several notions of Xul Solar. Both Barcia and Navascués reproduce, in their respective editions of Adán, Marechal’s pencilled sketch of Schultz’s Neocriollo.

14 George Brummel (1778–1840): an Englishman, the most famous dandy of the nineteenth century, who created the rules of etiquette in his era.

15 Schultz’s notions are not much more fantastical than those proposed by Xul Solar in his 1957 article “Propuestas para más vida futura” [Proposals for More Life in the Future] (in Artundo 146–51). These include: (1) communal wetnurses (col-nursas, in the panlengua) endowed with mammaries the size of demijohns, which in turn would be equipped with multiple retractable ducts designed to feed the population; (2) a long, prehensile tail to serve the human body as a third arm; (3) a skin-sack inflatable at will by hydrogen-generating glands, its purpose being to offset the force of gravity on the human body; (4) extremely long arms like wings or the suspension lines of a parachute meant for human flight. Oscar Svanascini (9) mentions in addition to these “improvements” the following: suppression of the human stomach; a swivel-neck allowing the head to turn 360 degrees; eyes on the tips of horns like those of snails.

16 “¡Ven, triste amigo! / En la penumbra del invernadero, / junto a las rosas fraternales.” I have not been able to locate the source of these verses, but they appear to refer to Book Six, chapter XII.

17 In the original: “para que le hiciese compañía”; in Toulat’s French translation: “pour lui tenir compagnie.” To keep whom (or what) company? The poetic phantom? I suspect a typographical error: le should be the reflexive pronoun se: “para que se hiciese compañía.”

18 This group of three verses, as well as the next two tercets, are quoted almost verbatim from Marechal’s poem “Canción del ídolo” from his book Días como flechas (1926) (OC I, 92). First tercet: “Yo, alfarero sentado en el tapiz de los días, / ¿con qué barro modelé tu garganta de ídolo / y tus piernas que se tuercen como arroyos?” Second tercet: “Mi pulgar afinó tu vientre / más liso que la piel de los tambores nupciales, / y puso cuerdas al arco nuevo de tu sonrisa.” Third tercet: “Haz que maduren los frutos / y que la lluvia deje su país de llanto, / ídolo de los alfareros.” Translations mine.

19 Luis Pereda: clearly a caricature of Jorge Luis Borges, the only send-up in the roman-à-clef to have aroused serious indignation in Argentine literary circles. Franky Amundsen: associated with several historical personajes, including Oliverio Girondo (1891–1967); Marechal’s close friend and canonical poet, Francisco Luis Bernárdez (1900–1978); and a lesser known martinfierrista and M.’s childhood friend, Ilka Krupkin. As Navascués (AB 227n) judiciously concludes, Franky Amundsen is best understood as a composite of traits drawn from various martinfierristas. Arturo Del Solar: this least vivid of the caricatures probably corresponds to Borges’s cousin Guillermo Juan (“Willie”) Borges. The pipsqueak Bernini [el petizo Bernini]: clearly a parodic version of writer Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz (1898–1959).

20 Gath y Chaves was a department store founded in 1883 by the Englishman Alfred Gath and the Argentine Lorenzo Chaves. Merging with Harrods Buenos Aires in 1922, the store became a symbol of foreign-dominated commerce. As Barcia (316n) points out, the irony of this passage lies in the circumstance that a foreign business is packaging and selling back to Argentines the “exotic” culture of the local suburbs. The Anglophile, European-educated Borges, real-life model for Luis Pereda, is the particular butt of this joke.

21 Franky Amundsen’s penchant for all things pirate-related seems to be a cartoonish send-up of a facet of Oliverio Girondo’s character and life. In 1936 Girondo bought a brigantine, a sailing vessel traditionally favoured by pirates (brigantine < It. brigantino “brigand”). Earlier, to celebrate the publication of Norah Lange’s book Forty-Five Days and Thiry Sailors (1933), he organized a costume party in which Norah appeared as a mermaid, the male guests in sailor suits, and he in a captain’s uniform. They all posed for a famous publicity photo. On the other hand, in his 1938 review of Girondo’s Interlunio (OC V, 421–4), Marechal admired his Rabelaisian “gigantism” and his outlandish humour. Cf. Norah Lange’s salute to the boat’s launch in Estimados congéneres (26ff); she refers to it both as a bergantín and as a paylebot (Hispanicized version of “pilot boat”).

22 Original lyrics for all three stanzas: “Venía por la barranca / un tranguay angloargentina / cuando a mitad de camino / encuentra un carro encajao / ‘¡Compañero, hágase a un lao!’ / dice el del coche al carrero. ‘Si no vienen a poner / una cuarta, ¡todo el día / estará el carro en la vía!’ / Y el cochero, ya enojao, / le contesta: ‘¡Dos biabazos / te daría por pesao!’ / El carrero / se ataja la puñalada, / y a las dos o tres paradas / le larga un viaje al cochero / que si éste no es tan ligero / y en el aire lo abaraja / media barriga le raja, / como sandía campera.”

Marechal, late in life, recalled learning this song by heart in childhood from an early twentieth-century gramophone recording made by Alfredo Eusebio Gobbi (1877–1938) for Gath y Chaves (Andrés 14). Gobbi and his wife, Flora, started out in the circus and were active in popular criollista culture; their songs are considered precursors to the tango. Their son Alfredo Julio Floro Gobbi (1912–1965) became a famous tango composer.

23 In the original: “listo para entrar en la de San Quintín”; literally, ready to enter the Battle of Saint-Quentin (1557), in which the Spanish forces trounced the French in a decisive event marking a high point in the power of the Spanish Empire under the Habsburg dynasty.

24 To break someone’s soul, romperle el alma a alguien, is an old Argentine expression whose approximate equivalent would be “to thrash someone within an inch of his life.”

25 This passage considerably exaggerates a statistic adduced in the famous essay El hombre que está solo y espera (1931) by Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz (real-life model for Bernini). In his chapter “La ciudad sin amor,” Scalabrini Ortiz alleged that, of the million or so inhabitants of Buenos Aires, there were 120,000 fewer women than men (60).

26 In the original: Aventura criolli-malevi-fúnebri-putani-arrabalera. Franky parodies the neocriollo language invented by Xul Solar (real-life model for Schultz).

27 This paragraph sets up Marechal’s hyperbolic satire of criollismo, a popular cultural and literary movement that flourished approximately between the 1870s and the 1920s, and whose final, moribund stage is hilariously parodied in Book Three. In El discurso criollista en la formación de la Argentina moderna (1988 and 2008), a classic of Argentine cultural history, Adolfo Prieto points out that, in reaction to the burgeoning cultural phenomenon of the popular criollista literature being consumed by the semi-literate masses, both native and immigrant, the cultural elite “seemed to oscillate between fascination and anger.” By the turn of the nineteenth century, however, they had formed a “veritable program of cultural politics meant to contain the advance of popular literature of criollista stamp” (20). This reactionary cultural attitude is mockingly invested in the voice of the narrator of this passage, a technique that Marechal no doubt owes to his reading of Joyce’s Ulysses.

28 Samuel is likely referring, not to the universally revered literary figures Martín Fierro or Santos Vega, but to Juan Moreira, the legendary nineteenth-century gaucho outlaw (gaucho malo) who inspired Eduardo Gutiérrez’s eponymous serial novel (1879–1880). Always enormously popular, the novel was adapted in 1886 for the circus stage by Juan Podestá (1858–1937). In the twentieth century the novel has inspired several film versions, notably Leonardo Favio’s in 1973. Juan Moreira is probably the prototype behind the noble-outlaw protagonist of the Adriano Caetano’s movie Un oso rojo (2002) [A Red Bear].

29 In Xul Solar’s early paintings, angels are often a theme — for example, Dos Anjos (1915), Deities of Soil (1918), Angels (1921). But Franky may be alluding to Xul’s water-colour Mestizos de avión y gente (1936) in which two hybrid airplane-human figures, equipped with wings, propellers, and wheels, fly over a semi-urban landscape, each of them trailing what looks like an anchor.

30 This bizarre (and jarring) racist penchant in Samuel Tesler appears to originate from an idée fixe in the real-life poet Jacobo Fijman. Navascués cites a 1929 letter from Alfonso Reyes to J. Ortega y Gasset, in which Reyes complains about a Jew called Fijman insulting him not only as “an influential widow [sic] in Argentine literature” but also as a ¡mulato! — that latter insult being obviously the more astonishing (and outrageous?) to the great Mexican author (Navascués, AB 135n; Corral 167).

In one of Vicente Zito Lema’s rambling interviews with him in the late 1960s, Fijman claims that the Virgin Mary was black. Zito Lema asks him if Jesus Christ, then, was mulatto. Fijman’s reply, though incoherent, is revealing: “La concepción de la virgen es inmaculada. Esto es también secreto de estado. Vía de Cristo. Cristo es rubio. Pero un día fue negro. Y otro verde. Los mulatos son culpables. Se pasan horas y horas tocando el tambor. En Africa ha [sic] visto que sus casas son hornos de barro. Están poseídos por la avaricia” [The Virgin’s conception is immaculate. This too is a state secret. Christ’s Way. Christ is blond. But one day he was black. And another day, green. Mulattos are guilty. They spend hours and hours beating their drums. In Africa I’ve seen that their houses are earthen ovens. They’re possessed by greed] (Zito Lema 68; my emphasis). It seems that for Fijman the mulatto condition denotes or symbolizes a fall from moral purity into impurity and iniquity.

31 Adam’s words — “estoy solo e inmóvil: soy un argentino en esperanza” — echo the title of Scalabrini Ortiz’s El hombre que está solo y espera (1931) [The Man Who Is Alone and Waits/Hopes]. On the intertextual relations between Scalabrini’s essay and Marechal’s novel, see Cheadle, “Twentieth-Century homo bonaerense.”

32 El Espíritu de la Tierra, or Spirit of the Earth, is a mythopoetic notion elaborated in Scalabrini Ortiz in his above-cited essay. It is perhaps the last expression of a kind of mystical telluric organicism cultivated by the previous (novecentista) generation of Argentine writers, particularly Ricardo Rojas. Scalabrini’s take on this topos is less earnestly Romantic and more heuristic than that of Rojas, and has nothing of Bernini’s comic bathos.

33 Probable allusion to a prose-poem by Oliverio Girondo (real-life model for Franky Amundsen) entitled Interlunio (1937). The poem’s protagonist tells his quasi-delirious story. Having taken the streetcar out to the edge of the city at night, he is accosted by a cow who talks to him, maternally scolding him. Marechal reviewed the book, admiringly, in Sur 48 (Sept. 1938). Eliseo Subiela includes a sequence based on this episode in his film El lado oscuro del corazón (1992) [The Dark Side of the Heart].

34 Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz (real-life model for Bernini) denounced Britain’s economic colonialism in Argentina in his book Política británica en el Río de la Plata (1936). He carried on his battle against British interference for most of the rest of his life.

35 Variation on the classical saying Carthago delenda est, “Carthage must be destroyed,” traditionally attributed to Cato the Elder, who would have pronounced this opinion prior to the destruction of Carthage by the Romans in 146 BCE.

36 Britain invaded Buenos Aires twice, in 1806 and 1807. It has been argued that this repulsion of British military might was one factor that inspired enough confidence in the porteños to declare independence from Spain in 1810, making Buenos Aires the first Spanish American colony to do so.

37 Las Islas Malvinas: in English known as the Falkland Islands. A group of islands off the Argentine coast, claimed by Argentina against Britain’s de facto possession. Esteban Gómez, Portuguese navigator in the service of Spain, discovered the islands in 1522. However, in 1690 the British claimed the islands. In 1982, the Argentine military dictatorship went to war against Margaret Thatcher’s Britain in a disastrous attempt to recuperate the Malvinas.

38 Lucio alludes to Jacobo Fijman’s version of his first internment in the Hospicio de las Mercedes, a mental asylum in Buenos Aires, which eventually became the Hospital Nacional José T. Borda — known as el Borda, for short. Fijman recounted his hallucinatory experience in “Dos días” [Two Days], a short text first published in the daily newspaper Crítica on 3 January 1927: “I’m perceiving aromas, incense. My body exudes, pore by pore, diverse and penetrating aromas” (San Julián y otros relatos 28). But in this text he calls himself the Cristo rojo — the Red Christ, not the Black Christ as in Lucio’s version. (The image of a “yellow christ” occurs in “Poema V” of Fijman’s Hecho de estampas [1930]). Fijman surely picked up the phrase “Red Christ” from A. Capdevila’s apocalyptic poem titled “Cristo rojo” (in Melpómene [1912]). In “Dos días” Fijman assumes the identity of the Red Christ while conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony before the multitude, an event he envisioned as heralding “the great work: the Social Revolution” (San Julián 26). This episode later inspired a similar sequence in Eliseo Subiela’s movie Man Facing Southeast (1986), partly filmed on-site at the Borda. Also on-site at the Borda, Gustavo Fontán, with the Frente de Artistas del Borda, filmed a creative evocation of Jacobo Fijman; a voice-over recites Fijman’s poetry.

39 Jean-Martin Charcot, considered the founder of modern neurology, founded in the late nineteenth century the École de la Salpêtrière, where he followed his particular interest in hypnosis and hysteria. Sigmund Freud was one of his students.

40 Founded in 1876, the Buenos Aires Herald began as a single sheet carrying the shipping news and a few advertisements, but it later became the weekly and then daily newpaper serving Argentina’s English-speaking community. It is published to this day both in print and online.

41 Orlando furioso, by Italian author Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533). A novel of chivalry wildly popular in its time, and one of Don Quixote’s favourites. The Immortal Knight imitates Orlando (among other literary models) when he feigns madness in the Sierra Morena over the cruelty of his ladylove (Don Quixote, I, chap. 25).

