”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 st
ardust 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:
Adam Buenosayres: A Novel Page 62