Looking from the woman in the painting to the maid, the contrast couldn’t have been greater if it had been arranged. Slightly hunched over the coat-check table set into the wall, she was a middle-aged woman in a grey-and-white maid outfit, slightly-blued hair in a coif, and support stockings pulled up to her knees. She stared at me with that haughty look servants in magnificent houses adopt after years of service to the élite. This comes from decades of ushering in baronets, duchesses and cardinals through the front door and shepherding out mistresses and abortionists through the back.
Unmoving, unblinking, it seemed as if she’d always sat on that folding chair in that little recess in the wall. She reminded me of a story I’d once read in school about a Czarina who wanted to know when her favourite rose broke through the frost of Spring. She ordered the Captain of the Guard to post a soldier to stand in the rose garden, head bowed, his only task to watch for the first green shoots, the first sign of life from the flower. To this day, a cadet is stationed in the rose bed, head bent towards that same patch of ground. The Czarina long dead, the rose long gone, the job has lost its purpose, but the soldier remains.
Trying to break the ice with an inane remark, I said, ‘I don’t have a coat, but I could go out and get one if you want . . .’
She looked at me, expressionless, and said, ‘Don’t matter if you leave a coat. Everyone takes one of these,’ and she pointed to a leather mask hanging on a hook on the wall. It had a long, pointed nose like something from a festival in nineteenth century Venice. In the same monotone voice, she said, ‘Now, go in. They’re about to start,’ and pointed to the door through which the butler had just disappeared.
I quickly picked up the mask, nodding as if I were familiar with the normal operations of demonic ceremonies. As I opened the door, I put on the mask, pinching my ears in the process with the tight elastic strap, so a sudden shot of pain flashed through my brain. As a result, I stumbled into the room. Quickly, rubbing the tears from my eyes, I looked around to see I was in a sort of medieval banquet hall. Candelabras here and there, a small, dwindling fire at the far end, and all around the walls hanging tapestries of hunting scenes, crossbows, axes, and a boar’s head, one tusk of which, I noticed, was chipped.
There were a few dozen other guests, milling around here and there, champagne glasses in hand. Even if I’d wanted to identify them—which I don’t—they all had masks on as well. Even so, I recognised a few of them. Not the individuals, I mean, but their type.
For example, one man with bent shoulders was reaching for a glass of champagne. I noticed his fingertips were stained with blue ink. He had all the bearing of those officials who take your fingerprints when you renew your passport. You know the ones I mean. After hours of collecting all the required stamps, photographs and affidavits, the last thing you have to do is to form a long, serpentine line towards a single bureaucrat. He hunches over a ridiculously-small desk, noiselessly taking your index finger, pressing it to the inkpad and index card and pointing towards the box of tissue paper to wipe your hands. His lips move incessantly, but the only word he says audibly is, ‘Next!’
Then through one of the woman’s masks—a studded, pink leather affair with an ostrich feather drooping in the back—I saw the dull, almost opaque eyes of every receptionist to every Assistant Director I’ve ever tried to make an appointment with. Like some deep sea fish, she stares blindly, puzzled that anyone—ever —would want to speak with her boss, and she feels torn between pretending to read a report in front of her or filing her nails.
Then I glanced at a man painstakingly selecting a canapé from a tray being offered him at such a snail’s pace that I could see even the butler’s patience was wearing thin. He reminded me of the civil servant who signed our wedding certificate after the civil ceremony. That day had been as hot as hell, and I was sweating in a borrowed, wool suit. Julieta was radiant as always, but already showing at three-and-a-half months. And this man, this idiot, was flipping through an ancient registration book with a palsied hand, trembling as it ran down every entry from the preceding year, trying to find the day’s date. After half an hour of this agony, my patience finally broke, and I said, ‘Here, let me help,’ and I grabbed the book, flipping through a few months of entries in a second. Indignant, the old man grabbed the book back and said, ‘There, now you’ve made me lose my place.’ And he started flipping through it from the beginning . . .