BOOK THREE, CHAPTER 1

1 Aside from the reference to Ricardo Rojas (see 639n18), Barcia (355n6) detects an allusion to the Argentine poet Manuel de Lavardén (1754–1810) and the well-known opening lines of his “Oda al Paraná” (1801) [Ode to the Paraná]: “Augusto Paraná, sagrado río, / promogénito ilustre del Océano, / que en el carro de nácar refulgente / tirado de caimanes, recamados / de verde y oro, vas de clima en clima, / de región en región, vertiendo franco / suave frescor y pródiga abundancia” [August Paraná, sacred river, / illustrious first-born of the Ocean, / who in the wagon of refulgent mother-of-pearl / drawn by alligators embroidered / in green and gold, you go from climate to climate, / region to region, generously pouring / mild freshness and prodigal abundance].

2 An allusion to Hermann Keyserling’s South American Meditations (see 640n23).

3 An allusion to the misadventures of Don Quixote.

4 As Barcia (360n) observes, Samuel mocks not only Adam’s effusions, but also the opening line of Borges’s famous poem “Fundación mitológica de Buenos Aires” (in Cuaderno San Martín, 1929; later revised as “Fundación mítica de Buenos Aires”) and its evocation of the River Plate: “¿Y fue por este río de sueñera y de barro / que las proas vinieron a fundarme la patria?” (Borges OC I, 81). In Alistair Reid’s translation: “And was it along this torpid muddy river / that the prows came to found my native city?” (Borges, Selected Poems 49).

5 Pereda uses the language of the nineteenth-century frontier in Argentina, where the term cristiano [Christian] is used in opposition to indio [Indian]. In gauchesque literature, cristianos e indios would be roughly the equivalent of Cowboys-and-Indians.

6 “La Chacarita”: lyrics by Iván Diez (1897–1960). The tango is a lugubrious meditation on death written in lunfardo and inspired by the eponymous cemetery (see 628n2).

7 Paternal is a barrio bordering on both Chacarita and Villa Crespo. Villa Soldati is in the south end of the city.

8 lobisome (also, lobisón or lobizón) < Portuguese, lobishome “wolf-man.” The werewolf legend passed from Brazilian to Argentine folklore. In Brazil, the seventh consecutive son of the same father and mother, from the age of thirteen, changes into a lobishome on Fridays during Lent from midnight to two in the morning. In the Argentine version, the seventh of consecutive sons in a family turns into a wolf-like creature that wanders the hills and attacks all humans. This legend was so prevalent in the 1900s that children were being abandoned or killed. To prevent this, a law was passed in the 1920s making the president of Argentina the legal godfather to the seventh son of all families. The state gives the boy a gold medal and a scholarship for his studies until his twenty-first birthday. The tradition continues to this day. On 7 June 2004, Argentine president Néstor Kichner attended the baptism of the seventh boy born to a family in the city of Sunchales, in the northern province of Santa Fe.

9 Perhaps a reference to Marechal’s poem “A un zaino muerto” [To a Dead Chestnut Horse] in Días como flechas: “Sabías deshacer el nudo del horizonte / y masticar el pasto bravío de las leguas” (OC I, 100) [You used to untie the knot of the horizon / and chew up the wild grass of leagues].

10 Rabelaisian allusion. In Gargantua and Pantagruel (Book Two, chapter VII) appears a list of titles supposedly belonging to the Library of St. Victor. One title is Ars honeste fartandi in societate [The Art of Farting Decorously in Society]; another, Tartaretus de modo cacandi [Treatise (or better: Turdise) on How to Shit].

11 Gringo: — refers to any foreigner or immigrant, usually Italians, but others as well. Later, Del Solar calls Schultz “gringo”; his real-life model, Xul Solar, was born of an Italian mother and a German-speaking Latvian father.

12 “Caballito criollo / del galope corto / y el aliento largo.” The first lines of the popular poem “Caballito criollo” by Belisario Roldán (1873–1922), later set to music by Floro Ugarte (1884–1975).

13 In the original, Adam “todo lo veía en imagen.” There may be an allusion to Eduardo González Lanuza’s short story collection Aquelarre (1928), which Lanuza characterized with the somewhat pleonastic subtitle: “cuentos imaginados en imagen” [stories imagined in images].

14 “En mi pobre rancho, / vidalitá, / no existe la calma, / desde que está ausente, / vidalitá / el dueño de mi alma.” These lines, along with the stanzas that follow, are Argentine folksongs. The chorus line Vidalitá comes from the folk genre vidalita, typical of the northwestern region of Argentina.

15 “Amalaya fuera perro, / mi palomita, / para no saber sentir, / ¡adiós, vidita! / El perro no siente agravios, / mi palomita, / todo se le va en dormir, / ¡adiós, vidita!”

16 “Una vieja estaba meando / (y adiós, que me voy) / debajo de una carreta / (¡cuál será su amor!) / y los bueyes dispararon / (y adiós, que me voy) / creyendo que era tormenta / (¡cuál será su amor!).”

17 “De arribita me he venido / (la pura verdad) / pisando sobre las flores / (vamos, vidita, bajo el nogal): / Como soy mocito tierno / (la pura verdad) / vengo rendido de amores / (vamos, vidita, bajo el nogal).” Marechal collected and/or invented many more folkloric ditties such as these for possible inclusion in his novel. See Marisa Martínez Pérsico (147–96).

18 The idea was propagated (invented?) by Leopoldo Lugones, who in El payador (51) spoke of an Andean Sea and even claimed to have found fossilized clam shells in Covunco, Neuquén (51n).

19 Florentino Ameghino (1854–1911) was an Argentine paleontologist and anthropologist whose book La antigüedad del hombre en el Plata (1880) sustained the thesis that humanity originated in the Argentine pampa. Bernini, the character based on Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz, will espouse his thesis shortly. His father, Pedro Scalabrini, was also a paleontologist who worked closely with Ameghino (Galasso 16–17).

20 Gaetano Rovereto [Cayetano Roveretto, in Argentina] (1870–1952): Italian geologist, paleontologist, and theoretician of evolution, whose investigations in Argentina resulted in his book Los estratos araucanos y sus fósiles (1914). Paul Wilhelm Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905): influential German geologist. Hugo Obermaier (1877–1946): German paleontologist and anthropologist who worked in Spain, author of El hombre fósil (1916). Josef Bayer (1882–1931): Austrian anthropologist and archeologist who worked with Obermaier.

21 Even today, the avenida Corrientes is lined with bookstores of all kinds.

22 El Peludo was the nickname given to President Hipólito Yrigoyen (1852–1933), given his predilection to stay holed up in the Casa de Gobierno and avoid interviews with the press. His populist presidency in the 1920s marked a major shift in Argentine politics and the emergence of the hitherto unrepresented popular classes. That he was “the delight of the Muses” can be read in two senses. Barcia (380n) indicates that Yrigoyen was a favourite theme for the popular payadors. But the martinfierristas were also enthusiastic about him. In the lead-up to the 1928 presidential election, a group of them formed The Committee of Young Intellectuals for the Re-election of Hipólito Yrigoyen, with Borges as president and Marechal as vice-president. Macedonio Fernández, among other writers now canonical, participated as well (Abós, Macedonio 135–6).

23 Located in the city of La Plata, this natural science museum was cutting-edge at the time of its inauguration in 1889 and a source of national pride.

24 The War of Paraguay, or the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70), pitted Paraguay against Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. This triple alliance was supported by British capital, which until the war had been economically shut out of isolationist Paraguay. The war literally decimated Paraguay’s population and drastically reduced its national territory.

25 The daily existed from 1928 until 1967. At the invitation of its first director, Alberto Gerchunoff (see 639n22), Marechal worked as a journalist there for some months. It was there that Roberto Arlt became known for his column “Aguafuertes porteñas” (Andrés 29).

26 The literary conceit of the talking Glyptodon was invented by Enrique González Tuñón (1901–1943) in his vignette “Mi amigo de la prehistoria” [My Friend from Prehistory] in his El alma de las cosas inanimadas (1927).

27 In Spanish, a verdad de Perogrullo or perogrullada is a truth so trite or obvious as to be not worth saying. Perogrullo’s uncertain historical existence dates back to thirteenth-century Spain.

28 Navascués (AB 278n) notes that the notion linking aboriginal America with Atlantis goes back to colonial times, at least as far as the Dominican friar Gregorio García’s treatise Origen de los indios del Nuevo Mundo (1607).

29 Winca means “Christian, white man” in the Araucano language spoken by the Ranquel Indians. The abuse of the gerund (matando, “killing”) in the spoken Spanish of the aboriginals has been picked up from Lucio Mansilla’s Una excusión a los indios ranqueles (1870) [A Visit to the Ranquel Indians]. Marechal’s personal copy of this book is very well thumbed and full of underlined passages, an indication of how much his fictive excursion to Saavedra respectfully parodies Mansilla’s famous book, not only in this passage, as Barcia notes (387n), but throughout the chapter.

30 As noted by Mansilla, gualicho means “devil” in Araucano.

31 The invented name combines the Greek morpheme paleo-, “ancient” with the Araucano term — curá, “stone.” The historical Calfucurá was for decades until his death in 1873 the most powerful Aracauno chief in Argentina.

32 Barcia (388n) notes that the image comes from Marechal’s poetry, but cites only “Didáctica de la Patria,” a poem written much later and included in Heptamerón (1966). In an earlier poem, “Gravitación del cielo” in Poemas australes (1937), the architectural metaphor is applied in a different sense to the nation’s beginnings: “¡Oh deleznable arquitectura, / oh bondadosos arquitectos! / Con tierra frágil nuestros hombres / edificaron su morada” (OC I, 181) [O negligible architecture, / O good-hearted architects! / With fragile earth our men / built their dwelling]. It seems that the later Marechal made poetry out of his novelistic material.

33 Marechal did in fact know this man in real life. His poem “A un domador de caballos” in Poemas australes (1937) was inspired by him. Gustavo Fontán includes a short sequence with Liberato Farías in his documentary film Marechal, o la batalla de los ángeles (2002). The name of the narrator-protagonist of Marechal’s second novel, El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo (1965), is a variation on the domador’s name: Lisandro Farías.

34 Schultz’s comment echoes the position of Leopoldo Lugones, first enunciated in his lectures on the gaucho in 1913: “[The gaucho’s] disappearance is a good thing for the country, because he contained an inferior element in his partially aboriginal blood” (El Payador 83).

35 The last two paragraphs are a pastiche of the first Canto of “El alma del payador” [The Soul of the Payador], in Hilario Ascasubi’s poem Santos Vega (1885).

36 According to one popular version of the story, Santos el Payador (anonymous), which circulated in print in the late nineteenth century: “Santos Vega se murió. / Y fue porque lo venció / Luzbel, sin decir Jesús” (qtd. in Prieto 89) [Santos Vega died. / And it was because he was defeated by / Lucifer, without a mention of Jesus]. But in another version belonging to the oral tradition, Santos Vega met and defeated the Devil, only later to be defeated by a payador from the North (Prieto 104). Adam is championing this version.

37 This is Rafael Obligado’s version of the story in Part 4, “La muerte del payador,” of Santos Vega. As Prieto writes, this version could be, and was, read as propaganda in support of progress, or the advance of “civilization” over “barbarism,” in the terms of Sarmiento. The debate over the story is not over. In his 700-page history and anthology of gauchesque poetry, Fermín Chávez completely excludes Obligado’s poem, alleging its lack of “gauchesque spirit,” its “pessimism,” its symbolic message of “frustración criolla”; he prefers instead an oral version from Paraguay in which a Guaraní Santos Vega, mounted on a white horse, defeats the “infernal spirit” (Chávez 35).

38 Cocoliche was a late nineteenth-century vaudeville character who imitated the Spanish spoken by Italian immigrants and came to symbolize them, denoting as well the dialect spoken by Italian immigrants, some terms of which passed into the lunfardo argot and then later into the common language of Argentina.

39 “I came to Argentina to make America [make my fortune]. And I’m in America to make Argentina.” The chiasmic pun plays on the Italian idiomatic expression fare l’America “to make or seek one’s fortune.”

40 “I work the land. We eat bread thanks to me.”

41 The glorified or glorious body refers to the Pauline doctrine of the body’s ressurection: “[The Lord Jesus Christ] shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body” Phillipians 3:21 (KJV). In medieval teaching, a saint’s corpse has the “odour of sanctity.”

42 Behind the obvious allusion to the Christian saint, Martin of Tours (316–397), lies a veiled allusion to General José de San Martín, known as the “Saint of the Sword” (cf. 634n30 and 636n1). Marechal works this poetic conflation in his later poem Canto de San Martín (1950).

43 All are birds indigenous to the Argentine pampa.

44 All traditional folk dances from various Argentine provinces.

45 The “ditch” would correspond to Medrano Creek as it passes through the farmland of Luis María Saavedra, today occupied by the soccer field of the Club Atlético Platense as well as Sarmiento Park (Piñeiro 75).

46 The Frogs, trans. Dudley Fitts (Aristophanes 93).

47 Barcia (400n) points out that the two paragraphs sung by the Chorus are full of allusions to rural Argentine folklore.

48 Navascués (AB 241n) notes the allusion to the French expression Cherchez la femme! — that is; look for the woman of you want to get to the bottom of the matter.

49 “Yo soy la muchacha del circo, / por una moneda yo doy.” First lines of the tango “La muchacha del circo” (1928), music by Gerardo Matos Rodríguez and lyrics by Manuel Romero. The circus girl is a trapeze artist who, in exchange for a penny, shares beautiful illusions. On her precarious trapeze, she is like a white dove anxiously leaping heavenward.

50 Two popular superstitions, according to Barcia (410n). The Pig, a.k.a. the chancho de lata or Tin Pig, wears chains that rattle metallically. The Widow is a ghost who chases young lads and robs them.

