– Who are you to play the redeemer? the false Muse practically spat at me.
– And who gave this tourist the right to prune my angels? whined the tunicked pipsqueak.
– I know him! said the red tunic. He’s a fifi from the new generation who used to come over to Boedo Street every night and mock the libertarian muse.
With the tumult intensifying and the False Euterpe’s entourage threatening to attack, I beat a retreat that to this day I do not consider shameful. However, the astrologer Schultz, having caught up with me, stopped me at a gathering of ladies and gentlemen lying around on the fake grass.
It was immediately obvious that another hideous Antimuse was in charge of this group. The False Erato142 was distinguished by badly bleached hair, two pale eyes underlined by smoky black bags, a big, rouge-inflated mouth, and a crusted-over complexion flaking off layers of ancient, dried-out makeup. She sat on the ground, legs splayed out, a few wisps of tulle veiling the now withered charms of an old whore. Puffing on an outrageously long quellazaire ending in a Turkish cigarette, she exhibited hands with all five fingers a-glitter with cheap rings and fake jewels. To the left and right of her, clumps of poetesses were likewise lounging on the ground, along with a swarm of erotic poets who’d dreamed up false loves and lied about amorous adventures. The poetesses dilated their burning eyes, rolled around on the fake grass, or avidly sniffed at cloth roses. The poets, in a robotic frenzy, pretended to pull out the cardboard arrows apparently piercing their sides.
In silence, I let my gaze wander over the various groups, here pausing on a woman who, when she recognized me, put an imploring finger to her lips, or there diverting my glance from a man who turned away lest he be recognized. The discretion observed by the erotic poets seemed to bode well; and when Schultz, without a word, tapped me on the shoulder to signal it was time to leave, I realized he was generously sparing me a dialogue that might well have been more than disagreeable, and in mente I swore him eternal gratitude.
Encouraged by this turn of fortune, I decided then and there that Schultz wasn’t going to foist the complete series of his Antimuses upon me. I started walking faster, though not yet in flat-out flight, and I glanced left and right, ready to swerve and feint. Unfortunately, in attempting to avoid the groups surrounding the Antimuses, I bumped into a voluminous female crossing the meadow with no entourage at all; her wide black tunic imperfectly hid the enormous development of her buttocks, the adipose sphere of her belly, the torrential overflow of her udders, and her elephantine legs blue with varicose veins. After our collision, the False Melpomene (for that’s who she was) clapped porcine little eyes on me:
– Watch where you’re going! she shouted at me in a harsh voice. What’s the big idea, ploughing into people like that?
– Pardon me, I said. I never would have expected to find Madame walking so alone.
A grimace of hatred pursed her luxuriantly mustachioed lips:
– Those scatter-brained whoresons up above! she exclaimed. Buenos Aires has lost the notion of drama. What happened to all the porteños who used to burst with indignation at the circus when they beheld the heroic figure of Juan Moreira?143 And those whose eyes grew moist as they watched the final scene of Barranca abajo?144 And what of the philodramatic hosts who would mount serious plays like Juan José145 or Cena de las burlas146 in their little neighbourhood theatres, before audiences of girls sobbing and old women sniffling and riled-up compadritos fit to bust a gut? Those bastards up there are now in full farcical mode. To hell with the sons of whores!
– Don’t send them quite so far, I implored her timidly. According to Aristotle, every tragic scene must elicit the spectators’ compassion. Now then, it isn’t easy to feel another’s pain if one’s own flesh has never suffered it. And it’s been a long time since our beloved city has suffered a tragedy.
– Degenerates! rebuked the False Melpomene. They stuff themselves in luxury restaurants, and then plop their fat butts into Pullman seats, where they guffaw, hoot, belch, and laboriously digest their meals. But you can sure, before they go to the show, they take a good look at the marquees: “A thousand laughs per hour at the Astral.”147 Fine! Laughter stimulates the peristaltic movement of the large intestine. And if by mistake they end up watching a drama, they laugh all the same. A mother weeps over her son’s grave? Muffled laughter in the orchestra seats. Two lovers discuss their unhappiness? Convulsive hilarity in the gallery.
