I say quasi-figures, because their contours were sparsely sketched in colourless, translucent material, like virgin celluloid. Thanks to their extreme lightness, the quasi-figures maintained a fluctuating equilibrium in the wind: they bobbed about in all directions but didn’t fall; anchored to a thick, round, leaden base, they were similar to those small, lightweight rag dolls children play with. Curious and smiling, I stopped before the battalion of toys guarding the portal. No doubt they were the Potentials mentioned by the astrologer. Seeing them now, I thought it was clear sailing ahead and imagined how easy it was going to be to get through a thicket of celluloid floppy-dolls. “No doubt about it – I said to myself – Schultz is a flake.” But when I got up close to the quasi-men and recognized their sparsely sketched faces or the simulacra of their jerky voices already boldly cursing me, I simultaneously felt a chill run down my spine and my face flush hot. Clairvoyant reader, rare is the man who, safe in the intimacy of his soul, has not invented for himself wild destinies, impossible adventures, outrageous poses, and absurd personifications. Even under torture, he would not dare confess to these fantasies forged in the inviolable workshop of daydream. Well now, in the celluloid homunculi now blocking my way, I was seeing, patently incarnate, the craziest dreams ever woven on the secret looms of my imagination. Now materially concrete, they looked like extravagant foetuses, plastic abominations, the contrivances of some demon. And as I identified them one by one, I felt a cold sweat of shame bathing me, as if I were being stripped naked in the street before a thousand mocking eyes.
Schultz was the first to confront the line of defence. Clenching his teeth, he barged his way through the celluloid homunculi fairly easily, though not completely unscathed. Once on the other side, he called over a few words of encouragement:
– Don’t be afraid of them! They’re the Potentials.
I closed my eyes and charged in turn, putting heart and soul into it. The homunculi bobbed and swayed, but on recovering their balance they pushed me back with mechanical violence, and I suddenly found myself sitting ignominiously on the ground. The astrologer was shouting and urging me on:
– Not like that! You have to look straight at them!
Armed with this piece of belated advice, I got myself up and charged again, but this time with less brutality and keeping my wits about me. At the first row of floppy-dolls, one put his gigantic thorax in my way, protesting in a piteous tone characteristic – I later realized – of all Potentials:
– Stop shoving! he whined. We’re not in the ring anymore!
I looked straight at him, just as Schultz had told me to do. Recognizing him with a start, my teeth began to chatter. He was sort of a gorilla – muscles bulging out all over the place – and his lantern jaw, crushed nose, and cauliflower ears suggested the idea of a pugilist pummelled in a hundred combats.
– I woulda bin the young boxer Edison Anabaruse,109 the Wild Panther of Villa Crespo, the pugilist continued whining. Gimme that hunnerd grand in prize money I woulda won in Madison Square Gardens in New York when I beat, or at least woulda beat, Jack Dempsey in the second round in one whale of a match!
– Easy, now, easy does it! I said, petrified.
But Edison Anabaruse wasn’t calming down:
– Five-hunnerd thousand spectators in the stadium! he moaned plaintively. The crowd went wild when I landed him one smack on the jaw and sent Jack flyin’ through the ropes to ringside. The Yanks shoutin’ like crazy; the glare of spotlights in my charcoal-blackened eyes – and the referee forgot to count! . . . But I didn’t lose my cool. I remembered Firpo.110 And when Jack climbed back in the ring, completely groggy . . .
– Sure, sure, I uttered, swallowing hard. Just a case of delirium.
– Delirium? he whined. I want my hunnerd grand and my world-champeen’s belt!
Sweating like a pig, I fled from the insistent Anabaruse. I staggered past two or three figures who were sobbing their names at me, and finally came upon a big, husky fellow. When he felt me run into him, he hit the roof:
– Hey! he growled at me. Don’t be fallin’ on top of me like that, like a chickenhawk swoopin’ for eggs. Nobody shoves Don Brandán Esoseyúa around!