I suppressed the urge to give this man a kick in the shins from the anonymity of the darkened room, and moved towards the centre of the crowd. There, holding court amongst a mass of figures was a flaming red-haired woman of a certain age, made a little less certain by the taut skin around her eyes and lips which gave her the look of perpetual surprise. The only one without a mask in the entire room, except for the butler, she wore a red-feathered boa looped several times around her throat. I supposed, this was ‘Madam’ who had allowed me in.
Moving through the crowd, I caught fragments of conversations. One woman remarked, ‘So, I just changed the font size, and you know what he said? “That’s the best goddam purchase requisition I’ve ever read!” ’ Then someone else said, ‘Of course, we could have extended his contract, but I remembered that snippy remark he’d made about my request for a parking space last June . . .’
As I approached the inner circle, the conversation changed to the more philosophical sort. ‘What sort of metal would I be, you say?’ said ‘Madam’, splaying her fingers across her ample bosom, ‘Well, if Socrates said there were three kinds of people—brass, silver and gold . . . then I’d be platinum!’ With this attempt at wit, the whole group laughed uproariously, and I could tell, even through their masks, they were trying to ingratiate themselves with her. Trying to fit in as best I could, I also laughed, but not so much that they would notice me.
In the laughter, I lost the first part of another quip, to which a man responded, in a weird, high-pitched voice, ‘So I says to him, “Don’t be such as ass. Why wouldn’t Machiavelli dedicate The Prince to Lorenzo de’ Medici?” ’
Trying to ride on the wave of good humour, I chipped in, ‘Well, it is a bit fucked up, isn’t it, since de’ Medici had Machiavelli tortured the year before for conspiring to overthrow him?’
To my horror, just when I’d made my remark, there was a lull in the conversation, and what I’d meant to have been a barely audible aside instead reverberated throughout the entire hall. Immediately, the man who’d mentioned Machiavelli, wearing a grey, owl-like mask with its beak curved suggestively upward, turned and glared at me with eyes that burned with the flames of hell.
Shit! The first thing I say at this party, and I make an enemy.
Then the owl-man forced a laugh and shrugged his shoulders, although his eyes still burned. With that terrible, high-pitched voice, he said, ‘Well, as Niccolò wrote, “The end justifies the means”.’ I opened my mouth to say something, but just then the butler beat an old Chinese gong, the sound of which resounded throughout the banquet room.
At this, ‘Madam’ sprang into action, grabbing a spoon and striking it against her champagne glass several times. She called out, ‘Everyone, everyone . . . gather round, gather round. The culmination of the evening is at hand, the reason we have come here tonight.’
The room fell hushed, and she said in a rehearsed, dramatic voice, ‘Can you feel the animal energy pulsating through the room? Can you feel the Panther licking its lips?’
The whole group responded, as if repeating the liturgy in church, ‘Yes, we feel it!’
She continued, ‘Are you prepared to enter its iron cage?’
I answered with the rest, ‘Yes, we are!’
‘For how long?’ she shrieked.
And we answered as a group, ‘Forever!’
‘And whom do you hope to find there?’
In one voice, we screamed, ‘Saint Perpetuus!’
Only minutes before, I’d been trying to figure a way to beat a hasty retreat if this turned out to be a bad joke. But h
ere I was surrounded by average people, dull people, people who could never be accused of having flights of fancy (or, indeed, of ever having an imagination) and yet they all believed in Saint Perpetuus. In fact, the fervour in their voices told me they were convinced he would make an appearance that very night.
And then something happened, something I’ve been trying to figure out since then. It’s not that I’m trying to find a way to excuse my actions, but it’s just that I’m still baffled as to why I did it.
The woman’s voice became shrill and commanding, ‘And now, true-believers, let us approach Him as we came into the world, for He longs to see you in your innocence.’ It was then I noticed the butler had been extinguishing the candles, one by one, throughout the liturgy, and now the room was lit only by the fireplace at the end of the hall.
At this, ‘Madam’ unwound the red boa and unclasped a brooch at her chest. She kicked off her stilettos and slid her dress onto the floor, casting the shadows of two firm breasts, which must have been the pride and joy of at least one team of the most distinguished plastic surgeons in Buenos Aires.
Without saying another word, she beckoned all of us to do the same, and she stepped through a door nearby the fireplace, disappearing into the darkness of another room. All around me, the guests began to undress, rapidly loosening neckties, lowering trousers and unsnapping bras, as nonchalantly as if they were doing double-entry bookkeeping. Only wearing their masks, they followed ‘Madam’ through the dimly-outlined doorway.
And here’s where the inexplicable thing happened. Instead of hiding in the shadows or running for the exit, I began to undress as well. I, who had been so ashamed of my body in high school—so much so that I’d always changed under a towel in the locker room and wouldn’t think of showering with the other boys—was fine with getting naked in a room full of strangers, for only God knows what was going on in the mysterious, adjoining chamber.
I’m inclined to say it was the mask, the anonymity it afforded me, or perhaps I was infected with some sort of group hysteria. But those are just reflections in hindsight. At that moment, I was truly convinced that Saint Perpetuus did, indeed, walk the earth, and after all I’d done, after all I’d suffered, I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to try to learn from Him the secrets of Time-Travel.
I hurriedly tore off my suit and kicked off my shoes, wiping the dense perspiration from my face with my handkerchief. The only article of clothing I retained was my underpants, hoping in the twilight they wouldn’t notice me. However, as I approached the doorway, the butler who was standing guard raised his hand and said, ominously, ‘Enter as you came into this world, or do not enter at all.’ So I unceremoniously lowered my drawers and rushed inside.
I don’t know what I expected, exactly, in the next room . . . perhaps an acolyte handing out black robes or broomsticks, and then we’d position ourselves around the points of a pentagram for a séance with the world beyond. At first, in the darkness I couldn’t make out what was going on, beyond the fact that there was a line of dark figures in front and behind of me, and we seemed to be moving slowly down some sort of wide, spiral staircase. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see, dimly, the outlines of figures writhing down below.
Towards the bottom of the staircase, I could just make out a raised dais lit by a three-pronged standing candelabra. ‘Madam’, with a look of ecstasy on her face, was being mounted by three or four dinner guests. As they gyrated and grunted above and below her, she moaned, ‘Yes, yes, worship Saint Perpetuus by entering my iron cage. Through my body, he will come to you.’
My head started to reel, and my attempt to grab hold of the invisible banister met with a sweaty mass and a smile from a man to my left that I’d sooner forget.
As I looked at the men and women queuing up for the opportunity with ‘Madam’, the hairy potbellies, the spindly legs and flabby arms, I realised, to my horror, I hadn’t been admitted to a witches’ coven. I’d simply come to a sex club for bureaucrats.
Previously, just about everyone in the room had, metaphorically, screwed me (at the DMV, when I renewed my passport, and even on my wedding day), and by going down that staircase I’d volunteered for them to do the same thing to me, only this time in the flesh. Suddenly, in the grip of sheer panic, I tried to stop my forward movement and bolt back up the staircase. However, countless hands—they seemed to me more like claws—held me fast, and clammy skin pressed in on me from all sides. I nudged, tussled and finally flailed my elbows all about, knocking bodies forwards and backwards, finally opening a channel in the flesh back up the stairs.
I burst back into the hall above so violently, that I smacked into the butler standing guard and knocked him out cold. I banged my head and shin so horribly in the process and sprawled over his unconscious body in my nakedness. By the dying light of the fire, I frantically rummaged through the piles of clothes and finally found my pants, shirt and jacket. Groping on my hands and knees, I located my handkerchief and stuffed it in my pocket but couldn’t for the life of me find my underpants. Then I remembered I’d taken them off somewhere near the stairs, but I didn’t dare go back, because the butler I’d just bowled over was stirring. Pulling up my pants and madly buttoning up my shirt, I pushed open the door and skidded down the hallway.
The maid sat still under the painting of the ‘Vampyre’, in her little niche in the wall, unperturbed, unblinking. For some reason, the sight of her so placid and unmoving after what I’d been through infuriated me. Realising I was still wearing my mask and venting my exasperation on the only person close at hand, I ripped it off and flung it through the coat-check area behind her. She made no movement at all.
I shouted at her, ‘What a sham! What a fucking sham! There’s no salamanca in there, no secret cave. It’s just some fucking gang-bang!’
Trying to stuff my sweaty feet into my shoes, I yammered on, ‘And, as for your boss, she doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about. When Socrates said we should start a new myth that divides people into three categories, the first of them was bronze, not brass. And the rest of the crowd can’t tell its Machiavelli from its Marx. I can’t stand it when know-nothing pedants say “the end justifies the means”, when Machiavelli never said such a thing. It was Sophocles who wrote in Elektra, “the end excuses any evil!” ’
Of course, I didn’t expect a reply from this unmoving maid. I just said it to feel superior to someone after my gross stupidity for going there that night. And why had Professor Pendleton set me up like that? Had he gone insane?
That’s why I was completely shell-shocked when the maid said so matter-of-factly, ‘You’re not as stupid as you look, Mr Assistant to the Assistant to the Assistant Director. I’m glad I let you in.’
My mouth gaped wide open, and I dropped one of my shoes. I stammered, ‘Y-you let me in. But I thought . . .’
Pointing a stubby thumb towards the room, she asked, ‘You thought the silicon matron in there was my boss?’ She laughed a short, hollow laugh. ‘Who do you think really runs this place? Who do you think has always run everything in this household, before her, before her mother?’
The most sensible retort I could make was, ‘But . . . I . . . but . . .’
‘By the way,’ she continued, ‘I believe this is yours, pointing to the countertop in front of her.
Trying to take in what she was saying, I said absentmindedly, ‘But I didn’t leave a coat . . .’ Then I saw what she was pointing to: a copy of Butlers’ Lives of the Saints!
I greedily snatched up the book and flipped through it. Yes, there it was, an entry in the same handwriting I’d become familiar with. At the sight of it, I blurted out, ‘Oh, thank you so much for the favour you’ve just done me.’
Still unblinking, she said, ‘I’ve haven’t done you any such thing . . . you’ll learn that soon enough. Now I suggest you leave right now, before the rest of the guests realise you’ve left . . . or you’re going to lose more than your underpants.’
‘But . . .’
I stared at her in amazement, ‘how could you possibly know . . . if you’ve been here the whole . . . ?’
‘Your barn door’s open,’ she replied blankly, ‘and your horse is going for a little walk. Perhaps you are as stupid as you look.’
I looked down and quickly zipped up my pants. Then I pulled on my shoe and bolted for the door. I didn’t stop running until I was down the gravel path, beyond the wrought-iron fence and at least ten blocks away from the mansion.
As I ran with the book in my hand, heart beating in my head, I thought now and then I could see something moving in the shadows. But after all I’d imagined that night, I convinced myself it was just my mind playing tricks on itself.
After a few more minutes, I slowed down to a trot and entered some anonymous café and took a table in the back. When the waiter came to take my order, he had to repeat himself several times, because I was already lost deep in thought, reading the following entry under the heading of Saint Perpetuus . . .
Book XI
(Third entry, Lives of the Saints)
Like the cycles of the moon and the tides, Buenos Aires gives the impression of endless continuity.
It makes you think the wide boulevards have always curved around islands of impossibly-ornate French mansions, and these have always been topped with impossibly-ornate cupolas. The Belle Époque is the only period we have ever known—the only period we could ever know—to which we are still connected, albeit by a long, tattered thread of Time.
But things can change, even in Buenos Aires.
Take, for example, Santa Fe Avenue. Walk along it any hour of the day or night, and you’ll see six lanes of homicidal traffic all flowing in one direction towards 9 de Julio. The little voice inside your head says, ‘Traffic on Santa Fe has always gone towards 9 de Julio, and it always will.’
The St Perpetuus Club of Buenos Aires Page 12