Adam Buenosayres: A Novel

by Leopoldo Marechal

  – Let’s bear to our right, the astrologer suggested then.

  I gave him a dirty look, because it was obvious that Schultz was strutting with an insolence that, in my view, went way beyond the tolerable and which my status as a denizen of Villa Crespo would not and could not brook.

  – I’ll go if I feel like it! I answered him. And don’t shout at me! All we need is some blasted compadrito . . .!

  – How about I thump you one! he threatened me hoarsely.

  My fist flew toward his jaw. But the astrologer parried my blow and locked me in a bear hug:

  – Calm down! he said in alarm. I went a little overboard with the ether!

  I understood he was speaking not as an antagonist but as the inventor of that Inferno. Struggling against the dense choleric fumes, I followed Schultz as he made his way into the Thieves’ Sector.

  – Good Lord! I said, finding myself up to my neck in that mob of burglars. I knew that fingernail-fencing was one of the most popular sports in Buenos Aires, but I never imagined it had so may adepts.

  The astrologer brought a finger to his lips:

  – Shhh! he said. Cover your pocket-watch with one hand and your wallet with the other. Too bad we don’t have another pair of hands to guard our neckerchiefs and false teeth!

  – Are we going to have to talk with these people? I asked.

  – I don’t advise it, answered Schultz. Some of them are capable of filching anything, even your language.

  The astrologer’s watchword was similar to that of his distant colleague – “look and pass on.”120 So I decided to keep my mouth shut and my eyes open in that little corner of hell through which we were scrambling as fast as our legs could carry us. Then I saw a legion of avid pickpockets obstinately working on a legion of bourgeois figures sculpted in granite. The thieves were trying to get their hands into the statues’ stony pockets, moaning at the vanity of their efforts, persistently scratching away at the rock. Finally, they would break off from their labour and go over to a row of Italian knife-grinders to get their broken fingernails sharpened on pedal-driven grindstones. Their nails once again sharp, the pickpockets ran back to the statues, while the Italian knife-grinders produced surprising flourishes on their copper Pan pipes. Next I saw the swindlers or con-artists: exuberant in language, eloquent in mimicry, deceitful in gaze, each of them was trying to pull a fast one on various mannikins, one representing a rural criollo, another a Spanish servant woman, yet another a recent immigrant, using their arsenal of scams: “the inheritance,” “the winning lottery ticket,” “the lucrative marriage,” “the money-making machine,” “the can’t-miss business deal,” “the invisible embezzlement,” “the magic purse,” “the prodigious cheque.” The swindlers were gesturing in vain, talking themselves hoarse; coming to the end of their pitch, they then had to repeat it over and over again, endlessly, always facing the same sly smile in the cloth mannikins. Then I saw the safe-crackers, the counterfeiters, the muggers, the fugitive bank tellers, the bank robbers, the money launderers, all of them subjected to torments that remained unclear to me, for the astrologer Schultz was not just walking but running through the thieves’ sector and pulling me along in his flight.

  We entered the Laboratory of the Dynamiters, and I observed that Schultz, far from calming down, was looking around anxiously. To tell the truth, there was good reason for anxiety: the dynamiters had the appearance of Orsini-style bombs,121 hand grenades, and other machines of destruction, some with burning wicks, others with timer-switches emitting a sinister tick-tock. Such hellish devices constituted the torsos of the dynamiters. On top of each torso, an extremely skinny neck stretched up, ending in a mop head covered by an enormously wide-brimmed hat. The torso’s lower end was fitted with two legs made of wire, wobbling beneath the weight of the explosive upper body. And out of the shoulders poked two arms with little hands that feverishly tried to put out the burning wick or stop the timer-mechanism that would make their own particular device explode. The bomb-men were wandering around in their laboratory replete with glass beakers and chemical smells. For fear of colliding and setting off an explosion, they moved slowly, exchanging shouts of warning. And every time they narrowly averted collision, they covered their ears with their hands so as not to hear their own imminent detonation.