Wide baggy trousers, accordion boots, broad-brimmed hat turned up at the front, silver-handled riding whip, wide belt, and a silver buckle packing more ounces of metal than a magnate, the homunculus’s get-up suggested a rancher from the south. And once I’d identified him, I stammered, crimson with shame:
– Señor Don Brandán . . .
– So you recognize me, he said, at once ironic and sorrowful. The pampa is still unpopulated. Where are the ideal settlements, the wonderful ranches I founded or might’ve founded in the south, distributing my land amongst settlers who worked like angels and proliferated like beasts, while neither function kept them so busy that they didn’t have time to read a little Virgil and meditate on Aristotle’s Politics?
– A mad fantasy inspired by patriotic intentions, I excused myself, my voice faltering.
– The road to hell is paved with good intentions, retorted Don Brandán. But I saw or might’ve seen the prairie covered with towns purling like wheat fields in the wind.
At that point, a bereaved though authoritarian voice was heard:
– Who speaks of towns? Have you forgotten that Bruno de San Yasea lives on?
I moved closer to the man who had so proclaimed his name, and beheld the most curious sight: an old man of flowing beard, Mosaic horns on his brow, and vestments at once civil, military, and priestly. Recognizing him, I trembled like a leaf:
– No! I implored him. Not you! It would be too ridiculous!
– Ridiculous? enunciated the apostle, elegiac. I, Bruno de San Yasea, in this the twentieth century, assumed, or might have assumed, the government of the Republic; and for forty years I ruled their destinies with one hand of iron and the other hand lily-soft. Thanks to me, the migrant workers from Tucumán and the Chaco, the wretched who harvest the sugar plantations, the damned of the quebracho plantations, established themselves, or would have, in a land that until then had been their stepmother. They set up, or would have, impeccable families; and the sons of their sons bless me today, or would do so, in folksy Castilian Spanish. You think this ridiculous? I am the one who organized bright and shiny corporations for the ranchers of the south, the farmers of the central region, the wine growers of Cuyo, and the tobacco, mate, and cotton farmers in the tropical north. I instituted their jobs in regal eight-line stanzas, I myself wrote their amazing codes of law, I designed their badges and emblems, determined their festivals, wrote their allusive songs and legislated their liturgical dance forms. And you find this ridiculous? On hill and dale, in villages and burghs, I tempered and harmonized the social classes as if they were strings on a lute, so that together and without discord they might raise the unitarian chord of life. And for you this is too ridiculous?111
– No, no, poor ghost, I answered. But one’s creations ad intra . . .
San Yasea interrupted me with a sad gesture:
– I haven’t yet got to the sublime part, he said. I got all of the nation’s inhabitants to recover, through happiness and well-being, the lost notion of their dignity. But I didn’t achieve this by sweet-talking them with the false illusion of a Terrestrial Paradise. Instead, I gave them the necessary otius, the opportunity to rediscover within themselves the image of the Creator. And so it was that, once I’d got, or would’ve got, the land of Argentina to be a “great earthly province,” I managed at the same time to turn it into a “great heavenly province.” Then it was seen how sixty million souls undertook the delectable road of metaphysics and progressed through every stage of contemplation! . . .
– Enough! I implored, overwhelmed.
– And it was seen how people deserted the city and, like the anchorites of Egyptian Thebes, built their solitary retreats in the wilderness of Santiago del Estero, the puna in Atacama, or the desert in San Luis. Great God, the cathedrals sprouted up like
grass!
– Be quiet! I insisted. Not another word!
– Shall I ever forget the day I died? added Bruno de San Yasea in a fanatical voice. Millions of faces were gathered round my catafalque, sobbing . . .
I ran him over, made him spin like a weathervane, and fled in desperation. Now a foppish-looking homunculus tried to talk to me:
– I am Urbano de Sasaney, doctor in Eros . . .
But I knocked him over in passing – hapless celluloid puppet! – and continued punching and head-butting my way through those loathsome entities. I was already taking heart, convinced that no force could stop me now, when suddenly my legs went weak: the sweet, ascetic figure of a monk was fixing a lachrymose gaze upon me. I tried not to look at his face, emaciated by fasts and mortifications; I wanted to sink into the earth like a worm. But – alas! – I knew very well there was no escape from the impending converstion with Fra Darius Anenae (OSB).112
– Father! I implored him. Allow me to appeal to your immense charity and ask you to spare me this embarrassment . . .