The False Melpomene fell silent. Then, gloomy and alone, she walked away muttering a endless stream of profanities.
– If you think about it, I said to Schultz, the poor old roly-poly is quite right.
But at that moment, without giving us a chance to take defensive action, the retinue of the False Terpsichore148 descended upon us, imprisoned us within a hermetic circle, and began to execute dance steps: tango, foxtrot, walse, Charleston, and polka. They danced alone or in couples, spinning and twisting and throwing themselves out of joint like rag dolls. And the vertiginous circle was closing in tighter and tighter around us. Then, after exchanging a look with Schultz, I put my head down, closed my eyes, and charged violently against the dancers. The circle was broken, I fell down, got up again instantly, and took off running with the astrologer right behind me, for he had imitated my escape technique. Just when we thought we were out of harm’s way, the False Thalia149 attempted to detain us with her vaudeville troupe.
– Don’t take off, rubes! she shouted at us. The trick’s easy. Toss in a gallego, an Italian, a Turk, and a compadrito. Shake well. And out comes a sainete criollo, a home-grown comic farce.150
Paying no attention, we lunged straight into thespian rabble already in combat formation. By dint of strenuous dekes and dodges learned on soccer fields, we managed to pick our way through the crowd.
The pseudo-Parnassus had been left behind. Now came the sector of the Despots and Traitors. The discretion I adopted at the beginning of this chronicle of my journey through Schultz’s Helicoid will serve to justify the merciful tact I’ll now use in describing this new sector. Fortunately, I caught only a panoramic view of it. As in the classics, Schultz had included traitors and tyrants in the Hell of Violence; due to his furious personality, however, he had lumped them together in a common environment, as though he meant to convey that despotism is a form of treachery, and treachery a figure of despotism. Moreover, and just as he had done with the other human passions, in this new sector the astrologer had refrained from displaying those historical personalities who could very well have served as paradigms. Instead, with a view to disinterested generalization, he had gathered a bunch of anonymous exemplars.
The infernal environment spreading before us was an expanse of muddy pampa. No tree, no weed, no colour interrupted the black surface of the quagmire, where despots and traitors squelched around beneath a rainy sky, busy at who knows what tasks. As soon as the sky brightened, I noticed dark shapes sprouting up from the quagmire and swelling in a process of swift vegetal growth: they were earthen horses, colts of wet mud. Then I saw how the despots, unrecognizable under their layers of muck, headed for those equine forms, frantically mounted them, punished their flanks with their heels, shouted to spur them on. But the earthen horses remained motionless, collapsed under the weight of their riders, fell apart like clods of mud, and finally crumbled, dragging the horsemen down with them. And then, after laboriously floundering in the mud, the despots got up and mounted other horses and fell to earth again. As for the traitors swarming in the quagmire, I’ll be brief: they had the shape of half-men, each having half a head, half a thorax, and only one arm; they hopped along on their lone foot, anxiously searching for their other, betrayed, half.
The last sector of the hell of Wrath, it turned out, belonged to the assassins. Stranglers, dismemberers, poisoners, all the models of man as tiger, serpent, and hyena were there, encased in coarse hospital gowns and stretched out on nickel-plated operating tables. Intense spotlights blinded them and cast their features in relief
with the implacable sharpness of mug shots. Hovering over the assassins, walking around the operating tables, cackling and febrile, a hundred demon-psychiatrists in white lab coats were measuring their skulls, pricking their nerve endings, extracting glandular fluids, pawing them over and submitting them to vexatious experiments. A vulture-faced assassin, who had managed to escape from his operating table, ran up to us:
– I’d like to meet the guy who invented this inferno! he griped, staring me in the face.
– What for? Schultz asked him.
– To tell him where to get off. He’s gotta be either an avant-garde type or a bungler. Any sophomore student would have known enough to set this hell up as a deluxe butcher shop, with nice big hooks, knives, saws, and cleavers. Where was the turkey’s head? Shoving us into this dump, with a bunch of weird medics scratching away night and day at our grey matter!
