– 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 pectore21 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.
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