Not even hearing me, Fra Darius began to speak, tearful and exalted:
– In the province of Corrientes, on the shores of the mysterious Lake Iberá, there is an inhospitable region seemingly abandoned by the hand of God. Do you remember the spot?
– Father, Father! I begged him again.
– It was in that zone where, called by the Lord to the hard road of penitence, I built or might have built my hermitage, a pigsty of mud and straw, practically sinking into the bog. The implacable sun, the noxious vapours of the lagoon, and the insects punished all flesh; so I, Fra Darius Anenae (OSB), dedicated or would have dedicated my days and my nights to cleaning the sores of lepers, burying the dead, drying the tears of widows, and feeding orphaned children. Ah! All that under a sky weighing down upon men and beasts like a terrible, wrathful gaze. One night . . .
– Father! I interrupted, sweating with anguish. Why reveal the wanderings of an imagination more poetic than contrite?
Fra Darius showed no sign of having heard me:
– That night I was visiting a shack in the area. I’d swept the earthen floor, and was now watching a pot of stew cooking over a cow-flap fire. Inside the darkened cabin various sounds could be heard: the dying man’s hoarse gasps, a woman’s voice wailing in delirium, the irrepressible sobbing of old women, the innocent laughter of children playing in the corners. But worst of all was the stench emanating from the running pustules, the caked and cracked scabs, the fetid breath, the rags damp with saliva and sweat. And I, Fra Darius, inhaled that bitter aroma of penitence. Stirring my pot, I persisted in a prayer, ongoing by then for years, which in my view would soon force open the sluicegates of heaven. Suddenly I saw the whole cabin being filled with a very soft light; and in the air I caught whiffs of a Sabaean perfume, as if invisible numina had begun to swing fragrant thuribles. Great God! At the same time I saw how the dying rose to their feet, how the women exulted, and how the children became sore afraid. All eyes were upon me, and the voices cried out: “Father Darius! Father Darius!” I was disoriented for a moment, put my hand to my brow. And, Great God! When I drew my hand away and saw how it glowed, I realized the light and the scent were coming from my body: I was the beacon emitting that light, the thurible of that perfume.
His mounting exultation multiplied my shame:
– Lunatic, lunatic! I shouted at him. I was reading the Flos Sanctorum at the time . . .113
But Fra Darius would not be quiet:
– I fled the cabin! And through the wilderness I ran, the night sky above unfurling its great corymb of stars. An infinite elation coursed through my blood. Miracle! I, Fra Darius, had just performed a miracle! I ran, I flew over the wilderness. A miracle! All avenues of heaven opened before me now, and I heard angelic voices calling from on high: “Darius! It’s our brother Darius!”
– Lunatic! I shouted again.
– All of a sudden, he said, the night was rent by laughter, an immense, diabolical, terrible guffaw. I stopped short, petrified. The euphoria fell away from my soul like a dirty garment. I felt something within me was collapsing, clamorously, catastrophically, and I sensed it was the ridiculous, haughty, despicable cathedral of my pride. Then I flew to the fen and plunged my eyes, nose, mouth, and ears into the foul mire, not without first begging the mire to forgive me the insult. And then . . .
I listened no more. Putting my index fingers over my ears, I turned my back on Brother Darius and charged against the last Potentials, who gave way like a field of wheat. When I raised my head, the astrologer Schultz and I were passing through the open portal.
X
Later, going over in memory my entire journey through Schultz’s Helicoid, I told myself no other incident had so vexed me as the battle with the Potentials, not even my subsequent encounter with Samuel Tesler, in the Hell of Pride, when I had to solve the fiendishly tricky riddle of his Chinese kimono. It’s quite logical, then, that when we left the fifth spiral of the Helicoid a sort of rancorous humiliation came over me, which translated into thoughts not at all benevolent about the astrologer Schultz, then into a boundless anger against all those wits who, displaying an arrogance both absurd and malicious, had ever dared to cobble together a literary Inferno. Poking their noses into other people’s lives, washing their dirty laundry in public, conducting a moral autopsy on their neighbours and making them sweat in violent infernal sports: all these seemed to me exercises which, contravening the sweet laws of mercy, betrayed a limitless wickedness. “To be sure,” I reflected, “when faced with the human disfigurations stemming from the first injustice, man ought to respond only with compassion or laughter: compassion, in the literal sense that we should suffer with the creatures resembling us in form and destiny; or laughter, provided that it be another image of compassion. By putting on a false halo, brandishing feeble brassy thunderbolts, and parodying God’s handling of the scales of justice, one risks falling into sacrilege and getting jeered at by the peanut gallery.” Moreover, I was worried about how menacing our journey was becoming as we went deeper and deeper into the Helicoid. Each new infernal circle held more numerous difficulties, becoming less disciplined, more excessively unruly and argumentative. I wondered if all those entities convoked by the astrologer might not end up staging a revolt and scaring the living daylights out of us.
Fortunately, the sixth spiral quite calmed me down, for it amounted only to a simple panoramic vision. True, my ears still ring with the disagreeable thud of oars knocking the skulls of those who dared raise their heads. But, for the rest, we crossed the melancholy water without incident, notwithstanding “the voice that let itself be heard between two muddy slurps.” Schultz and I were passing through a gallery, he in silence and I deep in bitter rumination, when suddenly, just as we rounded a bend, the sixth circle hove into view. The passage to the Hell of Envy was blocked neither by door nor wall nor hieroglyph nor guardian, perhaps in order to indicate how easily that passion can slip into one’s soul; or maybe (and most likely) as a result of Schultz’s innate aversion to symmetry and reiteration. The whole infernal area seemed to suggest a contrast between sky and earth, between organization and chaos. Above, in the darkness of a very good imitation of night, celestial spheres were spinning on their axes as they orbited around green, blue, and pink suns. But they were racing and whirling with the artificial speed of a Planetarium, each of them producing as it rotated its own musical buzz, which joined the tones of the other spheres in a furious chord that sounded like a swarm of irritated wasps. Below, completely covering the ground, there extended a marshy lagoon similar to those I’d seen in the prairies of the south, between Segurola and the sea, where I had often gone hunting otters and fishing for sharp-toothed dientudos. It was a patchwork of clearings of open water, here shimmering mirror-like, there ferruginous with algae, thickets of reeds, and islands of lilypads. The navigable surface of the marsh was being plied by flat-bottomed boats, whose crews seemed busy with some task I couldn
’t make out right away.
Only when Schultz led me down to a wooden wharf did I catch a glimpse of what was going on. The light of the rotating spheres, waxing and waning as in the lunar cycle, alternately revealed and hid fragments of the lake’s quite agitated world. Then I saw the entire lagoon was a seething hatchery of men and women: they swam in the muddy water like otters, their noses cutting the surface of the water at the vertices of triangular wakes flairing out behind them. They were groaning with dissatifaction or cavorting in amphibious somersaults, revealing flashes of buttocks, thighs, and breasts, all a-glint with slime. At the same time the job of the crews manning the boats became clear to me: as soon as a head popped up over the water’s surface, whether inadvertently or deliberately, the nearest boat shot over like an arrow, and the crew brought their oars down on the rebellious head with a thud of broken bone, making it disappear beneath the surface. “Keep your head down!” was no doubt the watchword in that hell.
As I was stringing together these observations, the astrologer Schultz had been exchanging a series of shouts and signs with the two crewmen of a boat moored not far from the shore. Schultz, evidently, was commanding or beckoning them over to the wharf we were standing on. But the boatmen showed no sign of obeying. Seeing this, the astrologer started to insult them violently, unleashing a string of esoteric epithets that concluded with the wingèd and very musical putifilios.114 That word must have had some magical meaning, for when the oarsmen heard it, they overcame their natural resistance and headed our way. Once the boat was tied up at the wharf, one of the men rudely demanded:
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