  While I was observing all this, the astrologer was growing more worried than ever. When I looked at him again, he had his hat pulled down over his eyes and his brow lowered, as if not wanting to be recognized.

  – Are they dangerous types? I asked him, gesturing toward the bomb-men.

  – A wretched bunch, he answered. Poor souls who thought they’d been born under the sign of Anarkos.122

  – So why are you afraid of them? Are the bomb-men loaded for real?

  Schultz chuckled a moment under his hat:

  – They’re loaded, all right, he affirmed, but with bad literature.

  Schultz was trying to lead me to the exit of the laboratory, when a bomb-man puffing on a bird-bone cigarette-holder approached, looking Schultz over intently and showing signs of recognition.

  – It’s him! he exclaimed at last, pointing a nicotine-stained index finger at the astrologer. It’s the traitor, the good-for-nothing, the turncoat who deserted the banner of Anarkos!

  Schultz stopped, looked at him coldly, then turned to me:

  – I don’t know this man, he told me. He must be suffering from an optical illusion.

  – Kowtowing toady! yelled the bomb-man. He deserted the banner of Anarkos to kiss the elegantly shod feet of the bourgeoisie! Look at him now! He invents an inferno in imitation of the Great Bourgeois the priests are always trying to get us to adore!

  Attracted by the shouting, the bomb-men had drawn closer to Schultz and were glaring at him menacingly.

  – Comrade Bomb is right! shouted one.

  – Throw him out! insisted another.

  – You can read the phoniness in his face like it’s an open book, growled a third voice.

  The astrologer, soaked in sweat, fended off the bomb-men already coming at him.

  – Watch your fuses! he reminded them.

  When he saw that the bomb-men, panic-stricken, were resuming a prudent distance among themselves, Schultz confessed to me:

  – It’s true. For a time I hung around with these people, but just for a while, like a tourist.

  – What a whopping-big Tartuffe! claimed the man with the cigarette-holder. He wants to deny he was inititated into the first rites!

  Several voices piped up to confirm his assertion:

  – He planned an operation to blow up a gasometer!

  – He whistled contemptuously in a security guard’s face!

  – He slept with our women!

  Schultz’s eyes turned to me, as if pleading for indulgence:

  – I was young! he alleged. Perverse readings had led me to the cult of destruction symbolized in Kali, the Dark Goddess, who dances on the rubble of the world, her heifer teats shimmying beautifully.

  – Hah! laughed the bomb-man. There he goes again with his whoring orientalisms.

  The astrologer looked at him sadly.

  – In these men, I thought I’d found adepts of Kali, he told me. Didn’t I hear them endlessly conjugating the verb “destroy”?

  – So what? cried the man with the cigarette-holder.

  – Pure hot air! Schultz confessed to me. Their initiation ceremonies? Bah! Want me to describe them for you? They forced me sleep on the floor, eat their vegetarian stews, and do yogic breathing practices. Before we could have the revolution, you see, we had to become as strong as Zarathustra and renounce all bourgeois prejudice. I still blush when I recall the incident of the chamber pot . . .

  Schultz hesitated a moment here, but the man with the cigarette-holder acridly challenged him:

  – Go on, out with it, if you ain’t a wimp!

  – Fine, conceded the astrologer. That night, while we were debating in assembly, I felt an intestinal plenit
ude urgently clamouring for evacuation (in those days I was a neophyte and, as such, a martyr of vegetarianism). I asked the assembly for permission to go to the toilet, and they got into a Homeric debate about whether or not it was a bourgeois prejudice to move one’s bowels in private. The matter was put to a vote, the “yes” side won overwhelmingly, and so they brought in an enormous enamelled chamber pot with blue trim, in which I was to satisfy coram populo123 the urgency of my viscera.

  – It was a profoundly liberating gesture! said the bomb-man in ecstacy.

  – Quite so, affirmed Schultz. And what about the white tunics?

  – The tunic of Anarkos! intoned the man with the bone cigarette-holder. One afternoon we put them on and ventured outside. But the neighbourhood kids pelted us with rocks.