51 A further send-up of the Spirit of the Earth (see 650n32).

BOOK THREE, CHAPTER 2

1 Barcia (413n) explains the process: an enclosure or pond of mud would be made; horses would be sent in to work the mud with their hooves and then haul it out for making bricks.

2 In the original: “¡Traga santos y caga diablos!” [Swallow saints and shit devils!], meaning that they present a sweet image but their words or actions belie the appearance.

3 Villa Urquiza: a barrio in Buenos Aires bordering on Saavedra.

4 Emilio Salgari (1862–1911), Italian author of adventure novels, especially the pirate stories whose protagonist was Sandokan.

5 During La Semana Trágica [The Tragic Week] in January 1919, a series of strikes inspired by Anarchists and Communists were brutally repressed by the Argentine Federal Police and the National Army with the help of paramilitary groups, leaving hundreds dead and thousands wounded. The violence of the repression got out of control and spilled over into attacks on Jewish establishments.

6 La Brecha. No such daily seems to have existed but it is a likely name for an anarchist publication. The phrase abrir brecha means “to break through”; firme en la brecha “to stand firm” was a militant watchword. Chilean author Mercedes Valdivieso titled her 1961 feminist novel La brecha. In Montevideo, Brecha has been a left-wing weekly since 1985, when it succeeded its forerunner, Marcha, shut down by the Uruguayan dictatorship in 1974.

7 The issue of cremation was indeed controversial. Roberto Arlt was cremated at his death in 1942, in accord with his express wish. But Arlt’s friend and mentor, the Boedo writer Elías Castelnuovo (1893–1982), regretfully recalls visiting with Arlt the crematorium at the Chacarita Cemetery where the director, a medical hygienist and “fervent believer” in cremation, convinced Arlt with “catechizing propaganda” to sign up for cremation upon his death (qtd. in Saítta 297). Castelnuovo, a progressive socialist intellectual, apparently harbours the same cultural conservatism implied by Marechal’s satirical treatment of Zanetti.

8 “Olas que al llegar / plañideras muriendo a mis pies.” “Waves that break and die / plaintive at my feet.” Verses from the Vals sobre las olas, a waltz in the Viennese style composed in 1888 by the Mexican composer Juventino Rosas, who died in Cuba in 1894. Popular in Europe, the waltz was illegitimately claimed by many European composers. The Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) recalls that during his students days spent in early-twentieth-century Spain the visiting Spanish-American students used to sing this waltz in order “to distinguish and affirm our collective personality.” Thus, he continues, the Vals sobre las olas came to be “a sort of hymn of the peoples of Spanish America vis-à-vis the foreign contingent; it did not cease to be a pleasurable dance, but it became as well an expression of nationalist and regionalist resistance” (Ortiz 18).

9 Juan Moreira: see 649n28.

10 “El Choclo” [The Corncob] is an old chestnut in the tango repertoire, first performed publicly in 1903.

11 A.M. Zubieta (120) considers that the taita Flores is Francisco Real, the murdered protagonist of Borges’s famous story “Hombre de la esquina rosada” (in Historia universal de la infamia [1935]), who has resuscitated and retells his story “with changes.” In Borges’s story, Francisco Real is murdered, secretly, by the sly first-person narrator (Borges OC I, 331–6). Zubieta’s thesis, though she does not say so explicitly, implies a subtle literary duel being waged between Marechal and Borges.

12 “Cascabel, cascabelito, / ríe, ríe, y no llores.” From the tango “Cascabelito” (1924; lyrics by Juan Andrés Caruso, music by José Böhr). In the following paragraph, as Barcia (450n) indicates, several other tangos are referenced: “Milonguita” (1920), “Flor de fango” (1919), and “Mano a mano” (1923). Marechal’s pastiche is based on the popular stereotype first coined in Evarista Carriego’s posthumous La costurerita que dio un mal paso [The Little Seamstress Who Took a False Step] (see 659n14). It came to be emblematic of tango culture, directly inspiring, for example, “No salgas de tu barrio” (1927) [Don’t Leave Your Neighbourhood] (Gobello Letras de tango, vol. 2, 125). Osvaldo Pugliese closes the cycle in 1934 with a tango without lyrics titled “La Beba,” the title alone invoking the pathos of the neighbourhood girl who went astray. The stereotype reflected the burning social issue of young working-class women who, in search of economic independence, often fell into prostitution. Manuel Gálvez’s widely read novel Nacha Regules (1919) represents a middle-brow treatment of the theme; a film version was made in 1950 by Luis César Amadori.

13 In “the fiery sunsets of Villa Ortúzar” A.M. Zubieta (118–19) sees an allusion to Borges’s poem “Último sol en Villa Ortúzar” [Last Sunlight in Villa Ortúzar] (OC I, 71); and, less convincingly, in the game of truco in the phantasmal general stores an allusion to “Fundación mítica de Buenos Aires” [Mythic Founding of Buenos Aires] (OC II, 81). The well-known poems belong, respectively, to Luna de enfrente (1925) and Cuaderno de San Martín (1929), books in which Borges, like Marechal in this passage, was working with topoi drawn from Evaristo Carriego’s poetry and tango lyrics.

14 Marechal’s family melodrama is a pastiche of Evarista Carriego’s La costurerita que dio un mal paso, a classic of the literature about suburban Buenos Aires. This cycle of eleven poems, mostly sonnets, tells the story of the sister gone astray, the effects on the family, her return and reconciliation with the family. Also referenced in this chapter is Carriego’s posthumous La canción del barrio), in particular the poem “El velorio” [The Wake]. Borges’s essay “Evaristo Carriego” (1930) dedicates an entire chapter to La canción del barrio (Borges, OC I, 130–41).

15 Gabino Ezeiza (1858–1916), a.k.a. “El Negro Ezeiza,” was a famous Afro-Argentine payador and author of popular criollista or gauchesque literature; e.g., Colección de cantares and Cantares criollos, both published in 1880 (Prieto 57). He continually toured rural Argentina and Uruguay in circuses and appeared in theatres in both Buenos Aires and Montevideo. He was a champion in the poetic “counterpoint” contests known as payadas, in which two payadores would compete by improvising on a given theme.

BOOK FOUR, CHAPTER 1

1 Viento del este, / agua como peste. Popular saying in Argentina. (Literal translation: “Wind from the east, water like the plague.”)

2 The payador Tissone seems a generic representative of many entertainers of Italian descent who participated in the final stages of the criollista/gauchesque genre. On the other hand, there was indeed a tango singer, Herberto Emiliano de Costa (1901–1935), known in the business as Príncipe Azul or Prince Charming, though this historical figure does not seem to be the basis of Marechal’s character of the same name. (When international tango idol Carlos Gardel died in a plane crash in June 1935, American impresarios saw the handsome de Costa as a possible replacement. On his way to the United States in September 1935, he died of a sudden illness in Trinidad.) Likewise, in the mid-thirties a group called Los Bohemios, directed by Mario Pugliese, was doing musical comedy as well as radio shows.

3 Globe trotter: in English in the original.

4 Giovinezza: “youth” in Italian. Navascués (AB 347n) notes the probable allusion to the Italian Fascist anthem so titled.

5 Vino de la Costa or vino chinche is made from a hybrid grape, a cross between the indigenous Vitis Labrusca and the European Vinifera, and is grown on the coastal area of Buenos Aires Province.

6 The magazine El alma que canta (1916–61) published tango lyrics and popular poetry. Barcia (482n) disparages it as cursi (vulgar, kitsch).

7 “La pampa tiene el ombú / y el puchero el caracú. / Sacudíme la persiana, / que allá viene doña Juana. / Cinco por ocho cuarenta, / pajarito con polenta. / ¿Quién te piantó de la rama, / que no estás en el rosal?” I have translated this doggerel verse freely.

8 Adam’s discourse takes up ideas expressed by Alfonso Reyes in his influential article “Jitanjáforas” published in the one and only issue of Libra (1929), a review directed by Marechal and Francisco Luis Bernárdez: “Putting together two names of objects which of their own accord don’t go together, the poor objects cannot but obey the magic spell, and end up tied together by the word: hence centaurs, mermaids and dragons have been born, the same way as Morality and Metrics” (Corral, ed. 14–15). Reyes goes on to cite Paul Valéry: “No discourse is so obscure, no fable is so absurd nor conversation so incoherent that we cannot in the end attribute some sense to it” (15). Reyes did not take entirely seriously his playful exercise in avant-garde nominalism, unlike Adam, who effectively presses this nominalism into the service of a pious philosophical realism. The allegorical, symbolic, moral, and anagogical he mentions are the four levels of interpretation in medieval theory and mentioned by Dante in his Convivio. Adam’s poetics combines Thomist theory with twentieth-century avant-garde poetics (see Cheadle, Ironic Apocalypse 63–7).

9 “Y el amor, más alegre / que un entierro de niños.” (Note the slight textual variation between this version and the first citation of these verses, which in Book One, chapter 1 exactly replicate those in Marechal’s original poem.)

10 “En el pingo del amor / quise jinetear un día, / creyéndome que sería / solamente escarceador.”

11 The model for the ensuing conversation is the Platonic dialogue, in particular The Symposium, where philosphers are seated around a table. The ideas expressed by Adam were earlier rehearsed by Marechal in his essay “Descenso y ascenso por la Belleza” (1933 and 1939), which elaborates a form of Christian Neoplatonism.

12 Borges, model for Luis Pereda, attended the Lycée Jean Calvin in Geneva as an adolescent.

13 In his hagiographic essay “Vida de Santa Rosa de Lima” (1943), Marechal begins Chapter V: “The saint is an imitator of the Word in the order of Redemption… Santa Rosa de Lima, more than anyone, gave herself over to the terrible imitation of the agony of Jesus Christ; and her mortifications were so severe that their mere description both amazes and frightens” (OC II, 381; my translation). Navascués (AB 371n) considers the analogy between poet/artist and saint to derive from Jacques Maritain’s Neo-Thomism. Marechal possessed the 1927 edition of Maritain’s Art et scholastique (1920).

14 “Aparcero don Tissone, / ya que me lo pintan franco / dígale a este servidor: / ¿Por qué el tero caga blanco?”

15 “Caga blanco el tero-tero, / ya lo ha dicho el payador, / porque, de juro, no sabe / cagar en otro color.”

BOOK FOUR, CHAPTER 2

1 Perramus was and continues to be a brand of high-quality, Argentine-made gabardine coat. A perramus (naturalized as a lower-case noun in common Argentine speech) was a status symbol. I am grateful to Professor Raquel Macciuci (Universidad Nacional de la Plata) for this information.

2 C.P.G. likely stands for Compañía Primitiva de Gas, established in 1910 with British capital.

3 Lenocinium. Latin word for brothel.

4 Camoatí: a Guarani word for a kind of wasp indigenous to river basins of the Paraná, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

5 Albas corpus: popular deformation of the legal principle Habeas corpus.

6 The cultural stereotype of the obtuse gallego causes the laughter here. See 637n5.

7 Schultz’s anti-Jewish slur here anticipates another in Book Seven, the “Journey to Cacodelphia” (see 675n50). There may be some basis for Schultz’s attitude in Xul Solar’s own racial views, at least in the 1920s. Ernesto Mario Barredo, recounting his interview with Xul in La Nación (29 October 1929), drops this comment, shortly after relating that Xul’s father was a German from the Baltic: “we get into a discussion about race. I [Barredo] don’t believe in Arians, and he [Xul] doesn’t altogether believe in Semites” (qtd. in Artundo 65).

8 The common etymology is dubious, according to Joan Corominas (Diccionario etimológico hispánico [1954], vol. 1, under absolver), but was once commonly accepted, as in Ramón Menéndez Pidal’s Manual de gramática histórica española (1904; 6th ed. 1940). Leo Spitzer, writes Corominas, considered the etymological connection “unnecessary” and “improbable” for both semantic and phonetic reasons. Whether Marechal himself accepted the common-etymology thesis is not clear; he may be poking fun indirectly at the erudition of Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz’s essay El hombre que está solo y espera (1930). If so, the mockery seems unjustified, as shown in this passage: “Bachelor [soltero] or married, the Man of Corrientes and Esmeralda is a man who is naked and alone [solo] within the verbal bastion of his skepticism, who is alone amid two million men and women who are alone” (75). The passage clearly distinguishes between bachelorhood and solitude, and in no way attempts to conflate the two.

9 Albert Londres (1884–1932), prototype of the investigative journalist, published Le Chemin de Buenos Aires in 1927, whose subject matter is la traite des Blanches, the trade in white female prostitution. Taking a quasi-anthropological approach, Londres penetrated the milieu of pimps and their women to describe how their world worked, while denouncing poverty as the real cause of prostitution. The reaction in Buenos Aires was righteous indignation, as reflected in Marechal’s characters. Even in 1994 the normally sober Barcia, in his footnote on Londres’s book (532n), cannot refrain from insulting it as a librejo [a poor excuse for a book]. But the librejo has always enjoyed enormous success. Sergei Eisenstein planned a film adaptation of it. The latest edition came out in 2010 (Brussels, Magallan & Cie).

10 Barcia (534n) finds an allusion here to Manuel Gálvez’s novel Hombres en soledad (1938) which, like Adam’s discourse in this passage, proposes a Catholic-Nationalist solution to the problem raised by Scalabrini Ortiz in El hombre que está solo y espera (1930).

BOOK FOUR, CHAPTER 3

1 “¿Dónde están mis compañeros / del Cerrito y Ayacucho?” Two lines from the poem “El inválido” [The Invalid], by Bartolomé Mitre. Barcia (537n) comments that the lines have come to stand as an Argentine ubi sunt. Ongaro (327n) recalls here that Mitre was the first Spanish-language translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

2 Exodus 15:1 and 15:8.

3 Allusion to Ruth 2

4 Allusion to Exodus 32.

5 Allusion to I Kings 12.

6 Allusion to Daniel 3. The three just men, untouched by the flames, are Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego.

