Adam in Eden

Chapter 37

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The public debate over the comet continues. The scientist Vizarrón provides us with facts about the history of the phenomenon going back in the West to the Stagirite Aristotle, whose Meteorology is the earliest writing on comets we know of, and who refers to them as “flaming expectations.”

We don’t know whether Aristotle meant not expectation but hope, Father Güemes claims, interrupting the scientist and insisting on giving a spiritual connotation to a physical occurrence. The repeated appearances of the comet are signs of a God angry over some frustrations of His divine plan.

“What does the divine plan have to do with anything,” the man of science responds. “A comet is nothing more than an ordinary and physical manifestation of Newton’s law of universal gravity.”

“How often does a comet appear?” asks the man of God.

“Every seventy-five years.”

“The same comet? And isn’t that proof of a celestial plan?”

“You said it,” concludes the man of science, “a celestial plan, not a divine plan.”

“Aren’t they the same?” the priest says in a (successful) attempt to have the last word.

Texas state troopers are detaining and robbing migrant workers returning to Mexico with their hard-earned dollars as well as those on their way to deposit their money in bank accounts. Police officers detain the migrants and accuse them of working illegally. If a worker asks to be taken to the police station to prove that a) he has a work permit, or that b) he is returning to Mexico and has no intention of coming back, or c) to tell them to complain to his boss and leave him alone, in all cases, d) the police ignore his excuses, they pretend not to understand or not to speak Spanish, and as a last resort, offer f) “Choose: your money or prison.”

“I am not illegal.”

“You sure don’t look legal.”

“All my papers are in order.”

“Your looks are a dead giveaway. Pay up or you’ll regret it!”

The authorities in the state of Guerrero reported the detention of Austrian tourist Leonardo Kakabsa, or Cacasa, accused of murdering young Sofía Gálvez, a sex worker in the colonial city of Taxco. Said Leonardo had been detained a week earlier, accused of murdering another sex worker from Taxco by the name of Sofía Derbez, aka the Can. Faced with the facts related to the death of the so-called Can, the judge ruled that to condemn a young and handsome man like Leonardo for killing a prostitute would only give Taxco a bad name and scare off tourism. Set free, the Austrian citizen Kakabsa soon committed the second crime already mentioned. Detained again, he said that once the sex workers in question had rendered their service, they would laugh at him and at his name, making indecent puns. And worst of all, Kakabsa, or Cacasa, said, what motivated his crime was that both prostitutes had called him “The German,” even though Leonardo was Austrian. This time, the local magistrate had no choice but to condemn him, regretting the damage that his decision would cause to the Taxcan tourist industry. “What is more important?” asked the magistrate, “to punish a criminal or to promote tourism, Taxco’s main source of income?” The answer came from Leonardo or Leonard Kakabsa, or Cacasa, himself, when he said that killing prostitutes had been a habit of his since he was a teenager, impelled by an irrepressible feeling of disgust and a sense of justice. “I have killed and will keep on killing,” said the unclassifiable individual when he was handed over to the authorities of his country in keeping with the extradition treaties between Mexico and Austria.

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When he arrived in Vienna, the said Kakabsa, or Cacasa, asked to be taken to the crypt of the Capuchin Church to kneel before the tomb of Maximilian, the nineteenth-century Habsburg emperor of Mexico, the son of Emperor Franz Karl and the Empress Sophie, descended from a hereditary (and incestuous) line of Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs, Neapolitan Bourbons, and Bavarian Wittelsbachs. Maximilian’s tomb neighbors that of L’Aiglon, the duke of Reichstadt and son of Napoleon with Mary Louise of Austria. When asked about his request, Kakabsa, or Cacasa, explained that his actions in Mexico were simply a form of justice, revenge for the execution by firing squad of Maximilian by the Mexican savages. Viennese authorities, upon examining the individual’s file, reopened two cold cases, both crimes against sex workers named Sophie. Investigations reveal that Leonardo’s mother was also named Sophie. Leonardo, or Leonard, is now under the observation of the renowned psychiatrists (despite the fact that the public calls them Wichtigmacher and Besserwisser, the Important One and the Know It All) of Wahringerstrasse prison.

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An ice cream parlor in las heras, Buenos Aires, near anchorena—

Tomás Eloy Martínez proposes the Kakabsa, or Cacasa, affair as the subject for a novel. Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez interrupts his habitual sobriety with an unexpected, wide, and joyful smile. Kakabsa is not Cacasa; he’s Sacasa. And Ramírez relates that in Nicaragua there lived a compulsive liar crazed by the incest implied by those few family names distributed among so many citizens — why so many Chamorros, Coronels, and Debayles?

It’s not kinship, Sergio explains. In Nicaragua last names are what the names of saints are in other Hispanic countries: they attest to one’s existence, they are proof of baptism. That’s why it is impossible to know if Sacasa was one of the Sacasas or just a compulsive liar and native of El Bluff who first misappropriated a name of the Nicaraguan ruling class to conceal his countless pranks, such as:

Writing fake manuscripts by the poet Rubén Darío and then burning them in public, defying the collective rage of an audience that considers Darío to be Nicaragua’s reason for existing: poor country, rich in poetry. He was imprisoned for disrespect and released soon after.

Demanding that Nicaraguan dictators have their buttocks branded with a hot iron — a gothic D — for two reasons: for them, a sign of distinction; for the public, an identifying letter. Somoza gave Sacasa a taste of his own medicine, or rather a dose of indelible Gentian violet: he had his buttocks branded with an I for imbecile, which Sacasa announced was an I for imperial. Go figure. .

He distributed missals to children with pictures from Playboy inserted between the pages, eliciting jesting giggles during the otherwise stiff mass. The priests confiscated the missals and guarded them jealously in their frocks. Sacasa boasted of perverting not the children with their healthy curiosities, but the priests with their unhealthy repression. He wanted to be known, Ramírez pointed out, as Sacasa the Liberator.

“So,” Tomás Eloy Martínez deduced, “your Sacasa is our Sikasky, a criminal mastermind from Buenos Aires whose mo included the unusual practice of remaining at the scene of the crime, mute and calm, as though he were a simple bystander of the murder that had just been committed and that the police never pinned on him because he never fled. The military dictatorship employed Sikasky as their perfect murderer. The police always accused the crime’s victims while Sikasky climbed the ladder of success, which put him in danger of being caught, because his technique was to be the criminal who was present, visible, and therefore not guilty.”

“But he got away. I came across him having dinner, not so far from here, in Vicente López.”

“Of course he got away. He denounced the criminals of the military regime. And very effectively at that. He gave all the gory details. He sent his bosses to prison.”

“And now, Tomás Eloy.”

“He gazes with great melancholy from his table in front of Recoleta Cemetery and regrets that none of his victims are there, among oligarchs’ tombs built on cows and grain, but they’re all in the La Chacarita cemetery. .”

“La Chacarita, where Carlos Gardel is buried.”

“Sikasky can’t stand the competition.”

“So, tell me, Tomás Eloy, is your Sikasky my Sacasa?”

“Tell me, Sergio, is your Nicaraguan Sacasa the Viennese Kakabsa?”

“Tell me, Tomás Eloy, is the Viennese Kakabsa the Cacasa killer of Mexican whores?”

“Tell me, Sergio, something I’ve always wanted to ask you. Can a reader take on an identity in literature the way an actor can in movies? That man who says he is Domingo Sarmiento is really the actor Enrique Muriño.”

“No, not really, no, Raskolnikov can be Peter Lorre or Pierre Blanchar, but neither Lorre nor Blanchar can be Raskolnikov. They are images. Raskolnikov is word, syllable, name, literature. .”

“We imagine literature and only see cinema?”

“No, not exactly, we give any image we like to literature.”

“But not to cinema?”

“Only when we turn off the light and close our eyes.”

“A dulce-de-leche ice cream.”

“In Argentina, we don’t say cajeta.”

“In her madness, remembering both her husband (whom she always believed to be alive) and the Mexican sweet (which nobody had the charity to bring to her), the Empress Carlota cried out, ‘Max, cajeta.’ ”

“And what does all of this have to do with Adam in Eden, the novel you’re reading?”

“Everything and nothing. The associative mysteries of reading.”

“A need to postpone endings?”

“There is no ending. There is reading. The reader is the ending.”

“The reader recreates or invents the novel?”

“An interesting novel is one that escapes from the writer’s hands. Rather. .”

“Where in the novel are you?”

“In Adam in Eden? The part where Adam Gorozpe and his brother-in-law, Abelardo Holguín, are trading boxing trivia.”

“What do they say?”

“Let me read it to you.

“‘Who established the rules of boxing?’

“‘Jack Broughton in approximately 1747, and the marquis of Queensberry in 1867. .’

“‘Who was the first professional boxer?’

“‘An English Jew by the name of Dan Mendoza. That was before boxing gloves caught on.’

“‘Who was the first to wear gloves?’

“‘The very same Jack Broughton. But it was the English pugilist Jem Mace who popularized gloves.’

“‘On the other hand, John L. Sullivan preferred to fight with his bare fists.’

“‘Socially speaking, what is boxing good for?’

“‘Boxers rise above poverty. From being an ignorant Irishman or a guy out of an Italian-American slum or a black slave. .’

“‘Joe Louis, champion from 1937 to 1949.’

“‘He wound up as a doorman, penniless with cauliflower ears.’

“‘Can we divert social climbing through crime to boxing?’

“‘By way of guerrilla fighters: the Filipino boxing champion of 1923 went by the name Pancho Villa.’

“‘1923: the same year that our Mexican Pancho Villa was murdered.’

“‘Don’t get your hopes up, my dear brother-in-law. When you fight without gloves, don’t move your feet.’ ”