  – Make no mistake; common sense speaks most eloquently through kids, scolded the astrologer. The stones rained on us down to beat the band! And now I wonder: why all those fantasies and dreams of violence, when in the end we were just a bunch of poor devils incapable of hurting a fly?

  When the bomb-men heard those words, they began showing signs of indignation. But Schultz gave them a paternal look, then turned to me, full of benevolence:

  – Ignore them, he told me. They’re unfortunate wretches, good as gold. They could barely spell their own names, and yet they’d sit up nights trying to decipher Nietzsche’s Zarathustra or the Apocalypse of John of Patmos, not realizing they were getting their heads into one god-awful muddle. Later they’d repair to their cubicles and snore till noon, while their heroic wives broke their backs doing laundry at other people’s homes to support them.

  Irate voices interrupted him here:

  – Get out!

  – Sold out to Yankee gold!

  – Two-faced liar!

  The astrologer smiled at me, as if begging a mite of charity for them.

  – These excellent brothers! he said. God’s little lambs! I’d shower them with tears of tenderness if I weren’t afraid of getting their powder wet. True, they used to waste their time making paper plans for innocuous train-derailments and explosions, or mixing up batches of quite harmless chemicals. But it was heart-warming to see them at their Sunday picnics, chomping on chicken drumsticks like peaceable burghers.124

  – A paid infiltrator! shouted a voice choked with rage.

  – Clown! shrieked other voices. Get outta here!

  And with that, as if responding to a signal, the bomb-men charged us, coming dangerously close and shoving us with their explosive bellies.

  – Watch the fuses! Schultz warned them.

  But the men came on relentlessly, and we had to back away in the face of the onslaught until we reached the exit from the laboratory.

  There was now an interlude in the suite of sectors making up the seventh circle of hell. A parenthetical place of repose, as I understood it, or a chamber of silence. Schultz paused there a moment to recover the Virgilian decorum he’d lost during his altercation with the dynamiters. Having wiped the sweat from his brow, he quickly led me across the chamber to an open balcony affording a view of the sector of violence in its entirety. From there, I looked out over the central area crammed with a multitude hard at work in brutish exercise; truth be told, all the eye could see was a tangled mess of legs, arms, and heads aggressively flailing at each other with mechanical ferocity, in a silence so unreal that the whole tableau was reduced to a flitting succession of phantasmal gestures as in a silent movie.

  – There are violent types and violent types, Schultz informed me. The ones you see down there knocking each other about are lunatics in potentia who seek release in spectacles of wrath. They’re the ones who, although weak in muscle or in spirit themselves, would nevertheless sit comfortably in ringside seats at Luna Park screaming for blood, brandishing mosquito-sized fists, and roaring their indignation or triumph at the honourable boxers who were fighting for real. They’re the narrow-lunged, feeble cripples who flock to soccer fields to insult players of the enemy team, or to throw empty bottles at the long-suffering referees. There you have them now! A little exercise is just what the doctor ordered!

  I seemed to detect a certain anger in the astrologer’s words, and I was tempted to bring up a theory espoused by the pipsqueak Bernini about the cathartic virtue of demonstrations of brutality. But after taking into consideration how long we had already spent in the famous Helicoid, how much further we might still have to go, and my keen desire to avoid any word or attitude that might prolong the journey, I held my tongue. So it was that, with Schultz deep in his own thoughts and I in mine, we left the chamber of repose and entered the adjoining sector.

