– 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 emp
loyees.” 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 soli
tude, 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 . . .
Adam Buenosayres: A Novel Page 60