The astrologer, all the while listening to him, leaned over and discreetly whispered in my ear:
– Take a good look at him. He’s an old-school murderer.
He was just turning to respond to the vulture-faced fellow, when he saw him flailing amid a throng of psychiatrists as they dragged him back to his table. Only then did we come face to face with the Man with Intellectual Eyes.
Tall, gaunt, aquiline of profile, the Man with Intellectual Eyes was wearing blue trousers and a chamois jacket. But his ashen-grey eyes were his most striking feature; as they peered they emitted a disquieting light.
– The green fly hasn’t come back to buzz in front of my eyes, he announced, his voice tranquil and confidential.
– It hasn’t come back? Schultz asked him.
– It couldn’t come back anymore. The three fateful sisters haven’t returned either.
– It is just.
– You said it, affirmed the man. Now there reigns the peace of an evenly balanced scale. Yes, some invisible weigh-scale has come to rest, with its two pans at the same level.
He must have noticed my astonishment and great curiosity, because he turned to Schultz and asked, pointing at me:
– Does the gentleman not know the story?
– I know nothing, said I, about any green fly or three fateful sisters.
The man seemed to recover an extinguished fervour, and his disquieting ashen eyes grew moist:
– Let me tell you about Bellona! he implored us. When I was a happy mortal and worked with the language of men, I described strange affections and introduced strange intrigues into the passions of others. Now I need to talk about myself. Give me the chance to deliver my monologue! Not the terrible inner monologue that wracks my being in this night of punishment, but the other kind, which one delivers before an understanding face, so it seems less a monologue than a dialogue between a voice and a gaze. May I speak of Bellona?
And since he’d read tacit consent in our faces, the Man with the Intellectual Eyes took us aside to a free spot and spoke in this way:
– I shall not give you my name, although you may have heard of me up above and associated my name with the death of a literary promise. My first comedy, The Invaders, premiered by chance at a theatre in Buenos Aires and unexpectedly plunged me into the flattering world of notoriety. And so I became a demiurge of theatrical fables, proudly manipulating a hundred destinies not my own. Little did I know, or else I’d forgotten, that I too (and forgive me the cliché) was a comic character on the great stage of the world, dangling from threads manipulated by the invisible fingers of angels and demons. It was in those days that I met Bellona.
He paused here, apparently trying to gather into his soul the shards of a broken image.
– Every time I pronounce Bellona’s name, he declared, I say it as the poet rereads his unfinished and unfinishable poem.151 Or as one names a truncated happiness, remembered less as something that actually was than as something that might have been. Bellona was the only child of an artillery captain. She grew up in the care of others and, in her solitude, she developed the traits of a soul which I never managed to define. For her soul used to open and close unexpectedly before my awareness, such that I caught only glimpses, a quick succession of bright and dark zones within her. As for the name of that incredible woman, Bellona – its rarity and musicality aside – I saw nothing premeditated about it at first, no occult meaning, no hint connecting Bellona to the genius of war. Except perhaps her hair of bronze – she used to wear it gathered in the form of an ancient helmet.
”Our honeymoon was one of mutual discovery. We spent it in Mar del Plata, during a season of steady summer weather uncommon in that maritime city. Bellona and I had taken a house on the edge of town. A cheerful-looking residence, its large windows looked out over the Atlantic, especially those in the living room, which we converted into a studio. There Bellona installed the objects we loved – pictures, books, tapestries, my old harmonium, her bird cage, and the models of set designs I used when hatching plots for my plays. I mentioned an initial bedazzlement, when Bellona and I were like two worlds commingling, laughing in the astonished delight of gradual discovery, not yet suspecting that love is sometimes the most terrible form of solitude. But after our rapturous beginning, when my eyes again saw reality as it is, I began to feel something was not quite right in that happiness-machine Bellona and I had built.
– Naturally! I interrupted him. The first rapture, or rapturous mode of looking at one’s beloved, so they say, is the only view love can take. Saying that the rapture is over and that one “sees reality as it is” is tantamount to announcing love’s death.