  We found ourselves in a kind of gigantic workshop where machines were clattering. At first, I couldn’t make out what sort of machines they were because of the smoke filling the place. And yet, the odours saturating the atmosphere – fresh ink, turpentine, and lead – were strangely familiar. Only when I recognized the dark bulk of a rotary press did I realize where we were. And then, as so many times before, I gave Schultz an enquiring look, curious to know what new evil was brewing in these premises. But the astrologer, without a word, merely gestured toward the gigantic rotary press; toward one end of it, I now saw a mob of men in shirtsleeves, greenish in complexion, grimy, agitated, vociferating. Joining the mob, I walked along the entire length of the machine. When I got to the end, I saw how the men were rushing pell-mell up the steps of the press and then diving head first between heavy rollers, which sucked them in, crushed them flat, and transformed each one into a long ribbon of paper. Then I saw how the ribbon slid between the impression cylinders and came out as newsprint, complete with screaming eight-column headlines and lurid illustrations. The ribbon was then folded and cut up into an infinite number of copies of an infernal daily newspaper. Finally I saw that each copy of the tabloid daily, once off the press, recovered its human form and ran back up the steps to be flattened and imprinted all over again.

  Completely sure now that this was a journalists’ hell, I looked attentively at the tabloid-men being vomited out by the rotary press, and my soul was sorely perturbed. For I too had once belonged to that vociferous brotherhood, had rolled up my shirtsleeves in late-night editorial rooms, had buried my bilious-green face in messy mounds of paper. All of a sudden, I noticed that one of the tabloid-men, having just resumed his human form, was approaching with an imperious attitude and trying to shout something at me.

  – Boss! I exclaimed in recognition.

  The man made was making such an enormous effort to speak that his eyes, underlined by purple bags, were nearly popping out of his head; the veins on his forehead stood out like tense wires under his skin. And his urgency found sudden egress in unspeakable vomit: a torrent of toads, salamanders, serpents, and other creepy-crawlies spouted from his mouth, in a convulsion that left him sweating, nauseous, and teary-eyed. When he’d recovered, he began to speak:

  – God has put me in your city like a horse on a noble gadfly of combat . . .125

  A second bout of vomiting cut his sentence short.

  – Bah! I retorted, while holding his head to let him vomit more comfortably. Why carry on now with that old song-and-dance?

  – Song-and-dance? he gurgled with difficulty.

  His anxious eyes flew to the rotary press, then to his big pocket watch, and he shouted at me in a fury:

  – The sixth edition is already in press! Did you bring your quota of blood? It should go six columns’ worth! What about the photos of the decapitated woman?

  – Yes, Boss, I answered. I was your “bloodhound”; it was my job to hunt down blood every day, so readers of the sixth edition could quaff it like a nightcap before bedtime. I had to find a gory crime and muck around in it, gather the brackish filth of mutilated cadavers and grubby souls, then season it all with the sweet-and-spicy sauce of the sentimental-pornographic; once the delicacy was ready and printed up in point-size seven, it was tossed to the beast, along with illustrations of pathological anatomies and c
opious crocodile tears.

  – So what’s wrong with that? retorted my Boss. The anonymous man-in-the-street, the low-brow without a life, needs his daily fix of violence.126 “God has put me here in your city . . .”

  – Oh, come on! Enough of that old routine! Time was when the man-in-the-street, at the end of his work day, used to go home to the warmth of his family and catch the last laughter of his children, appreciate the grace of his wife, or simply take a look at his own inner world. It was his time to look and be looked at; and you robbed him of it. It was the only time left to the ox to raise his head and savour a bit of the earth’s sweetness; you stole that time from the ox. And, as a substitute, you gave him ten pages laden with ignominy.

  By talking away like that, I must confess, I got myself almost ridiculously worked up. So it was no surprise when my Boss, in response, half guffawed, half vomited:

  – The poet! Now I remember! Didn’t I fire you because I caught you writing cute little verses in the editorial room?

  – They weren’t cute little verses, Boss! I responded. That day, between a major fraud and a crime of passion, I was starting a sonnet.

  – Counting syllables on your fingers! That’s what you were doing when I found you out. How absurd!

  – I’m no syllable-counter! I protested. I was using my fingers to count the matches in those five-cent boxes.

  – Matches? I don’t remember that.

  – There were supposed to be forty-five matches in each box. You ordered me to count them. I found a few boxes containing only forty-four. You threatened to denounce the manufacturer with the headline: “Consumers robbed of one match!” The manufacturer paid up without a peep. And that was the end of that!

  My Boss laughed heartily: