– 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 ignorance27 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.
Adam Buenosayres: A Novel Page 51