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 Herald40 – 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.
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