7 Abraham the Jew was apparently a fourteenth-century alchemist, magician, and philosopher, probably of Sephardic origin. A manuscript attibuted to him, Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin, was translated in 1899 by the British occultist sect, the Golden Dawn. The Green Lion and Lion’s Blood were chemical compounds (vitriol and metal sulphate, respectively) but endowed alchemically with various symbolic meanings.

8 Philadelphia (< Greek phileo, “I love” and adelphos, “brother”) is a Christian town privileged in Revelation [Apocalypsis] 1:11 and 3:7. The whole paragraph is an exercise in Biblical typology, drawing as well on non-canonical sources (the alchemical tradition) and depicting the Jews as at once the fallen and the chosen people.

9 Allusion to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in 1903 in Russia, which propounds the paranoid delusion that international Jewry is plotting to take over the world by subverting the morals of the Gentiles — a more extreme version of Samuel Tesler’s alcohol-induced temptation. Translated into many languages and circulated throughout Europe and the Americas in the twentieth century, Protocols was first exposed as a fraud in the British and American press in 1921, though with scant effect on its efficacy as anti-Semitic propaganda. Adam Buenosayres apparently believes in the conspiracy theory, along with the old myth, invented in the Middle Ages, of Christ’s curse against the Jews. Anti-Semitism was strong among the extreme sector of the Argentine Catholic-Nationalists, such as Hugo Wast (pseudonym of Gustavo Adolfo Martínez Zuviría [1883–1954]), who wrote the blatantly anti-Semitic novels El Kahal and Oro (1935). However, not all right-wing nationalists were anti-Semitic. The Fascist Leopoldo Lugones (1894–1938) dismissed the Protocols as “malignant and imbecilic” (qtd. in Schwartz 131), and Catholic-Nationalist author Manuel Gálvez considered himself an admirer and friend of the Jews, though clearly he retained a degree of anti-Jewish prejudice. Remarkably, Kessel Schwartz does not discuss Adán Buenosayres in his article “Antisemitism in Modern Argentine Fiction.” But Leonardo Senkman (10–14) does so, even-handedly and insightfully. In Senkman’s view, one may infer, Marechal’s Catholic, anti-Jewish prejudice was similar to that of Gálvez. As Senkman observes, in the 1920s and 1930s both Catholics and agnostic liberals, even in the literary avant-garde of Martín Fierro, harboured the negative Jewish stereotypes of the ambient cultural imaginary.

10 This curious sentence, framing the paragraph, has been translated literally. Marechal writes brazo, not rama [branch], of the fig tree. Though brazo de un árbol is more acceptable in Spanish than the English “arm of a tree,” the choice of words is odd. Given that the paragraph is a gloss on the crucifixion story (referencing passages from Matthew 27, Mark 15, Luke 23, and John 18), the word brazo “arm,” evokes brazo de cruz, “cross-arm,” and by association the arm of the Cross. Citing Matthew 27:3 (error for Matthew 27:5) where Judas hangs himself, Barcia (551n) erroneously attributes the detail of the fig tree to this same biblical passage, which states simply that Judas “went away and hanged himself.” According to Kim Paffenroth (123), “among the many species [of tree] on which Judas hanged himself are the fig, sycamore, elder, willow, grape vine (!), tamarind, oak, dog rose, poplar, and redbud” (Judas 123). In English we have the Judas tree (a flowering deciduous), but in Spanish language and culture the (non-biblical) image of Judas hanging from the fig tree is deeply etched. On the other hand, the Son of Perdition is from John 17:12, where Jesus in prayer tells God that of his faithful followers “none of them is lost, but the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled”; the “scripture’s fulfillment” refers to the Old Testament prophecy: “Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition” (2 Thessalonians 2:3). All this suggests an allegory of Samuel Tesler’s imminent conversion to Christianity: Samuel’s agony (Judas hanged in the fig tree) is a prelude to rebirth in Christ, who in Marechal’s narrative gloss is being simultaneously crucified. In fact, Jacobo Fijman (real-life model for Samuel Tesler) did convert to Christianity in 1930 (Bajarlía 83).

11 In “Dos días” (1927), his own account of his first internment in the mental asylum, Jacobo Fijman recalls saying: “¿no sabe que soy el Mesías?” [Don’t you realize I’m the Messiah?] (San Julián 19); and he insists: “Soy el Mesías” (22), along with the variant “soy el Anunciado” (20, 21). In a 1969 interview, he recalls with sly humour: “Years ago I met up with the midwife who brought me into the world; she said I was born talking. And you know what I was saying? I am the Messiah. What’s more, I said it in Hebrew. Take note, it’s not the kind of childhood memory you’ll hear from Borges” (qtd. in Barjarlía 41). Fijman evidently enjoyed the notoriety of the anecdote and must have told variations on it repeatedly over the course of his life.

12 A century earlier, the area occuped by Villa Crespo would have been the outskirts of the city. The wealthy Balcarce family had their magnificent summer house on what became the 600 block of Warnes Street. In the same era, nearby Canning was known as the avenida del Ministro Inglés, apparently because the British diplomat had his residence there (Pino 94–5).

13 “Super flumina Babylonis ibi sedimus et flevimus cum recordaremur Sion” (Vulgate Psalm 136:1). “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion” (New International Psalm 137:1). Zion, the Promised Land, is for Christians a figure of the Kingdom of God promised by Christ.

14 Narrating the agony of Santa Rosa de Lima, Marechal writes of her agony: “Rosa, on the cross, must have imitated the Crucified, saying as did he in his agony: ‘I’m thirsty. Thirst is devouring me!’ ” (Vida de Santa Rosa de Lima, OC II, 419). The biblical allusion is to John 19:28; again, the implication is that Samuel is undergoing his via crucis prior to an eventual conversion to Catholicism. Abelardo Castillo’s character Jacobo Fiksler — based on Jacobo Fijman/Samuel Tesler — protagonizes a novel whose title seems to refer to this passage: El que tiene sed (1985) [He Who Is Thirsty].

15 Noumena (plural of noumenon) in Plato refers to the objects of intelligence or substantive Ideas. Marechal is likely using the term in the Platonic rather than the Kantian sense.

BOOK FIVE, CHAPTER 1

1 See 633n22.

2 The Pampas lived in the plains of what is now the Province of Buenos Aires. Hunters and gatherers, they were famous for hunting ostriches using bolas (two or more stones tied to a strong cord, to be thrown at the prey so as to wind round it and entangle it).

3 Chubut is a province in southern Argentina. This episode is a homage to Ricardo Güiraldes’s famous novel, Don Segundo Sombra (1926), a text of literary modernism that closes the cycle of the gauchesque genre.

4 “En el corimbo rojo de la mañana zumban / tus abejorros, Maravilla.” In the red corymb of morning your / bumblebees buzz, Wonder.” First lines of Marechal’s poem “Canto en la grupa de una mañana” [Song on the Haunches of a Morning] in Días como flechas (1926).

5 In particular, Jorge Luis Borges, who brought ultraísmo from his contacts with the Spanish literary avant-garde, and Xul Solar, who had spent several years in Europe.

6 As Barcia (567n) observes, Santos Vega stands in here for that other iconic gaucho, Martín Fierro, whose name was taken by the celebrated literary magazine (1924–27).

7 The Royal Keller, located at the heart of Buenos Aires (at Esmeralda 385), was a storied confitería and literary/artistic gathering place, including for the martinfierristas.

8 Speaking of his own life, Marechal uses the phrase “a first call to order” (Andrés 30) to characterize his evolution from the his avant-garde poetry of the mid-twenties to the “metaphysical” verses of Odas para el Hombre y la Mujer (1929). Adam’s trip to Europe is a narrative condensation of Marechal’s two trips there, in 1926 and 1929–30.

9 Navascués (AB 425n) surmises that Adam is referring to the mountain of San Miguel de Aralar, popularly known as the “Angel of Aralar,” near Olazagutía, Navarra.

10 Garcilaso de la Vega (1501–1536), Spanish poet who introduced Renaissance verse forms into Spanish literature. Salicio and Nemeroso are two “shepherds” who dialogue in Garcilaso’s first Égloga.

11 Don Quixote’s lengthy, eloquent paean to the mythical Golden Age (Book 1, chapter 11) is delivered in the presence of real shepherds, not characters out of pastoral novel as the Knight believes. The rustic shepherds, of course, have no idea what he’s talking about.

12 Athanase Apartis (1899–1972): sculptor born in Greece who studied under the more famous French sculptor Antoine Bourdelle (1861–1929).

13 Valery Larbaud translated Joyce’s Ulysses into French (the version that Marechal read in Paris in 1929–30); his article “James Joyce” (Nouvelle Revue Française 1922) is ground zero of Joycean criticism. Friend of Ricardo Güiraldes and Manuel Gálvez, among other Argentine writers, Larbaud wrote articles in the 1920s for the major daily La Nación as well as for the literary magazines Proa and Martín Fierro (see Cheadle, “Between Wandering Rocks: Joyce’s Ulysses in the Argentine Culture Wars”).

14 Jujuy is the northernmost province of Argentina, bordering on northern Chile and southern Bolivia.

15 Alquiles Badi (1894–1976), Alberto Morera (1904–1954), Raquel Forner (1902–1988), Horacio Butler (1897–1983). Argentine painters who, among others — notably Antonio Berni (1905–1981) — formed the so-called Group of Paris. Perhaps the most internationally famous now are Berni and Forner. Marechal frequented the group both in the French capital and in Sanary-sur-Mer.

16 Adam’s quotation from the Critias is more or less accurate, and according to Plato’s text the white, black, and red stone was indeed used to construct docks.

BOOK FIVE, CHAPTER 2

1 San Luis de la Punta de los Venados: the complete name of the capital city of San Luis Province, in the interior of Argentina.

2 As Navascués (AB 436n) notes, the Principal has apparently been named for the Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827); inspired by J.J. Rousseau’s Romanticism, Pestalozzi set down the modern principles of modern education on the premise that human nature is essentially good.

3 Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s autobiography Recuerdos de provincia (1850) recounts in the chapter “Mi educación” a street fight between two gangs of schoolboys headed up respectively by Barrilito and Chuña (Barcia 586n).

4 The Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Buenos Aires located at Gaona 1730 in the barrio Caballito, is dedicated to the Virgen de los Navegantes [Virgin of the Mariners], originally the Sardinian Madonna di Bonaira, to whom Pedro Mendoza in 1536 dedicated the settlement of Santa María del Buen Aire. The statue described by Adam, in which the Virgin holds a ship in her right hand and the baby Jesus in her left, dates from 1897.

5 In Greek mythology, Bellerophon rode the wingèd horse Pegasus. After killing the monster Chimera, he tried to fly to Mount Olympus, but was stymied and punished by Zeus for his presumption.

6 La Grande Argentina (1930) was the title of Leopoldo Lugones’s nationalist essays. His concept of the Great Argentina took as its model Mussolini’s Italy, which he considered to be reviving the senatorial system of ancient Rome. As pointed out by Enrique Zuleta Álvarez (143–4), Lugones’s philo-Fascist nationalism was somewhat contradictory, in that he favoured economic development through British capital investment. Such development was the basis of the hegemonic liberalism opposed by both Catholic nationalism and left-wing nationalism.

BOOK FIVE, CHAPTER 3

1 “Las doce campanadas eran doce mochuelos: / Alguien abrió la puerta de la torre, y huyeron.” First two lines of Marechal’s poem “Noche de sábado” [Saturday Night] in Días como flechas (1926) (OC I, 95).

2 The poem “Noche de sábado” continues: “¡Igual que un trompo bailará de tu punta / tu corazón nocturno” [Just like a top your heart will dance on end like a top]. Adam’s image looks like a variant on this one.

3 The three images in quotation marks cited by Adam are all verses from Marechal’s “Poema de veinticinco años” [Poem on Turning Twenty-Five Years Old] in Días como flechas (1926). The first stanza reads: “La tierra es un antílope que huye / sobre deshilachados caminos de aventura. / — ¡Salve, moscardón ebrio / girando en el más fuerte mediodía de sombra! / — Mundo, piedra zumbante / de los siete colores…” (OC I, 89).

4 “Viernes Santo, Viernes Santo, / día de grande Pasión.”

5 “Página eterna de argentina gloria, / melancólica imagen de la patria.” The first verses of the patriotic poem by Juan Chassaing (1839–1864), minor poet, as well as Unitarian soldier and politician. Children ritually recited the poem in Argentine schools.

6 “Un automóvil, dos automóviles, / tres automóviles, cuatro automóviles.” The ditty continues up to seven automobiles “y un autobús” [and one bus]. According to Marechal (Andrés 21), this was the “anthem” of the magazine Martín Fierro, composed as a joke by Oliverio Girondo and sung to the melody of “La donna è mobile” [Woman is Fickle, from Verdi’s opera Rigoletto (1851)].

7 “Parece que van cayendo / copos de nieve en tu cara.” Marechal has inverted the first two verses of a traditional Spanish requiebro [song of seduction] put to popular music: “Copos de nieve en tu cara / Parece van cayendo: / Mientras más te voy mirando / Mejor me vas pareciendo” (Rodríguez Marín, item 1295).

8 “Dans une tour de Nantes / y avait un prisonnier.” Traditional French song, still popular today, which properly begins: “Dans les prisons de Nantes / y avait un prisonnier.” Often confused, as in Marechal’s text, with a another song that begins: “Dans une tour de Londres / y avait un prisonnier.”

9 Anaximander (see 631n14).

10 Anaximenes (d. 528 BCE) is known for his doctrine that air (Greek pneuma, “wind, breath, spirit”) is the source of all things. In medieval philosophy, the term came to be mean breath of God or Holy Spirit. The medieval Latin form neuma signified as well a musical structure in plainsong, consisting in a prolonged phrase or group of notes sung to a single syllable, usually at the end of a melody.

11 Luján is a town not far west of Buenos Aires. Nuestra Señora de Luján is considered to be the patron saint of Argentina.

12 Barcia (612n) points out the intertextuality between this passage and Marechal’s “Cortejo,” from Poemas australes (1937), in which the deceased is a woman: “la cabeza yacente, sacudida en el viaje, / traza el signo de ¡no!” (OC I, 190) [the prone head, jouncing back and forth in the journey, traces the sign of No!].

13 Allusion to Matthew 18:3. In the King James Version: “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

14 Ramon Lull (1232–1315): philosopher, Franciscan monk, and first major writer in the Catalan language. His most famous work is the Ars generalis ultima or Ars magna (1305).

15 Navascués (AB 464n) finds in the novel’s original manuscript a revealing paragraph that has been suppressed in the published novel: “Names of women [crossed out: that bring disturbing testimony to his conscience]! Herminia, Zulema, Rosa! Irma, in her happy humility (and he’d told her eyes were like two mornings together). Why, what for? When he already knew the sad game and abominated it? But behind Irma arises, suddenly, a figure — terrible Eumenides” [my translation].

16 The Eumenides (the Furies) is a Greek tragedy by Aeschylus. The Furies are to judge Orestes for murdering his mother Clytemnestra; Marechal has apparently conflated the Furies into a single figure.

17 Navascués (AB 466n) finds a much longer sentence in the original manuscript: “I am sick to death of empty [unreadable word], of sterile and proud literature. I renounce the art that made me what I am now, and I offer myself to your art so that you may make me what I ought to be [crossed out: if I can still be anything], if it isn’t already too late” [my translation].

18 Like the hobo of the Dirty Thirties in North America, the image of the linyera (hobo, tramp) became in the década infame a fixture in the Argentine imaginary. Enrique Larreta’s play titled El linyera (1932), in which a tramp suddenly appears and alters the lives of the villagers, was a popular success (a film version was directed by Larreta and Mario Soffici in 1933). Larreta’s character reflects the figure’s dual aspect — on the one hand, a frightening outsider, morally suspect; on the other, a wise messenger.

19 The “Someone” who lays down his arms is likely an allusion to the Knight Faithful and True in Revelation 11:19.

BOOK SIX, “THE BLUE-BOUND NOTEBOOK”

1 In the original: “El Cuaderno de Tapas Azules” [The Notebook with Blue Covers]. The colour azul in Spanish connotes the spiritual (similar to “azure skies” in English) but also, in Hispanic literature, aestheticism and the cult of beauty. The great modernist poet Rubén Darío (1867–1916) titled his most famous book Azul (1888). The chief literary model for Adam’s Notebook, both in substance and poetic language, is the Vita nuova, Dante’s courtly/mystical/devotional account of his love for Beatrice. The oneiric visions of the Notebook recall not only Dante (Vita nuova, chapters III and XII) but the cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus.

2 In the original Spanish: Aquella, the demonstrative pronoun in the feminine form. The form aquel (feminine aquella) marks a strong deictic distance from the position of enunciation. A literal translation would be “That [Feminine] One Yonder” (i.e., “over there” or “out there,” or perhaps “up there”).

3 Navascués (AB 31 and 482n) attributes the image of the soul’s spiralling movements to Marechal’s reading of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (5–6th century CE), a Byzantine Christian author heavily influenced by Neoplatonism. Later, in Book Seven, Schultz employs the spiral motif in his design of Cacodelphia.

4 “Woman, why weepest thou?” (KJV John 20:13, 15). The question is put twice to Mary Magdalene when she visits Jesus’s tomb. Thanks to Sheila Ethier for pointing out this biblical allusion.

5 In chapter XIV of Vita nuova, “a friend” takes Dante to a place where many beautiful women are gathered, and then Beatrice shows up (Dante 573). The friend in Vita nuova is traditionally considered to be Dante’s mentor, the poet Guido de Cavalcanti (1250?–1300), referred to earlier, in chapter III of Dante’s text, as “the first among my friends” (Dante 564). In Adam’s Notebook, the friend may be an idealized version of Samuel Tesler, with whom Adam has earlier discussed love, philography, etc. Later, Adam capitalizes Friend, as though to indicate a sort of Platonic ideal of the friend. Navascués (AB 498n) recalls the Friend as Love’s counsellor in the Roman de la Rose (circa 1230), a work probably known by Dante and definitely by Marechal.

6 “Entre mujeres alta ya, / la niña quiere llamarse Viento.” First lines of Marechal’s poem “De la adolescente” [On the Adolescent Girl] in Odas para el hombre y la mujer (1929) (OC I, 142).

7 Entre San Pedro y San Juan / hicieron un barco nuevo: / las velas eran de plata, / los remos eran de acero.” A traditional Argentine children’s song, which continues: “Saint Peter was the pilot, / Saint John was a sailor, / and the captain-general / was Jesus of Nazareth” (qtd. in Barcia 648n).

8 The question of gender in Adam’s Notebook is a fascinating one. The soul who narrates her “spiritual autobiography” is clearly cast as feminine, but in this passage there is a sudden shift to a masculine subject position of enunciation.

9 Belgrano is a barrio in the northern part of Buenos Aires, bordering on the river (Río de la Plata). The barrancas, “ravines,” were formed by the action of the river. The Plaza Barrancas de Belgrano is an elegant park.

10 For Fernanda Bravo (155), “Friend” in this passage refers to Dante himself.

11 The line comes from Marechal’s poem “Niña de encabritado corazón” [Girl of Rebellious Heart] in Odas para el hombre y la mujer (1929).

12 As Nicola Jacchia (437n) points out, the phrase seems an allusion to Matthew 8:22 (“Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead,” KJV); cf. Luke 9:60.

13 Barcia (668n) points out the intertextuality between this dream-vision and a poem by Marechal titled “Descripción de un sueño” [Description of a Dream], published in 1928 in the Buenos Aires magazine Síntesis and not collected in any of his books. Adam’s vision and the poem share the theme of the corpse of the beloved being transported in a rowboat to its final destination, as well as many specific images. But, instead of the Christ-like man of Adam’s vision, in the poem an angel speaks to the poet: “El amor es la vid que se riega en exilio / con el agua y la sal de los ojos llovidos. / Más allá de tus ojos colgarán los racimos” (OC I, 486; Marechal’s italics) [Love is the vine that is nourished in exile / by the water and salt of weeping eyes. / Beyond your eyes will hang the bunches of grapes].

14 The image of the Beloved being “nourished” by the substance or heart of the Lover occurs in the first sonnet of Dante’s Vita nuova (chapter III), where the allegorical figure of Love gives the poet’s bleeding heart to his beloved “as nutrition” (Dante 563). The same Dantean passage, no doubt reinforced by his reading of Adán Buenosayres, can be discerned in the penultimate sentence of the introductory “Liminar” of Cervera Salinas’s El síndrome de Beatriz: “With the serpent devouring the centre of her heart, Beatrice, in her eternal misfortune or in her throne of light, nourishes the healthy soul and feeds upon the soul that is sick” (34; my translation).

15 This last sentence of the Blue-Bound Notebook serves as the third of three epigraphs to Abelardo Castillo’s novel Crónica de un iniciado [Chronicle of an Initiate] (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1991): “rosa evadida de la muerte, rosa sin otoño, espejo mío, cuya forma cabal y único nombre conoceré algún día, si, como espero, hay un día en que la sed del hombre da con el agua justa y el exacto manantial.”

BOOK SEVEN

1 Navascués (AB 509n) finds in the original manuscript the terms Cacópolis and Calípolis (“ugly city and beautiful city”). Formed by analogy with Philadelphia (“city of loving brothers”) are the names Cacodelphia (“city of ugly brothers”) and Calidelphia (“city of beautiful brothers”).

2 Ulysses descends into Hades in Book XI of the Odyssey, Aeneas in Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid.

3 The “visible” and “invisible” Buenos Aires alludes to Eduardo Mallea’s notion of a visible and invisible Argentina in his well-known essay Historia de una pasión argentina (1937). In Mallea’s conceit, the visible Argentina was false, inauthentic, and degraded, while the invisible Argentina was the true, spiritual nation. Schultz/Marechal complicates this scheme considerably.

4 The Tabarís was a storied cabaret on the avenida Corrientes in Buenos Aires, famous for dancing and prostitution, and frequented by artists and international celebrities. Nowadays it is a review theatre.

5 Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, the first part of The Divine Comedy trilogy, is the structural model for the parodic “Journey to Cacodelphia.” Virgil, the old-world Latin poet, plays the role of guide to the poet Dante. The reader familiar with the Inferno will recognize allusions to it in many Cacodelphian episodes.

6 To Barcia (678n), this spell appears to be Marechal’s invention, but Jacchia (446) considers it to be from an invocation of the Celtic goddess (or god) Cerunnos.

7 Logistilla is the good fairy in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (see 651n41).

8 Various names or designations for the Old Testament Yahweh (Barcia 678n), but Jacchia (447) finds this incantation in a medieval manuscript, L’Opération de sept esprits des planètes, conserved in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris.

9 A reference to the medieval Spanish folk character of the crone and procuress, who by antonomasia came to be known as La Celestina. La Celestina is a secondary character in the Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea (1499), by Fernando de Rojas, but the resourceful crone stole the show, as it were, and the play came to be popularly known as La Celestina. The skill set attributed to Doña Tecla is that of La Celestina — in particular, the art of sowing up the broken hymen of deflowered virgins in order to refit them for marriage.

10 These tongue-twisters in English (taken from English Tongue Twisters <http://www.uebersetzung.at/twister/en.htm>) do not replicate those in the Spanish original, which Navascués (AB 516n) qualifies as jitanjáforas or playful nonsense (see 660n8). Adam, however, qualifies this wordplay as folklore.

11 “De mi pago me he venido / arrastrando mi reboso / sólo por venir a verte / cara de perro baboso.”

12 “De mi pago me he venido, / arrastrando mi chalina, / sólo por venir a verte, cara de / yegua madrina.”

13 Mandinga refers to a people from the west coast of Africa. In Spanish America, the term came to be associated with the religions of African slaves, considered evil by Christianity, and then to mean the Devil, a usage still common in rural Latin America.

14 Schultz speaks in his neocriollo language.

15 In the original: ¡Pirocagaron los Paliogogos! The made-up verb pirocagar is a mock-erudite (and mock-Neocriollo) version of the popular expression cagar fuego, “to shit fire,” which means “to fail, to mess up, to be screwed.” “Pollygogs” is Doña Tecla’s mispronunciation of Paleogogues, Schultz’s neologism meaning etymologically “old leaders” in contrast to the Neogogue or “new leader.”

16 Barcia (682n) and Navascués (AB 517n) note here the echo of the Inferno (Canto III, vv. 134–6), where Dante falls asleep.

17 Gath and Chaves: see note 648n20. In Books One to Five.

18 Luna Park, often called the “Palacio de los Deportes” [Sports Palace] and built in 1931, is a covered stadium used for boxing matches and other spectacles for mass consumption. Both the Palacio and the Boca Juniors’ stadium, La Bombonera, are still in use today.

19 Barcia (687n) speculates that this sentence alludes to the first presidency (1946–55) of Juan Domingo Perón.

20 Spanish has adopted the Canadian term “toboggan” and resignified it to mean “slide” of the amusement park type. Schultz’s neocriollo word combines “holy” and “toboggan.”

21 The Latin phrase refers to the Pope’s right to appoint a cardinal and withhold his name in pectore, “within his bosom”; i.e., without publicly naming the cardinal.

22 Celtic culture still survives in Galicia, and bagpipes are a traditional instrument there.

23 Alberto Vacarezza (1886–1959) was a popular playwright whose sainetes, comic or melodramatic sketches, reflected life among the lower classes.

24 ad honorem, “without pay.”

25 Waltz over the Waves (see 658n8).

26 Berreta in lunfardo means “fake.”

27 In “learned ignorance” Navascués (AB 534n) finds an allusion to De docta ignorantia (1440), in which Nicholas of Cusa characterizes the learned man as being aware of his own ignorance.

28 Beffa in Italian means “mockery,” ‘joke,” ‘hoax.”

29 Reference to the maxim: “Cobbler, stick to your last.” In Spanish: “Zapatero, a tus zapatos.”

30 “Unyielding waist” translates inquebrantable cintura. But in the original manuscript Navascués (AB 536n) finds cintura casta, literally “chaste waist” but suggestive of cinturón de castidad “chastity belt.”

31 The famous military “Marcha de San Lorenzo” (composed in 1901 by Cayetano Alberto Silva) honours General José de San Martín’s grenadiers and commemorates the Battle of San Lorenzo (636n1).

32 The entertainment in confiterías during the 1930s was commonly provided by young women’s orchestras.

33 Emilio Castelar (1832–1899), liberal democratic president of Spain during the First Republic (1873–74), renowned for his oratory.

34 Alfredo Palacios (1878–1965), an Argentine activist known as the first socialist member of Parliament in the Americas, and famous for his speeches.

35 Another allusion to Keyserling’s South American Meditations (see 640n23).

36 Barcia (716n) finds an allusion here to a verse of Garcilaso de la Vega’s “Third Eclogue”: “Flérida, para mí dulce y sabrosa / más que la fruta del cercado ajeno” [Flérida, for me sweeter and tastier / than the fruit of another’s garden].

37 The reference to this Italian monk’s visit in 1640 is obscure but plausible. In El libro de Buenos Aires, Abós includes the testimony of Ascarate de Biscay, who visited Buenos Aires in 1659 and commented that the men “love their leisure and pleasure and are devoted to Venus” (47). Navascués (545n) thinks Marechal may have been referring to the Italian Jesuit Antonio Sepp (1655–1733), who travelled to Buenos Aires in 1690.

38 Emeric Essex Vidal (1791–1861), English painter considered by some to be a precursor of Argentine art, published his Picturesque Illustrations of Buenos Ayres and Montevideo in 1820.

39 The cemetery of La Recoleta, in the centrally located upper-class barrio of the same name, is the final resting place of the wealthy and powerful.

40 The Jockey Club, established in 1882 by Argentine president Carlos Pellegrini for the political and economic elite of the nation, administered the Hippodromes in Palermo and San Isidro. Its original locale, a luxurious palace on Florida Street, is now a tourist attraction.

41 Titania is surely a satirical version of the writer Victoria Ocampo (1890–1979), whose most important accomplishment was the prestigious literary magazine Sur (1931–92), which she herself maintained for several decades, providing a forum for a wide spectrum of thinkers, writers, and artists from the Americas and Europe. Marechal was among Sur’s contributing authors until the outbreak of the Second World War, when the debate over Argentina’s position on the war hardened the increasing polarization of the cultural scene. Sur, aristocratic and liberal, favoured taking a pro-Allied stance; Argentine nationalists of all political stripes favoured a position of neutrality. Jorge Lafforgue and Fernando Colla, who examined the proofs of the novel’s original 1948 edition, found a longer and more detailed version of the Titania/Ocampo satire (372–3n; reproduced by Navascués [AB 549n]). At the behest of the managing editor of Sudamericana, Marechal agreed to tone down the passage; the result was this shortened version. Still, its brutality is in striking contrast to Marechal’s respectful article “Victoria Ocampo y la literatura feminina” (Sur 52, Jan. 1939, 66–70; in OC v, 293–7).

42 As Navascués (AB 550n) perceptively points out, the common theme in these figures is their controversial treatment of sexuality: Arthur Honegger (1892–1955), French avant-garde composer of the erotic operetta Les aventures du roi Pausole (1930); D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928); André Gide (1869–1951), whose Corydon (1924) is about homosexuality; and of course the centrality of sexuality in the theory of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).

43 Navascués (AB 551n) recalls the medieval legend in which unicorns gently approach maidens to be caressed by them. The inversion of the legend here slyly points up the Ultras’ condition of non-virgins.

44 “El Porvenir” means “The Future.”

45 The Asociación Amigos del Arte (1924–42), located on Florida Street, promoted contemporary art, both national and international, exhibiting the likes of Rodin, Toulouse Lautrec, and David Alfaro Siquieros, as well as young Argentine painters, now consecrated, such as Xul Solar. The association was especially active in the 1920s.

46 In the original, ¡No confundir hinchazón con gordura! This apparently lame aphorism seems to parody those that open Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s famous book on gastronomie, Physiologie du goût (1825). The second aphorism, for example: “Les animaux se repaissent; l’homme mange; l’homme d’esprit seul sait manger” [Animals stuff themselves; man eats; only the man of wit knows how to eat]. But the noun hinchazón derives from the verb hinchar, ”to inflate,” which in popular language in the River Plate means also “to annoy, pester,” and so Schultz seems to be punning; his Joycean penchant for wordplay is on display several times in Cacodelphia.

47 Arcades ambo, “both Arcadians”: a phrase, now usually ironic, from Virgil’s Eclogue VIII v4 referring to two shepherd-poets.

48 Navascués (AB 560n) finds in this episode several echoes of Trimalchio’s dinner in the Satyricon by Petronius (c. 27–66 CE).

49 As Navascués (AB 561n) recalls, in chapter 34 of the Satyricon, “a slave brought in a silver skeleton, so contrived that the joints and movable vertebrae could be turned in any direction. He threw it down upon the table a time or two, and its mobile articulation caused it to assume grotesque attitudes, whereupon Trimalchio chimed in: ‘Poor man is nothing in the scheme of things / And Orcus grips us and to Hades flings / Our bones! This skeleton before us here / Is as important as we ever were! / Let’s live then while we may and life is dear’ ” (Satyricon, Vol. 2, trans. F.W. Firebaugh, Project Gutenberg ebook).

50 In the brothel episode (Book Four, chapter 2), Schultz makes a snide remark about Jewish moralizing (see 662n7). Here his trite witticism, playing on the perfect rhyme in Spanish between color and olor, evokes the medieval anti-Semitic slur of foetor Judaicus. Marechal, after citing Schopenhauer in Book One (see 633n26), seems to attribute the German philosopher’s prejudices to the fictive astrologer. In his essay On Religion, Schopenhauer fulminates against Jewish morality, specifically linking it to foetor Judaicus several times in a few pages. Ironically, however, Schopenhauer’s contempt for Judaism is expressed in a subchapter titled “On Christianity” (Parerga 362–77), in which he abhors the Christian religion for being infected by the perverse “Jewish” moral notion, which stems from the Old Testment book of Genesis, that animals and humans are fundamentally different — a notion equally abhorrent to the Christian (Thomist) Adam Buenosayres. However, it is unlikely that the real-life Xul Solar, whose art continually blurs the boundaries between the human, animal, and plant realms, would endorse the absolute separation of human and animal. In this sense, Xul is indeed close to Schopenhauer.

51 KJV John 17:6.

52 The Summa, by antonomasia, is that of Thomas Aquinas.

53 “Woe unto the world because of offences!” (KJV Matthew 18:7).

54 “Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought out bread and wine. He was the priest of God Most High” (KJV Genesis 14:18). Considered by Christian theologians to be an anticipation of the sacramental bread and wine of the Last Supper. The phrase “in the order of Melchizedek” occurs throughout the Old Testament; e.g., “You are a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek” (KJV Hebrews 5:6).

55 Possibly an allusion to Marcelo T. de Alvear, aristocratic leader of the centrist “anti-personalist” (anti-Yrigoyen) faction of the Radical Party, whose presidency of the nation (1922–28) interrupted the dual presidency (1916–22 and 1928–30) of the populist Hipólito Yrigoyen, also of the Radical Party. Alvear supposedly had a lisp.

56 Condensation of the second of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them; for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God” (KJV Exodus 20:4–5).

57 An allusion to a similar idea, using the same Cervantine example, expressed in Miguel de Unamuno’s influential novel Niebla [Mist] (1914). In a crucial passage, the novel’s protagonist, Augusto Pérez, claims that he is more real than his author, citing against Unamuno the latter’s own oft-repeated argument that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are more real than Cervantes, of whom we know relatively little (Unamuno 150–1).

58 Barcia (753–4n) observes that the following are stories from Argentine folk tradition. The formulaic question “How were the poor devils?” is the equivalent of “How did the trouble start?” But Schultz will resignify the phrase presently. Juan (Don Juan or Juancito) is the name conventionally assigned to the fox in these tales.

59 A pointed reference to Joyce’s famous boast when asked to explain Ulysses: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.”

60 Perramus: see 661n1.

61 Abel Sánchez (1917) is a novel by Miguel de Unamuno treating the Cain and Abel theme.

62 Given that the novel is set in the mid- to late-1920s, the dance figures a process of decadence ongoing since the 1870s; that is, since shortly after the establishment of the modern liberal hegemony in a unified Argentina under President Mitre in 1862.

63 The Botanical Gardens of Palermo, in Buenos Aires, date back to 1779. Gradually expanding, they now occupy ten hectares.

64 Cuyo is a region in central western Argentina comprising the provinces of Mendoza, San Juan, and San Luis. Tucumán is a province in the north.

65 In ancient Greek art, the god of matrimony Hymenaeus (or Hymenaios) appears as a wingèd child bearing a torch in his hand.

66 White and blue are the colours of the Argentine flag.

67 Malambo de la Cabra Tetona: “The Malambo of the Big-Boobed She-Goat.” The malambo is a folkloric dance in Argentina.

68 I have not translated this paragraph literally, since it is formed entirely of apparently meaningless wordplay.

69 Errare humanum est: “To err is human” (attributed to Seneca). The next phrase in Latin is a variant of a psalm from the Vulgate Bible: nunc ergo reges intellegite erudimini iudices terrae; [“be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth”] (KJV Psalms 2:10).

70 The Gallic metaphysician is no doubt René Guénon (cf. 626n20, 628n6, and 637n7). Schultz’s discourse is indebted to Guénon’s exposition, in Introduction générale à l’étude des doctrines hindous (1921), of the Hindu caste system, whose mythic origin is given in the Rig Veda.

71 In his essay “Autopsia de Creso” [Autopsy of Croesus], Marechal praises Guénon as a “philosopher of history” (Cuaderno 53).

72 Xul Solar painted several watercolours in the 1920s with the motif of the dragon, including: Dos Dragos (1920), Dama, pájaro, drago (1922), Hombre y dragón (1922), Drago y dama fluctúo (1923), Drago San Jorge (1923), and Drago (1927).

73 La Prensa is an old, staunchly liberal Argentine daily in existence since 1869. During the government of Juan Domingo Perón, it was closed down and in 1951 was expropriated for its militant anti-Peronist stance. Returned to its owners in 1956, it resumed operations and continues to this day.

74 “¡Hijo audaz de la llanura / y guardián de nuestro suelo!” First verses of the ten-line poem “Al Pampero” by Rafael Obligado (1851–1920).

75 In Spanish, the two basic meanings of bomba are “pump” and “bomb,” but the expression hacer bombas means “to blow bubbles”; estar echando bombas, “to be foaming at the mouth.”

76 Unione e Benevolanza. An association of Italian immigrants still active today and founded in Buenos Aires in 1858, according to its website.

77 Barcia (797n) notes that name orejudo (long-eared) was popularly applied to the Conservative Party, after their leader Marelino Ugarte’s nickname “el Petizo Orejudo” (the Long-Eared Pipsqueak).

78 “En el extremo de una recta / que no se puede prolongar / levantar a dicha recta / una perpendicular.”

79 Personaje in Spanish has a dual meaning that is weakened by its rendering in English as “personage”: (1) a public person of note; and (2) a character in a literary, theatrical, or cinematic work of fiction. The antecedent of Marechal’s “Personage” is the idle, cultured, jaded bachelor of the Argentine patrician class, given literary representation most famously in Eugenio Cambaceres’s Pot pourri (1881), whose protagonist is a dilettantish, failed author; Cambaceres exploits the metaphor of the personaje and the theatrical actor to great effect (see Ludmer). The type is also represented in Lucio Vicente López’s La gran aldea (1884). Ricardo Güiraldes’s novel Raucho, whose hero leaves the ranch for a dissolute life in Paris only to be tormented by nostalgia for the land, is another text haunting the saga of the Personage. However, when Julio Cortázar reviewed Adán in 1949, he saw in this episode a debt to the “bureaucratic picaresque” of Roberto Payró (1867–1928).

80 Godos (Goths) was the derogatory term given by Spanish American patriots to the Spaniards during the Wars of Independence (1810–24).

81 Reference to the Battle of San Lorenzo (see 636n1).

82 Juan Antonio Álvarez de Arenales (1770–1831) was put in charge by General San Martín of a division sent from Chile to liberate Peru from Royalist forces in 1819.

83 The Battle of Ayacucho in Peru (1824), in which the last major stronghold of Royalist forces was defeated, is considered to be the final decisive battle in the Wars of Independence.

84 The region of Provinces of Río de la Plata, once independence was definitively achieved, fell into a series of civil wars along both territorial and ideological lines, especially between Federalists and Unitarians.

85 The so-called Campaña del Desierto reached its climax with the invasion of the south by General Julio Argentino Roca in the late 1870s. The purpose was to reclaim the “desert”; that is, to take possesion of the land not yet occupied by white Argentina by subduing the native peoples. The campaign is considered genocidal by many today.

86 In the character Germán, Marechal is perhaps paying homage to Ricardo Güiraldes, whose Cuentos de muerte y de sangre [Stories of Death and of Blood], as well as his book of poetry exalting the land Cencerro de cristal [Glass Cowbell], was published in 1915, though not to great acclaim as in the case of Germán’s Song in the Blood. However, great acclaim did immediately greet Güiraldes’s Don Segundo Sombra (1926).

87 The unmentioned term is probably cipayo (cognate of the English “sepoy,” an Indian soldier fighting for the imperial British Army), adapted in Argentine nationalist discourse to mean the equivalent of traitor.

88 “El solterón” [The Old Bachelor] is a poem in Leopoldo Lugones’s Los crepúsculos del jardín (1905). In the poem, a lonely old man in his room recalls an old flame, considers writing her a love letter, then gives up the idea when he finds that his rusty old pen no longer writes.

89 El Tigre is a resort town outside Buenos Aires at the delta of the Paraná River, a fluvial area full of islands.

90 Gloria Videla (174) sees in this interpolated story a debt to Ortega y Gasset’s critique, in “El hombre a la defensiva,” of the Argentine male who gains his position for reasons other than merit and competence, who wears a mask which becomes rigid, who suffers a scission between his authentic self and his social role, who “denies his spontaneous self in favour of the imaginary personage he believes himself to be” (Ortega 653).

91 Allusion to the nihilist hero of the poem Les Chants de Maldoror (1869), by the Comte de Lautréamont, pseudonym of Isidore Lucien Ducasse (b. 1846 in Montevideo; d. Paris 1870).

92 “El aeroplano”: a popular waltz composed by Pedro Datta (1887–1934), and a standard in the repertoire of tango orchestras.

93 “Don Esteban”: a tango composed by bandoneonista Augusto Berto (1889–1953), credited with making the bandoneón a standard instrument of tango music.

94 Place Pigalle, in Paris near Montmartre, had been renowned since the end of the nineteenth century for its artists’ studios and literary cafés.