The Man with Intellectual Eyes regarded me with affectionate curiosity.
– I didn’t mean to go that far, he rejoined. The initial rapture to which I referred is not the rapturous mode of looking at the beloved, but rather the rapturous mode through which the lover looks only at himself in the act of his own rapture.
– Another form of solitude, grumbled the astrologer at this point.
– Very well said! affirmed the Man with the Intellectual Eyes. But once that rapture has dissipated, a true lover will want to know what it is he really loves.
Here I interrupted him again:
– That’s turning the natural order of things upside down, I objected. Is it not said that knowledge precedes love and that no one can love what he has not previously known?
The storyteller’s hands flew to his head:
– Saints preserve us! he exclaimed. A Platonist! And it’s true, knowledge precedes love. But there’s a missing piece. If knowledge anticipates love in order to inspire it, knowledge constantly accompanies love in order to sustain it. The act of loving continues in the lover as long as the act of knowing tells him that what he loves is still the object of love; and it ends if the act of knowing announces to him that the object of love has ceased to be so.
Here the astrologer Schultz began to show signs of impatience:
– It hardly seems to me, he chided, that a Hell of Wrath is the most suitable place for an academic discussion on the art of love.
– You’re right, acknowledged the Man with Intellectual Eyes. But I’m glad we’ve had the discussion, because now it will be easier for you to understand the nature of the abyss that grew between Bellona and me as soon as the initial rapture had worn off. To know what I loved, or better, to understand what I possessed: such was the impossibility my amorous mind bumped up against. Bellona’s aspect changed every hour, like the moon or like the maritime face of the water whose mutations I used to watch from the windows of my study. Sometimes, in a sudden moment of unmediated presence, she seemed so close, so accessible, so rich in bridges and passable roads, that my entire being would hasten toward her; and on drawing nearer, I would find the bridges broken, the roads erased, and before me only a strange distance in the figure of a woman. At other times, when my being felt at the ends of despair, Bellona would fall upon me like a surprise wind, or like a rain shower no longer implored but that came anyway, by virtue of who knows what laws of mercy. Thus, between zones of light an
d darkness, I experienced first anxiety, then sleeplessness, and finally a crippling obsession that led me into an absurd, ongoing dispute with Bellona (only now do I understand!); for to demand that she explain the reasons for her changeability was tantamount to asking the sea to account for its mutations, its ire, its benevolence. Unfortunately, our quarrels, far from bringing us closer, only deepened the rift. Then I turned to the vulgar relief of drinking and gambling; they would dull my awareness for an hour, but later I’d wake up in bitterness and shame. How many times, in deepest night, seeking respite or forgetfulness in work, did I weep over the impassive marionettes I used to manipulate in my studio, or make them act out abominable scenes that were nothing more than the translation of the inner monologue driving sleep from my soul!
The Man with Intellectual Eyes paused here and studied us intently.
– The gentleman, he said gesturing at me, just alluded to the Platonists. They maintain that, through love, the lover gradually becomes what he loves; it is an act of amorous transmutation that ends in the peace of lover-converted-into-loved-one. Unlikely as it may seem, my conflict with Bellona originated in the impossibility of the ineffable assimilation; for, not knowing her, I could hardly assimilate myself to her, and without being converted to what I loved, it was unlikely I could attain the tranquility in love which is the goal and recompense of amorous movement. On the contrary, far from bringing me peace, Bellona unfailingly exercised the power to provoke an inner war in my soul; and it is fair to say that she accomplished this entirely without deliberate intent, by the mere fact of her presence, by her slightest gesture, by an innocent word. She was Bellona, after all, and too late did I understand the true meaning of her name! I never found out if her father, the artillery man, had chosen her name as a philosopher aware of her essence, or as a perverse genie who had marked Bellona with that name’s magical power, thus compromising her fate right from the cradle, and mine as well.
The storyteller paused again here, and we saw by his furrowed brow that the story was about to enter difficult terrain.
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