95 Navascués (AB 630n) detects behind this character a satirical version of tango musician and composer Luis Mandarino (1899–1993), who was born in the Abasto zone and went to perform in Paris with Francisco Todarelli. Marechal recalls the “famous duo Mandarino-Tordarelli” (Andrés 27).

96 Protagonist of Alexandre Dumas’s novel La Dame aux camélias (1848), adapted for stage in 1852, and in 1853 for the Verdi’s opera La Traviata.

97 “Day of Wrath,” a hymn attributed to Tomasso da Celano (c.1200–c.1260) forming part of the Requiem Mass. The phrase comes from the Vulgate version of the Old Testament book of Zephaniah (1:15): Dies irae dies illa tribulacionis et angustiae et miseriae dies tenebrarum et caliginis dies nebulae et turbinis. [“That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness”] (KJV Zeph 1:15). The theme of the Great Day of the Lord will become, in New Testament apocalyptic, that of Judgment Day or the Last Judgment.

98 All figures in the book of Revelation (Apocalypse). On the theme of apocalyticism in Adán, see Cheadle, The Ironic Apocalypse.

99 The children’s game of reaching for a ring on the end of a stick is traditional in merry-go-rounds in Buenos Aires. The city’s older calesitas are now a valued heritage; the municipal government has even published a book, Calesitas de Buenos Aires (Gobierno de la Ciudad Buenos Aires, 2005).

100 In light of the struggle among these mock-ecclesiastical figures, in particular between the Vice-Pope (see 680n102) and the Grand Orisonist, it is tempting to see in the ring an indirect allusion to the Anulus Pescatoris — the Ring of the Fisherman which, symbolically inherited from Saint Peter, bears the seal of the Pope. In Spanish, this ring is termed el anillo del Pescador. It should be pointed out, however, that Marechal does not use the word anillo but its synonym sortija, whose root etonym — Latin sors “lot, fate” — links the image of the merry-go-round to the topos of the wheel of fortune.

101 Vulgate version of the words “touch me not,” words spoken by Jesus to Mary Magdalene when she finds him risen from the tomb, in the Gospel of John (20:17).

102 The Vice-Pope is in fact César E. Pico (1895–1966), one of the founders of the Cursos de Cultura Católica as well as its wing of Christian artists and writers, Convivio. Marechal, in 1968, recalls the anecdote humorously: Pico indeed named himself Vice-Pope, half in jest, in order to combat, on behalf of the too-distant Roman Pope, the “sotanic [sic] pride” of certain priests (Andrés 39). However, what appears as a jovial lark may veil a rather more serious affair; that is, the polemic sustained by Pico in 1937 against Jacques Maritain, a regular visitor to Buenos Aires. Maritain condemned both sides in the Spanish Civil War, effectively witholding support for the “Christian” Franquistas, whereas the Argentine Catholic Nationalists, including Marechal in 1936, supported Franco in line with the official Church position. Maritain’s neutrality, for Pico, was a cop-out. By refusing to take sides, then, Maritain could perhaps be considered “guilty” of Quietism, at least from the perspective of militant orthodox Catholicism. If so, then Schultz’s Orisonists would be caricatures of Maritain’s Argentine followers, such as the priests Raphael Pividal and Augusto Durelli (see Zanca, “Cruzados y pescadores”). Navascués (AB 635n), however, considers that the polemic was between César Pico and Monseñor Franceschi, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, who in 1933 apparently censured Pico for his open endorsement of Fascism.

103 A form of religious mysticism based on the work of the Spanish priest Miguel de Molinos (1640–1697), condemned as heterodox by the Inquisition. Molinos rejected outward devotion and emphasized passive contemplation.

104 It should be noted that in the original there is no sly double-entendre in the word “vice”; vice in Spanish does not have the double meaning it has in English (“vice” in Spanish is vicio).

105 Marechal parodies the poem “De cuáles armas deve armar todo cristiano para vencer el diablo, el mundo e la carne” [Arms of the Christian Knight], strophes 1579–1603 in the fourteenth-century classic Libro de buen amor [Book of Good Love] by Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita (?—c. 1350). In that doctrinal poem, each Christian virtue is associated with a weapon or piece of armour as a mnemonic device.

106 KJV Matthew 7:1.

107 Ninth-century archbishop of Rheims, Turpin is celebrated in La Chanson de Roland (late twelfth-century) for fighting sword in hand against the Moors.

108 Cervercería Río Segundo: a brewery operating from the 1880s to the mid- 1930s. The brewery in Quilmes is still going strong.

109 Edison Anabaruse, along with the names of the rest of the Potentials confronting Adam, is an anagram of Adán Buenosayres. As Navascués (AB 644n) notes, Joyce used the device of anagrams in Ulysses. In the penultimate episode, Ithaca, Leopold Bloom wonders: “What anagrams had he made on his name in youth? / Leopold Bloom / Ellpodbomool / Molldopeloob. / Bollopedoom / Old Ollebo, M. P.” (Joyce 792).

110 Allusion to the controversial defeat of Argentine boxer Luis Ángel Firpo, “Wild Bull of the Pampas,” by Jack Dempsey in the “fight of the century” at Madison Square Gardens, 1923. Firpo did knock Dempsey out of the ring — many sources say for as long as seventeen seconds — but Dempsey finally managed, with the help of American journalists, to climb back in and eventually be declared winner of the fight.

111 This elaborate fantasy clearly satirizes the program of the extreme philo-Fascist faction of conservative Argentine Catholic Nationalism.

112 OSB, Ordo Sancti Benedicti, is the anagram appended to the names of Benedictine monks.

113 Flos Sanctorum: thirteenth-century hagiographical collection known in English as the Lives of the Saints. The Hispanophone world tends to conserve the Latin title.

114 Putifilios: Neocriollo neologism for hijos de puta “sons of whores.” Xul Solar himself employed a similar word in his watercolour Filios del Sol [Sons of the Sun] (1920). Xul, who could laugh at himself, took in stride his caricature as the astrologer Schultz in Adán Buenosayres, but his wife, Micaela (Lita) Cadenas, objected that Xul in real life never used coarse language (Abós, Xul Solar 172–3).

115 Navascués (AB 652n) sees here a barbed allusion to the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, a Neoplatonist interpretation of Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis by author Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius (5th century CE). The implication is that Schultz is merely the commentator of a commentator of others’ ideas.

116 There are a couple of instances of double-entendre in this passage that amount to playful nonsense. The phrase un sublimado de rana could mean “a frog who is exalted” or “a [chemical] sublimate of frog.” This parallels the phrase un comprimido de elefante, which literally means “an elephant pill” or “elephant tablet,” though the context demands that one understand the phrase as a transposition of un elefante comprimido, “a compressed elephant.” Also, ante los ojos del buey literally means “before the ox’s eyes,” but it evokes the term ojo de buey, meaning “porthole” or “circular skylight.” In short, a very Joycean passage that recalls the verbal tomfoolery of Finnegans Wake and suggests a verbal performance of the “horizontalization” of meaning in language.

117 “Contour of Life” is just as enigmatic as the original phrase, el Contorno Vivo. For Navascués (AB 656n), the phrase probably alludes to Convivio, the circle of writers and artists created by César Pico under the auspices of the Cursos de Cultura Católica. This interpretation in turn clarifies the allusion in the next sentence to Caesar (César in Spanish). The Pontifex Maximus, as Navascués has found in a marginal note by Marechal, is Máximo Etchecopar (1912–2002), another Catholic nationalist intellectual. The whole episode seems to send up both egalitarianism and antiegalitarianianism.

118 As with much of the novel’s “metaphysical” lore, Schultz’s theory of motion seems to come from Plato’s Timaeus (par. 34); the world’s body as fashioned by the Demiurge according to Reason, says Plato’s character, is spherical and its only motion rotational; worldly creatures are endowed with the other six (rectilinear) motions as enumerated by Schultz, which are “wanderings” without reason (Cornford 55–6).

119 In Orlando furioso, Agramante is the king of the pagan Saracens. In Canto 27, his warriors begin to fight among one another. King Agramante’s camp came to be a proverbial site of discord. Don Quixote (Book I, chapter 46) recalls the campo de Agramante during a burlesque brawl at the inn.

120 In the original: guarda e passa, from Dante’s Inferno, canto III, verse 51 (Barcia 8867n).

121 Felice Orsini (1819–1858) designed a bomb of fulminate of mercury that would explode on impact. He used such bombs in an assassination attempt on Napoleon III, hoping to set off a revolution in France that would in turn facilitate Italy’s independence.

122 The anarchist movement in Argentina, as Navascués (AB 662n) following José C. Moya notes, was among the largest in the world in the early twentieth century. According to Moya (20), Buenos Aires was the second most important centre of anarchism after Barcelona. Moya discusses the paradox of the stereotype of the Jewish anarchist, ideologically in contradiction with that of the rapacious Jewish capitalist. David Viñas, whose maternal grandparents were Russian Jews, takes up the theme in his novels Los dueños de la tierra (1958) [Masters of the Earth], En la semana trágica (1966) [In the Tragic Week], and Dar la cara (1975) [Stand Up and Be Counted] (see Misoo Park, “Otro discurso del programa político de Contorno” PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2009).

123 Coram populo — Latin, “before the people, in public.”

124 A likely allusion to a scene in El mal metafísico (1916) [The Metaphysical Disease], by Manuel Gálvez, where anarchists are portrayed at their Sunday picnics in the park Isla Maciel; taken there by an anarchist friend, the protagonist finds the scene depressingly mediocre and bourgeois (Part Two, chapter v).

125 Parodic inversion of Socrates’s famous simile comparing himself to “a sort of gadfly, given to the state by God; and the state is a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you” (Plato’s Apology, trans. Benjamin Jowett. Project Gutenberg ebook). The real-life referent of the Boss is Natalio Félix Botana (1888–1941), a newspaper magnate famous for bringing sensationalist journalism to the River Plate region. Starting in 1921, his newspaper, Crítica, carried a version of Socrates’s sentence printed as its motto just beneath the daily’s logo (Abós, El tábano 297).

126 This particular sentence is quoted in Abós’s biography of Natalio Botana titled El tábano (1921) [The Gadfly] in support of his claim that Marechal’s infernal episode is “one of the most lucid texts” ever written about the Argentine Citizen Kane, as Abós (11) characterizes him, noting that the word tábano is an anagram of Botana (7).

127 “The Thief in His Forest of Bricks”: the title of a novel projected by Arlt but never written. Pedro Juan Vignale announced it as Arlt’s next novel in his literary column “Autores y Libros” of 29 June 1930 in El Mundo (Saítta 76).

128 Navascués (AB 670n) finds a note by Marechal indicating that Walker is based on Roberto Arlt (1900–1942), who worked as a journalist at El Mundo with Marechal and also for Botana at Crítica. Arlt’s vivid Aguafuertes porteños (1933) [Etchings of Buenos Aires] were originally written for the newspaper. However, Walker the Red seems less like Arlt himself than a possible character from one of his raw, powerful novels, Los siete locos (1929) [The Seven Madmen] and Los lanzallamas (1931) [The Flame-Throwers].

129 An approximation of Matthew 18:6.

130 Matthew 18:3.

131 The idiom tener cola de paja means “to feel guilty or at fault,” as in the proverb: “El que tiene cola de paja no debe acercarse al fuego” [he who has a tail of straw shouldn’t get too close to the fire].

132 In Greek mythology, Euterpe is the muse of music.

133 This would be the location of the Amundsen house, setting of the tertulia episode in Book Two, chapter 2. In historical reality, the house at the corner of Tronador and Pampa in the barrio Villa Urquiza belonged to the Lange family (see 639n16).

134 The image occurs at least twice in Borges’s early poetry: first in the poem “Calle con almacén rosado” (in Luna de enfrente, 1925); after walking all night, the poet comes upon a street corner with a general store tinged pink by the dawn light; the poem is an ode to the city of Buenos Aires (Borges OC I, 57). And again in “Fundación mítica de Buenos Aires”: “Un almacén rosado como revés de naipe… el almacén rosado floreció en un compadre, / ya patrón de la esquina, ya resentido y duro” (OC I, 81). In Alistair Reid’s translation: “A general store pink as the back of a playing card… the corner bar flowered into life as a local bully, / already cock of his walk, resentful, tough” (Borges, Selected Poems 49). Gin is the preferred drink of traditional gauchos and tough suburban compadres.

135 The early Borges got these spellings from gauchesque poetry, which attemped to reflect the colloquial speech habits of rural Argentina.

136 A glamorous café on the avenida de Mayo in the heart of Buenos Aires, frequented by famous writers, artists, and musicians. La Peña del Tortoni, inaugurated in 1926 by Benito Quinquel Martín, was a famous literary and cultural discussion group that met in the café basement. Marechal, in his oral memoire, recalls fêting Luigi Pirandello at the Tortoni, and that Ricardo Güiraldes brought Carlos Gardel there to sing. But things could get rowdy. Marechal also remembers alcohol-inspired hijinks, such as a caper involving Evar Méndez (editor of Martín Fierro), Marechal, and others: they barged in carrying Norah Lange on a chair stolen from a nearby café, noisily went downstairs, and broke up a poetry recital in progress (Andrés 23–4).

137 The cult of the metaphor is typical of ultraísmo, the avant-garde poetics brought by Borges to Argentina in the early 1920s. The first and fourth principle of this poetics, as theorized by Borges, were “the reduction of lyric poetry to its primordial element: the metaphor”; “the synthesis of two or more images in one, which thus enlarges the scope of suggestivity” (Salas, Estudio preliminar viii). Borges, Marechal, Eduardo González Lanuza, Francisco Luis Bernárdez, and Oliverio Girondo practised ultraísmo.

138 Both lines are from Marechal’s own poetry. The first is from “Poema sin título” (Días como flechas, 1926; OC I, 93–4). The second is from the poem “Elogio,” published in the magazine Caras y Caretas (issue 1446, 19 June 1926; OC I, 476).

139 A slight variant on a line in “Balada para los niños que serán poetas” [Ballad for children who will be poets] in Días como flechas (OC I, 105–6).

140 Navascués (AB 686n) opines that the tunicked pipsqueak parodies Horacio Schiavo (1903–1978), a Catholic poet and friend of Marechal.

141 Boedo is a working-class street whose name was informally adopted by a group of 1920s leftist writers who considered literature to be a form of social and political engagement, as opposed to the rival Florida group, whose literary concerns were with avant-garde aestheticism. The dyad Boedo-Florida has been argued over for decades in Argentina, with no absolute consensus as to who belonged to which group — or even if the division into two rival movements has any validity. Borges, in a gesture typical of him, simply denied the existence of any Boedo group as such. Marechal, in later life, said several times (according to Horacio Salas) that the Boedo-Florida polemic was “almost an invention” designed to generate publicity (Salas, Memoria 231). Recently, Ojeda Bär and Carbone have postulated a “Third Zone,” whose writers fluctuated between the two groups without belonging to either (Ojeda 26–8). But see also Candiano and Peralta’s excellent book Boedo (2007), subtitled a “History of the First Cultural Movement of the Argentine Left.”

142 Erato: in Greek mythology, the Muse of love poetry.

143 Juan Moreira (see 649n28).

144 Barranca abajo [Down the Ravine] (1905), a tragic drama, is the best-known work of Uruguayan playwright Florencio Sánchez (1875–1910).

145 Juan José (1895) a tragic melodrama with a social message by Spanish writer Joaquín Dicenta Benedicto (1862–1917); Barcia (900n) notes that the play was popular in 1920s Buenos Aires.

146 Spanish translation of La cena delle beffe (1909; The Jesters’ Supper) by Italian writer Sem Benelli (1877–1949), a melodrama set in Renaissance Florence and immensely popular in Italy, France, England, the United States, and apparently in Buenos Aires, where a Spanish translation was published in 1925.

147 Teatro Astral, located at 163 °Corrientes Avenue in Buenos Aires, specializing in review theatre of mass appeal.

148 Terpsichore: in Greek mythology, the Muse of dance.

149 Thalia: in Greek mythology, the Muse of comedy and idyllic poetry.

150 As Navascués (AB 690n) recalls, the False Thalia’s recipe parodically condenses Alberto Vacarezza’s celebrated formula for the sainete. In his La comparsa se despide (1932) [The Boys in the Band Say Goodbye], a character explains it in lunfardo-laced language to a North American tourist: “Poca cosa: / un patio de conventiyo, / un italiano encargado, / un yoyega retobado, / una percanta, un vivillo. / Dos malevos de cuchillo, / un chamuyo, una pasión, / choques, celos, discusión, / desafío, puñalada, / aspamento, disparada, / auxilio, cana y telón” (Néstor Pinsón, “Alberto Vacarezza.” Todo Tango online). [Nothing to it: a tenement building courtyard, / an Italian superintendent, / a riled-up Galician, / a broad, a wise guy. / Two hoodlums with blades, / conversation, passion, / conflict, jealousy, argument, / challenge, knife-thrust, / hand-wringing, flight, / help, cop, and curtain] (my translation).

151 Cf. Marechal’s poem “A Belona” [To Bellona] in the third edition in 1944 of Odas para el hombre y la mujer (first edition, 1929), as noted by Navascués (AB 692n). The Roman goddess of war was a motif in Marechal’s work of the mid-40s; also from that period is an unpublished play, Muerte y epitafio de Belona, consulted by Navascués at the Fundación Leopoldo Marechal, whose plot is similar to the story told by the Man with the Intellectual Eyes, though with variations. Moreover, the goddess Bellona is a character in La púrpura de la rosa (1701), the first opera composed and mounted in the New World in Lima, Peru (music by Tomás de Torrejón, based on a comedy by Spanish Golden Age playwright Calderón de la Barca).

152 Navascués (AB 692n) perceptively observes that the playwright’s devotional remembrance of Bellona parallels the artistic transformation of Solveig by Adam Buenosayres. The two relationships — Bellona and her adoring husband, Solveig and her adoring poet/suitor Adam — invite comparative analysis. See also Cheadle, “Teoría de la violencia en Adán Buenosayres.”

153 “Guest of stone” translates convidado de piedra, a phrase coined by Tirso de Molina’s El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra [The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest] (1630); the famous play of the Spanish Golden Age is the first literary rendering of the Don Juan myth. In Tirso’s play, the “guest of stone” is the ghost (incarnate in his mortuary statue) of Don Gonzalo, father of one of Don Juan’s female conquests. Don Juan kills the father in an altercation, and later mockingly invites him to dinner. The statue, or convidado de piedra, unexpectedly shows up at dinner and drags Don Juan off to hell.

154 The three women, long before their literary antecedent in the witches in Macbeth, can be traced to the Erinyes (“the avengers”) of classical mythology. Both Barcia (911n) and Navascués (AB 697n) invoke Aeschylus’s tragedy The Eumenides [The Furies] (final play of the Oresteia trilogy). Navascués plausibly traces the green fly to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mouches (1943), given that Marechal’s personal library contains a book of Sartre’s theatre in Spanish translation.

155 Comrade Friedrich is probably Engels (1820–1895), Karl Marx’s collaborator, but it may also be clumsy allusion to Nietzsche (1844–1900), whose summary dismissal of religion was notorious. Later in this episode Samuel sarcastically invokes Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and the superman.

156 Navascués (AB 780n) fnds here an allusion to Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827), who theorized the material origins of the universe.

157 The notions of “sufficient reason” and “thing in itself” are from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

158 Argentine intellectuals, as usual, were precocious in their uptake of theosophy in the late nineteenth century. With early adherents such as Leopoldo Lugones, Alfredo Palacios, and José Ingenieros, the movement was culturally very influential. Theosophy’s challenge to organized religion was felt as a threat by the Argentine Catholic Church.

159 Though José Ortega y Gasset himself is not directly identifiable among them, the athletic mise-en-scène for this satirical review of the philosophers seems to allude to a great theme of his early work, athleticism and sport. In his 1925 “Letter to a Young Argentine Who Studies Philosophy,” certainly read by Marechal, Ortega wrote that the intellect must be cultivated with athletic rigour as “a sublime cosmic sport” through “purely sporting exercises of superfluous [non-utilitarian, a-political] aspect” (Ortega 341). “I expect much from the intellectual youth of Argentina; but I’ll have confidence in them only when they resolve to cultivate seriously the great sport of mental precision” (Ortega 343).

160 Juan Demos. This symbolically named character echoes, perhaps deliberately, the similarly named Juan Pueblo, a character in the 1931 animated feature Peludópolis by Italian-Argentine film pioneer, Quirino Cristiani (1896–1984). Both names might be translated as John the Commoner.

161 Ungula, Latin for “fingernail”; in Spanish, uña. The word connotes rapacious thievery, as in the expression tener las uñas largas, meaning figuratively “to have sticky fingers.” Except for the Speaker of the House, all the parliamentarians’ names are allusive and symbolic, most of them recognizably so. Navascués (AB 714n) has found notes linking these caricatures with historically real members of parliament from the Radical and Socialist parties.

162 Olfa (short for olfaturista), a vulgar term for “adulator.” According to Gobello, it alludes to the canine propensity for sniffing one another’s hind parts. Approximate English equivalents: “bootlicker,” “asskisser,” “browner.” Mr Olfademos would ostentatiously exhibit this attitude toward the demos or common people.

163 In English in the original.

164 Psittacus, Latin for “parrot.”

165 Jugar a la taba is an old gaucho game in which contestants throw the anklebone of a cow and bet on which way it lands.

166 In the original, the words ringside, match, and knock-out are all in English and italicized.

167 The boxing match between body and soul parodically revisits the medieval literary convention that allegorically stages their combat, and whose crowning expression is the battle between Don Carnal and Dame Lent in the Libro de buen amor (1343) [Book of Good Love], strophes 1067–1172. Lent triumphs, leaving Carnal lying “wretched in his prison, / weak and tearful from the battle, / in pain and wounded, afflicted and suffering” (Ruiz, strophe 1172).

168 The half-hour of silence, apparently offending against verisimilitude, seems a reference to the Book of Revelation (8:1), the interlude between the opening of the seven seals and sounding of the seven trumpets; the same phrase occurs in the street brawl recounted in Book One, chapter 2. See Cheadle 2000, 33–4.

169 In the original: adefesio “something ugly, hideous, or montrous.” Franky’s automaton may be a sly allusion to Oliverio Girondo’s book of poetry Espantapájaros (1932) [Scarecrow] and the publicity stunt Girondo mounted for its publication. He drove around downtown Buenos Aires in an open car bearing an oversized papier-mâché puppet, a replica of José Bonomi’s painting “Espantapájaros-académico,” which served as the book’s cover design. The puppet is conserved in Girondo’s former residence, now the Museo de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, at 1444 Suipacha Street.

170 Permanganate is a disinfectant. Sulfonamides are anti-bacterial drugs developed in the 1930s. Spirochaetes are a type of bacteria, some of which cause syphilis.

171 Today called simply Flores, a mixed-class barrio in Buenos Aires. Home to canonical writers Roberto Arlt (1900–1942) and Baldomero Fernández Moreno (1886–1950). Author César Aira (b. 1949) has lived in Flores and set much of his fiction there.

172 “Por matar a una mujer / tocóme la última pena; / me firma el rey la condena, / y comienza el padecer, / amarrado a una cadena.”

173 Allusion to Miguel de Unamuno’s essay “El sentimiento trágico de la vida” (1912) [The Tragic Sense of Life].

174 “Dígase lo que se diga, / no es tan fiera la Muerte / como la pintan.”

175 The Feast of Saint John the Baptist, 24 June, often conflated with the summer solstice or, in South America, the winter solstice. In Argentina, as in much of Iberia and Latin America, it is celebrated with a bonfire or fireworks, sometimes both.

176 Dolores literally means “pains” or, in Christian tradition, “sorrows,” as in Our Lady of Sorrows.

177 Gustavo A. Bécquer (1836–1870), a Spanish Romantic poet. His love poems Rimas [Rhymes] were collected and published posthumously.

178 A traditional Christian name, Consuelo means “comfort, consolation.”

Bibliography

FIRST EDITIONS OF

ADÁN BUENOSAYRES

(SELECT LIST)

For a complete list of first editions, see http://www.marechal.org.ar/primerasediciones.pdf.

Adán Buenosayres. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1948.

Adán Buenosayres. Prol. Oscar Collazos. Havanna, Cuba: Casa de las Américas, 1969.

Adán Buenosayres. Trans. Patrice Toulat. Paris: Grasset/Unesco, 1995.

Adán Buenosayres. Ed. Pedro Luis Barcia. Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1994.

Adán Buenosayres. Coord. Jorge Lafforgue and Fernando Colla. Colección Archivos 31. Madrid: UNESCO, 1997. [Includes a useful selection of critical articles.]

Adán Buenosayres. Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 2003.

Adán Buenosayres. Trans. Nicola Jacchia. Notes Claudio Ongaro Haelterman. Florence, Italy: Vallechi, 2010.

Adán Buenosayres. Ed. Javier de Navascués. Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2013.

WORKS CITED

Listed below are only those texts from which specific material is quoted directly or indirectly.

Abós, Álvaro. Xul Solar: pintor del misterio. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2004.

— Macedonio Fernández: la biografía imposible. Buenos Aires: Plaza & Janés, 2002.

— El tábano. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2001.

Abós, Álvaro, ed. El libro de Buenos Aires: Crónicas de cinco siglos. Buenos Aires: Argentina, Mondadori, 2000.

Academia Argentina de Letras. Diccionario del habla de los argentinos. Intro. Pedro Luis Barcia. Buenos Aires: Espasa, 2003.

Aizenberg, Edna. Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and Argentine-Jewish Writing. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2002.

Andrés, Alfredo, reportaje y antología. Palabras con Leopoldo Marechal. Buenos Aires: Carlos Pérez, 1968.

Aristophanes. Four Comedies. Trans. Douglas Fitts. New York: Harcourt, 1954.

Aristotle. The Complete Works: The Revised Oxford Translation. Vol. 1. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Artundo, Patricia M. Alejandro Xul Solar: Entrevistas, artículos y textos inéditos. Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2005.

Bajarlía, Juan-Jacobo. Fijman, poeta entre dos vidas. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 1992.

Barcia, Pedro Luis, intro. and ed. Adán Buenosayres. By Leopoldo Marechal. Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1994.

Belting, Hans. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Trans. Thomas Dunlap. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Bendazzi, Giannalberto. Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation. Trans. Anna Taraboletti-Segre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Berg, Walter Bruno. “Espacios escriturales en Adán Buenosayres de Leopoldo Marechal.” La ciudad imaginaria. Ed. Javier de Navascués. Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2007. 89–103.

Bernárdez, Francisco Luis. “Leopoldo y Adán.” Clarín. Notas Literarias. 2–3.

Bianchi, Susana. Catolicismo y peronismo. Religión y política en la Argentina 1943–1955. Tandil, Argentina: Instituto de Estudios Histórico-Sociales “Prof. Juan Carlos Gross,” 2001.

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Content

Leopoldo Marechal
Adam Buenosayres

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION1

~ ~ ~

ADAM BUENOSAYRES

Indispensable Prologue

BOOK ONE

Chapter 1. The little white kerchief

Chapter 2

BOOK TWO

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

BOOK THREE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2. HERE LIES JUAN ROBLES, MUD-STOMPER

BOOK FOUR

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

BOOK FIVE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

BOOK SIX

BOOK SEVEN

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography