The Seven Madmen

THE WHIP

The ruse Erdosain had thought up and the Astrologer carried out was so successful that the Astrologer decided to hold the first meeting for the “chiefs” to get to know each other on the following Wednesday. On Tuesday afternoon at four, he went to tell Erdosain they would all be meeting in Temperley at nine o’clock the next morning.

He was with Erdosain for a few minutes, and as they were coming out of the house, he suddenly glanced at his watch in panic and said:

“Goodness, it’s four o’clock already, and I’ve got lots of places to visit still … I’ll see you at nine tomorrow … oh, by the way, I was thinking that there’s only one person who could be our Chief of Industry, and that’s you. Anyway, we’ll talk more about it tomorrow … Oh, and don’t forget to present … or rather, don’t forget to prepare a plan to build hydraulic turbines, a simple scheme we could install in the mountains. We’d use it in our colony for the electro-magnetic work we need to do.”

“How many kilowatts?”

“I’ve no idea … that’s your business. Remember, there’ll be electric furnaces … you’ll have to sort it out. The Gold Prospector’s arrived, he can give you more specific details tomorrow. Just make sure you’re prepared when the idea is suggested. Damn, it’s getting late … I’ll see you tomorrow.” He put his hat on, hailed a passing cab, and settled on the back seat.

The next day, as Erdosain walked along the streets of Temperley he was astonished to find that for the first time in many months he felt calm and relaxed.

He strolled along. The tunnels of vegetation he passed through gave him the sense of some titanic, uncontainable effort taking place. He stared with delight at the red gravel paths in the gardens, reaching their scarlet feelers out towards the fields, green baize cloths studded with purple, yellow and red flowers. If he looked up, he could see the watery blue depths of the sky, which made his head spin so much that the heavens suddenly disappeared from his sight, leaving him with a blinding black flash on the retinas of his eyes, before he gradually recovered his sight in a stealthy fluttering of silver atoms, which turned slowly into an image of harsh dry blue slates, like methylene-blue caves. And the sensation of pleasure the morning gave him, this new delight, helped unite the broken shards of his personality, shattered as it had been by all the sufferings that disaster had inflicted on him. He felt as though his body were ready for anything.

The words he kept repeating to himself were: “Augusto Remo Erdosain”, as if simply saying his name gave him a physical pleasure which redoubled the energy the walk had infused in his limbs.

He walked on down the diagonal streets in the shafts of sunlight, rejoicing in the power of his brand-new personality: Chief of Industry. The cool freshness of this botanical stroll filled his mind with great ideas. And this satisfaction helped ground him in the streets, like a doll with lead weights in its shoes. He was thinking of how disdainful he would be at the meeting, and he was gripped by a cold contempt for the weak of this world. The earth belonged to the strong — that was it, to the strong. They would take the world by storm, until they came face-to-face with the imbeciles who stuff their backsides into a chair in every office in every country, while they themselves were armoured in their grandeur like solitary, ruthless emperors. Erdosain again imagined an immense office with glass walls and a round table at its centre.

Papers in hand, pens pushed back behind their ears, his four assistants tiptoed over to consult him, while in a corner the white haired workers’ representatives sat cowed. Then Erdosain turned towards them and simply said: “Either you all go back to work tomorrow or you’ll be shot.” That and nothing more. His orders were brief and softly spoken. His arm ached from signing so many decrees. The voracious appetite of the times kept him going, its need for a tiger’s soul to embellish each day’s end with its quota of bloody executions.

He drew close to the Astrologer’s house, his heart pulsing with renewed enthusiasm, repeating to himself like a haunting refrain Lenin’s phrase: “What kind of a revolution is this if we don’t shoot anyone?”

When he reached the property and was opening the front gate, he saw the Astrologer coming to meet him, dressed as usual in a long grey smock and wearing a straw hat.

The two friends shook hands warmly, and the Astrologer said: “Barsut’s calmed down. I don’t think he’s going to put up too much of a fight about signing the cheque. The others have arrived, but let’s go to see Barsut first. Let them wait, damn it! Can you imagine how I feel? With that money, the world is ours.”

By now they were in the study. The Astrologer was twisting the purple stone on his finger and staring at the map of the United States. He went on: “We shall conquer the earth, we’ll bring our ‘grand idea’ to fruition, we can set up a brothel in San Martin or in Ciudadela, we can establish our colony in the mountains at Los Santos. Who better to take charge of the brothel than the Melancholy Thug? We’ll appoint him our ‘Grand Patriarch of the Brothels’.”

Erdosain went over to the window … the rose bushes gave off a piercing scent, filling the air with a fresh red fragrance like a mountain stream. Bright-winged insects buzzed around the scarlet asterisks in the pomegranate trees. Erdosain stood gazing out for a few moments. The view took him back to the afternoon he had been there in that very same spot. And yet then he had been completely unaware of what the night held in store for him: the shock of Elsa’s departure.

The many shades of green flooded his eyes, but he paid them no attention. In his inner depths what he saw was his wife, her cheek resting against the purple nipples of a square male chest, limp, her eyes rolled back, lips parted to receive the man’s obscene mouth.

A bird crossed his field of vision, and Erdosain turned back to the Astrologer and said, struggling to control his voice: “Do whatever you like.” He sat down, lit a cigarette, and glancing over at the Astrologer, who was busy drawing a circle on a blueprint with a pair of compasses, asked him: “But how will you do it? Will the Melancholy Thug agree to manage the brothels?”

“Yes, that’s no problem, and Barsut isn’t going to put up much of a fight.”

“Is he still in the coachhouse?”

“I thought I’d better hide him. I chained him up in the stables.”

“In the stables?”

“It was the only place I could keep him hidden. And besides, there’s a room up above where the Man Who Saw the Midwife sleeps …”

“What’s that all about?”

“I’ll tell you some day. He saw the midwife and ever since, he can’t sleep at night. And I thought that you …”

“What, it’s going to be me who …?”

“Let me finish. I thought you could go and see Barsut and try to persuade him to sign — explain our ideas to him …”

“What if he won’t sign?”

“Then we’ll have to use force … Naturally I’m against violence, but you can see the spot I’m in. Our idea is so important we can’t let any feelings get in the way — and that’s what you must tell Barsut — tell him we wouldn’t like to find ourselves forced to burn his feet or something worse still — get him to sign the cheque.”

“You’re prepared to go that far?”

“Yes, because we won’t get an opportunity like this again. I was counting on your copper rose invention, but it’s taking time. It’s no good asking the Melancholy Thug for the money. If he hasn’t got it, we’d make him feel bad, and if he does have it but won’t give it us, we’d be losing a friend. The fact that he was generous with you doesn’t mean he would be again with us now. Also, he’s a neurotic who most of the time has no idea if he’s coming or going.”

Erdosain was staring out through the rectangles made by the window frames at the scarlet stains in the tops of the pomegranate trees. A golden strip of sunlight lit the upper half of one wall in the room. A vast sadness overwhelmed his heart. What had he done with his life?

The Astrologer noted how silent he had become, and said: “Look, Erdosain, there’s nothing for it but to risk everything or give up now. That’s the way things are. It’s sad … but what else are we to do? I know it would be much nicer if these things could be done without any sacrifice …”

“The thing is, in this case it’s someone else we’re sacrificing …”

“And ourselves, Erdosain, don’t forget we’re risking prison and sacrificing our freedom for God knows how long. Have you never read Plutarch’s Parallel Lives?”

“No …”

“Well, I’ll lend you the book, then you’ll discover that human life is worth less than a dog’s, if it’s a matter of sacrificing that life to change the direction of society. Can you imagine how many murders it takes for someone like Lenin or Mussolini to triumph? People don’t want to know … why? Because Lenin and Mussolini came out on top. That’s the only thing that matters, that’s what justifies any cause, just or unjust.”

“Who’s going to kill Barsut?”

“Bromberg, the Man Who Saw the Midwife.”

“You didn’t tell me that …”

“There was no reason to, we’d already settled it.”

A wave of fragrance inundated the room. The sound of water dripping into the rainbutt stood out clearly.

“So who exactly knows about this?”

“You, me and Bromberg …”

“Too many people to keep a secret …”

“No, because Bromberg is my slave, and what’s worse, he’s his own slave.”

“That’s all very well, but what I want from you is a signed piece of paper in which you and Bromberg confess to being the perpetrators of the crime.”

“What do you want that for?”

“To make sure you don’t double-cross me.”

The Astrologer absent-mindedly pushed his hat down, then cupped his mongoloid face in his thick fingers, and walked towards the centre of the room, resting his elbow in the palm of his other hand. He took up again:

“I have no problem giving you what you’re asking for, but just remember this. My life is totally devoted to carrying out my idea. Great times are just around the corner. I don’t have the time or the inclination to tell you of all the wonders that are about to happen. There’s no doubt a new age is dawning. Who will see it? The elect. And the day I can find someone to take over once the idea is launched, I’ll retire to the mountains to meditate. Until then, everyone around me owes me complete obedience. That’s something you must understand, if you don’t want to go the same way as Barsut …”

“That’s no way to talk.”

“Yes it is, because I am going to sign the piece of paper you’ve asked me for.”

“I don’t need it …”

“Will you need money?”

“Yes, 2,000 pesos to …”

“I don’t want to know. You’ll get it …”

“And also, I don’t want anything to do with the brothel side of things …”

“Fine, you can look after the accounts; but d’you know what we’re missing as of now? We need to find some vulgar symbol that will rouse the masses …”

“Lucifer.”

“No, that’s a mystical symbol … too intellectual … what we need is something cheap and stupid … something that appeals directly to the senses of the masses, like the black shirt … that devil is a genius, you know. He realised that the Italian people have the psychology of barbers and comic-opera tenors … Anyway, we’ll see … I’ve already had an interesting idea for the different hierarchies in our society … we can talk about it some other day … it might work …”

“The thing is for us to be self-supporting …”

“That goes without saying… the brothels will make money … But, look here, aren’t you going to see Barsut? Have you thought what you’ll say to him?”

“Yes …”

Erdosain went out to the coachhouse, where the stables were. It was a heavy stone building with a lot of empty, rat-infested rooms on the top floor. In one of them lived, or rather slept, the sinister Bromberg, whom Erdosain had seen the day of the kidnapping.

Erdosain realised he was getting ever deeper into something which was bound to ruin his life in ways he could not even imagine, and this realisation, coupled with his complete lack of enthusiasm for the Astrologer’s plans, gave him the feeling of play-acting, of deliberately creating this absurd situation. “Everything had failed in me,” he was to tell me later; and yet he overcame his fatigue and his indifference and carried on towards the coachhouse. His heart was pounding at the thought of “meeting the enemy”. He furrowed his brow and his anger showed plainly on his face.

He undid the padlock, loosened the chain, and with a sudden surge of curiosity slid back one of the sliding doors. Barsut was sitting in his undershirt, about to eat, in a circle of yellow light cast on to a pine table by a kerosene lamp.

Above him hung the metal triangle of a feeding-rack in a wooden horse stall. When he saw Erdosain scowling at him, he paused in the act of pouring oil on to a plate of cold meat and potatoes, but then, without a word to show his surprise, immersed himself once again in his nutritious task. He stretched out, took a pinch of salt between his fingers, and sprinkled it on the potatoes. He kept an air of studied composure even though his black armpit was clearly visible through a hole in the red undershirt.

The way Barsut stared intently down at the meat showed he placed far more importance on his meal than on Erdosain, who was standing only a few paces from him. The rest of the stable was in darkness. Shafts of sunlight slanted down through chinks in the walls, tracing porous gold discs in the dust of the floor.

Barsut would not deign to look up. He steadied the loaf of bread on the table, hacked off a piece, and poured himself some soda water, first carefully squirting some on to the ground to clean the nozzle. Then he bent over still further to read a paperback by the side of his plate, while he chewed on a mouthful of meat, bread and potatoes.

Suddenly sickened by the smell of hay, Erdosain leant against a pillar holding up the roof. He peered through narrowed eyes at Barsut, half of whose face was dimly lit by the green glow from outside, while his moving jaws stood out in the harsh lamplight. It was then Erdosain noticed a whip hanging from the wall.

Erdosain started at the sight. It had a long butt and a short lash. Following his gaze, Barsut curled his lip derisively. Erdosain looked first at the whip, then at the prisoner, and a smile spread across his face. He went over to the corner and unhooked the whip. Suddenly Barsut was on his feet, his body straining out of the box, as he stared wildly at him. The veins bulged in his neck. He was about to speak, but his pride kept him from saying a word. A sharp crack rang out. Erdosain had snapped the whip against the wooden partition to see how supple the leather was. But then he merely shrugged his shoulders, and a streak of black flashed across the rays slanting down through the darkness, as the whip fell on to the hay.

Erdosain walked silently up and down the stable. He thought of the life he was holding in his hands, but the feeling made him no happier. Above the stall partition, Barsut was gazing through the open front door at the sunlit field outside.

Things had changed. That was all there was to it. Erdosain stared angrily at Barsut and asked: “Are you going to sign the cheque or not?”

Barsut shrugged; Erdosain did not repeat his question. Perhaps one day at this very same hour he would find himself in some dark cell where suddenly like Barsut his memory would conjure up the scene of a red clay court by a riverside, the sky framed through the strings of young girls’ tennis racquets. He was unable to prevent himself shouting out, more to himself than to Barsut:

“D’you remember? You said I looked like an idiot? Don’t say a word. You had no idea how much I was suffering. Neither you nor her. The fact is, I am sad. It’s you and her who have got me into all this. I don’t even know why I’m talking to you. All I know is I’m so weary. What’s the point …”

He was about to leave the stable when the Astrologer appeared. Barsut glanced anxiously at his hands; the Astrologer settled his hat on the back of his head, took the lamp, blew it out, and sat down on a trunk. He began:

“I came to see you to sort out the cheque business. You must know that’s why we kidnapped you. Of course, I wouldn’t be talking to you like this if it weren’t for the fact that in a notebook we found in your pocket — which I prevented Erdosain from burning¹ — I read a simply amazing thought: ‘Money makes a god of man. Therefore Ford is a god. And if he is a god, he can destroy the moon.’”

It was a complete fabrication, but Barsut did not react.

Erdosain was studying the Astrologer’s impenetrable oblong face. It was obvious he was putting on an act, and that Barsut was not taken in by it, convinced he was being duped.

THE ASTROLOGER’S SPEECH

The Astrologer went on:

“At first, I thought that observation of yours was just another of the pathetic remarks scattered throughout your jottings … and yet in the end, despite myself, I began to wonder why money can make a god of a man, and suddenly I realised you had hit upon a fundamental truth. And do you know how I could prove you were right? Because I thought that thanks to his fortune Henry Ford would be able to buy enough explosives to blow up a planet such as the moon. So your proposition was correct.”

“Of course,” growled Barsut, secretly pleased at the praise.

“And then I realised that not only the entire classical world, but writers of every age — except for yourself, who had stumbled on that truth without knowing how to take advantage of it — all of them had been unable to realise that men like Ford, Rockefeller or Morgan were capable of destroying the moon … that they had the power to do so … a power which, as I say, many mythologies attribute to a creator god. So, unknowingly, you were laying the foundation for the realm of the superman.”

Barsut turned to observe the Astrologer. Erdosain realised he was speaking seriously.

“So, when I understood that thanks to the power money gave them, Morgan, Rockefeller or Ford were like gods, I also understood that social revolution would be impossible here on earth, because a Rockefeller or a Morgan could wipe out a race with a snap of their fingers, just as you trample on an ant-hill in your garden.”

“So long as they had the courage to do it.”

“The courage? What I was wondering was whether a god could renounce his powers … if copper kings or oil barons would ever allow themselves to be stripped of their fleets, mountains, their gold or their wells. I saw that for this to happen they would need to be as spiritual as a Buddha or a Christ … and that gods like these who had all the power would never accept being dispossessed. For that, something truly extraordinary would need to happen.”

“I don’t follow you … I jotted that idea down for completely different reasons.”

“That doesn’t matter. The extraordinary thing is this: humanity, masses all over the earth, have lost their faith. I don’t mean the Catholic faith. I mean all religious belief. So men are bound to say to themselves: ‘What are our lives for?’ Once science has extinguished all faith, nobody will want to go on with a purely mechanical existence. And the moment that this phenomenon occurs, an incurable plague will return to the earth … the plague of suicide … Can you picture a world of desperate people, their brains shrivelled, lost in the caverns of our gigantic cities, wailing at the foot of concrete walls: ‘What have they done to our God?’ And young girls and schoolkids organising secret societies where they practise the sport of suicide? Or men refusing to have any children, despite Berthelot’s naive prediction that they could all be fed with synthetic pills?”

“That sounds a bit far-fetched,” said Erdosain.

The Astrologer turned towards him in amazement. He had completely forgotten his existence.

“Of course, none of this will happen until mankind discovers the source of its unhappiness. That’s what went wrong with the revolutionary movements based on economics. Judaism sniffed at the world’s debit and credit entries and concluded: ‘Happiness is bankrupt because mankind lacks the wherewithal to meet its needs …’ whereas the true conclusion is that ‘happiness is bankrupt because mankind lacks gods and faith’.”

“Now you’re contradicting yourself! You said before that …” protested Erdosain.

“Be quiet: what d’you know anyway? So then I realised that this was the dreadful metaphysical sickness everyone is suffering from. Man’s happiness depends on a metaphysical lie … if you deprive him of that lie, he will turn to economic illusions … and then it came to me that the only ones who could restore man’s lost paradise were the flesh and blood gods: Rockefeller, Morgan, Ford … so I thought up a plan which might seem far-fetched to an inferior mind … I saw that there was only one way out of the blind alley of social reality … and that was to take a step backwards.”

Barsut was now sitting on the edge of the table, his arms folded.

His green eyes were fixed on the Astrologer who, with his smock buttoned up to his throat and his unkempt hair waving freely, was pacing up and down the coachhouse, absent-mindedly pushing aside the bunches of hay strewn on the floor with the toe of his boot. Erdosain was still leaning against the post. He studied Barsut’s face, watching as an ironic, almost malevolent look crept over it, as if the Astrologer’s words were worthy only of contempt. The Astrologer would walk, come to a halt and tug at his own hair as if he were listening to himself speak. He went on:

“Yes, a moment will come when unbelieving mankind, driven wild by all its pleasures, blasphemous in its impotence, will be driven so far out of its mind that it will have to be put down like a mad dog …”

“What are you saying?”

“It will be like pruning the human tree … a harvest which only those millionaires, with science at their service, will be able to carry out. Sickened by reality, and no longer believing in science as a source of happiness, these gods — with their cohorts of tiger-slaves — will cause appalling disasters, let loose catastrophic plagues … for several decades, the task of the supermen and their slaves will be to destroy mankind in a thousand ways until the whole world is almost consumed … and only a remainder, a tiny remainder will be set apart on some small island — and they will serve to build the foundations of a new society.”

Barsut had stood up. Hands stuffed in his trouser pockets, he glared at the Astrologer, then shrugged and asked: “Can it really be that you believe in all this nonsense?”

“No, it’s not nonsense — I myself would do it, if only to amuse myself.”

And he continued: “Anyway, the main thing is there are enough unfortunates who will believe it … but my idea is this: there will be two castes in this new society, with a gap between them … or rather, an intellectual void of some thirty centuries between the two. The majority will live carefully kept in the most complete ignorance, surrounded by apocryphal miracles, which are far more interesting than the historical kind, while the minority will be the ones who have access to science and power. That is how happiness will be guaranteed for the majority, because the people of this caste will be in touch with the divine world, which today they are lacking. The minority will administer the herd’s pleasures and miracles, and the golden age, the age in which angels roam along paths at twilight and gods are seen by moonlight, will come to pass.”

“But that’s a monstrous idea. It could never happen.”

“Why not? Oh, I know it couldn’t happen, but we have to proceed as if it were possible.”

“Everything is upside down … and science …”

“To hell with science! Have you any idea what its purpose is? And didn’t you make fun of geniuses in your notebook and say they were ‘infatuated with all that’s transient’?”

“I see you’ve had a good read of my rubbish.”

“Of course. And you shouldn’t contradict people just for the sake of it. As for your saying that everything is hopelessly upside down in my society, it’s the same in present society, but in the opposite sense. Our knowledge — by which I mean our metaphysical lies, is still in its infancy, while science is a giant … and man, poor suffering creature, has to bear the burden of this dreadful imbalance … on the one hand he knows everything; on the other, nothing. In my society, metaphysical lies, intimate acquaintance with a god of marvels, will be the goal, while everything represented by the science of things — useless for inner happiness — will be nothing more than a means of domination in our hands. Don’t let’s argue about that, there’s no point. Man has invented almost everything, but he hasn’t found any guiding principles for government better than the teachings of a Christ or a Buddha. No. Naturally, I won’t question the right to be sceptical about this, but scepticism is a luxury for the minority … we’ll offer the rest a well-cooked happiness, and humanity will gorge itself on this divine pigswill.”

“You think you can actually bring this off?”

The Astrologer paused for a moment. He twisted the steel ring with the purple stone off his finger and peered inside it; then he leant over towards Barsut, but with a distant look as if his mind was far from the reality he found himself in, and began again:

“Yes, everything that man’s mind can imagine is achievable given time. Hasn’t Mussolini already introduced religion into all Italian schools? That’s just one example of how effective the stick across the back is to bring people into line. The essential thing is to capture the soul of a generation … the rest is plain sailing.”

“What about your grand idea?”

“I was coming to that … My plan is to found a secret society that would not only spread my ideas, but serve as a school for future kings of men. I know you’ll say there have been lots of secret societies in the past … and it’s true … they all failed because they weren’t based on solid foundations, they relied on emotion, a political or religious illusion, without taking into account any concrete reality. Our society, on the other hand, will be based on a solid, modern concept: industrialism. In other words, it may have its fantastic side, if that’s how you want to describe what I’ve been talking about, but it will also have industry as its solid foundation, and that is how we will strike gold.”

His voice had taken on a sharper edge. A violent spasm gave his face a cross-eyed look. He moved his grizzled head from side to side, as though the pressure of extraordinary emotion was pounding in his brain. He rested his hands on the small of his back, started to pace up and down again, and went on:

“Ah, yes, gold … gold … Do you know what the ancient Germans used to call it? Red gold … gold … D’you follow me? Don’t say a word, Satan. Do you realise that never once has a secret society tried such a combination? Money will be what binds it together, gives the ideas the weight and violence needed to draw people to it. We will aim above all at youngsters, because they are more stupid and more easily carried away. We’ll promise them the kingdom of this world and the triumph of love … we’ll promise them everything … d’you follow me? We’ll give them shiny uniforms, splendid tunics … capes with plumes of every colour … sparkling jewels … different levels of initiation with resounding names, hierarchies … in the mountains we’ll build a cardboard temple, and use it to shoot a film … No. Once we’ve triumphed we’ll build a temple of seven gold doors … it will have pink marble columns and the paths leading to it will be lined with copper shavings. And all around it we’ll create gardens … the whole of mankind will come to adore the living god we’ve invented.”

“But what about the money for all this … how many millions …?”

The more the Astrologer spoke, the more his enthusiasm rubbed off on Erdosain. He had forgotten about Barsut, although he was standing right next to him. Despite himself, he conjured up the possibility of a new world. Mankind would live a perpetual happy ritual of simplicity; strontium beams would fill the night sky with showers of red stars, an angel with verdigris wings would perch atop a cloud, while down below men and women dressed in white tunics would glide beneath arches of vegetation, their hearts cleansed of the filth that was choking his. He closed his eyes, and Elsa’s face swam into his memory, but before he could capture its resonance, the Astrologer’s voice boomed out with this ferocious reply:

“So you want to know where we’ll get the millions from? That’s easy. We’ll organise brothels. The Melancholy Thug will be the Grand Patriarch of the Brothels … every member of the lodge will have a direct interest in all our businesses … we’ll become usurers, we’ll take advantage of women, children, workers, the countryside, madmen. In the mountains … down in Campo Chileno … we’ll pan for gold, we’ll use electricity to help us mine ore. Erdosain has already designed a 500-horsepower turbine. We’ll produce nitric acid by concentrating nitrogen from the atmosphere with a spinning electric arc system; we’ll use hydroelectric power to produce iron, copper and aluminium. D’you follow me? We’ll dupe the workers into going there, and we’ll use the whip to finish off those who refuse to work in the mines. Isn’t that what happens right now in the Gran Chaco, in the tea, rubber and coffee plantations, in the tin mines? We’ll put up an electrified wire fence all round our property, and we’ll buy off all the cops and inspectors of Patagonia with juicy bribes. The thing is to get started. The Gold Prospector’s already here. He found placers of gold when he was travelling through Campo Chileno with a prostitute known as the Mask. We have to get started, that’s all. For the farce of our living god we’ll choose an adolescent … or better still, we could raise an exceptionally beautiful child, educate him to play the role of god. We’ll talk about him … he’ll be talked about everywhere, but with an air of mystery, so that his prestige will grow and grow in people’s minds. Can you imagine what all the fools of Buenos Aires will say when they get wind of the rumour that in the remote mountains of Chubut there’s an adolescent god living in an inaccessible gold and marble temple … a wondrous youth who performs miracles?”

“Your nonsense is interesting, d’you know that?”

“Nonsense? Didn’t people believe in the existence of the plesiosaur a drunken Englishman discovered, the only man in Neuquén the police wouldn’t give a gun licence to because he was such a dreadful shot? … Didn’t people in Buenos Aires believe in the supernatural powers of that Brazilian charlatan who claimed he could cure Orfilia Rico’s paralysis? And if ever there was an unworthy, grotesque spectacle without an ounce of imagination, that was it. Yet didn’t countless idiots weep their eyes out when that trickster held her arm up in triumph, though the girl’s as crippled as ever? It just goes to show that the people of this and every generation have an absolute need to believe in something. And if we can get a newspaper to back us, we can perform miracles. There are lots of them desperate for something sensational like this to sell. And we’ll supply all these people hungry for marvels with a magnificent god, embellished with stories we can copy from the Bible … Now, there’s an idea: we can announce that our youngster is the Messiah the Jews have prophesied … I’ll have to think more about that … we can have photos taken of the god of the jungle … we could make a film with our cardboard temple in the middle of the jungle, and show the god talking to the spirit of the earth.”

“But are you a complete cynic, or a madman?”

Erdosain cast a disgusted glance at Barsut. How could he be so stupid and unreceptive to the beauty of the Astrologer’s plans? He thought to himself: “This wild beast is jealous of his magnificent madness. That’s what it is. He’s going to have to be killed.”

“I’m both. We’ll choose someone in between Krishnamurti and Rudolph Valentino, but more mystical: a child whose strange features symbolise all the world’s suffering. Our films will be shown in the poor districts, in the shanty towns. Can you imagine the impact on the lumpen of the sight of this pale god resurrecting a dead man, or of someone like the archangel Gabriel watching over the gold-mining works, or the metal shipments? Not to mention the alluring prostitutes just waiting to give themselves to the first poor unfortunate who arrives? We’ll be flooded with requests to go and work in the King of the World’s lost city and enjoy the delights of free love … out of all that riff-raff we’ll choose the least educated … and once we’ve got them down there, we’ll thrash all the spirit out of them and force them to work twenty hours a day panning gold.”

“I thought you were on the side of the workers.”

“When I talk to one of them, I’ll be a Red. But now I’m talking to you, and I’m telling you: my secret society is inspired by one organised at the start of the ninth century by a bandit called Abdala-Abn-Maimum. Of course, he didn’t have the industrial element I’m adding to mine, which will guarantee its success. Maimum wanted to bring together the free-thinkers, aristocrats and believers from two such disparate races as the Persians and Arabs in a sect that he built on a hierarchy of initiation and mystery. They told the most barefaced lies to everyone. They promised the Jews the Messiah would come, the Christians the arrival of the Paraclete, the Moslems that of the Mahdi … and they did it to such good effect that a throng of people with widely different opinions, social backgrounds and beliefs, ended up working for an organisation whose real aim was known to only a select few. In this way, Maimum hoped to rule the whole world of Islam. Permit me to tell you that the leaders of the movement were incredible cynics, who believed in absolutely nothing. We’ll follow their example. We’ll be bolsheviks, Catholics, fascists, atheists or militarists, depending on the level of initiation.”

“You’re the most shameless swindler I’ve ever met … If it worked …”

Barsut felt a strange satisfaction at insulting the Astrologer. The fact was he could not admit he was in any way inferior to him. Moreover, there was something he found deeply humiliating, however absurd it might seem, and that was the shocking fact that Erdosain could have become the close friend of someone of this calibre. He said to himself: “How can it be that this idiot is a friend of someone like him?” That was why he was convinced that he was right always to contradict the Astrologer.

“It will work, because gold is the lure. The success of our organisation will be judged by the profits our businesses generate. One source of income will be the brothels. Erdosain has invented a machine to enable us to check how many clients each girl has every day. Then there are the donations, and a new industry we’re hoping to launch: manufacturing copper roses, another of Erdosain’s inventions. Perhaps now you can understand why we kidnapped you.”

“What good is that if I’m your prisoner?”

At that moment, Erdosain suddenly thought how strange it was that Barsut never once threatened the Astrologer with revenge if he ever managed to get free. This led him to say to himself: “We have to be very careful with this Judas, he’s capable of selling us not for pieces of silver, but out of jealousy.”

The Astrologer went on:

“Your money will enable us to set up a brothel, organise our first expedition and buy tools, install a telegraph office, and whatever else we need for the gold panning.”

“And you won’t admit the possibility of failure?”

“Yes, I will … but I’ll go on as if there were no doubt. Besides, a secret society is like a huge steam engine. The steam it produces can just as easily move a crane as a ventilator.”

“But what is it you want to move?”

“A mountain of inert flesh. We, the select few, want — need — all the marvellous earthly powers. We’ll consider ourselves fortunate if through our atrocities we can terrorise the weak and arouse the strong. To do that we need to build our own strength, to revolutionise awareness, exalt barbarity. And the immense mysterious power that can set all this in motion is our secret organisation. We’ll bring back the Inquisition, we’ll burn all those who don’t believe in God at the stake. How can it be that people haven’t realised how extraordinarily beautiful it is to burn someone alive? And for not believing in God, d’you get that, for not believing in God! Can’t you see that it’s necessary, absolutely necessary, for a dark, awe-inspiring religion to take hold of men’s hearts once more? For everyone to fall on their knees as a saint passes by, or for the prayers of the humblest of priests to bring about a miracle in the evening sky? Ah, if only you knew how often I’ve dreamt of this! And what gives me hope is knowing how the progress and misery of this century of ours have knocked so many people off balance. And all those eccentrics who can’t find their way in society are so much wasted energy. Put together two simpletons and a cynic in even the most down-and-out local café and you’ve got three geniuses. These geniuses don’t work, they don’t produce anything … I agree with you, they’re no more than tinsel geniuses … but that tinsel represents an energy we can channel into creating the basis for a new and powerful movement. Those are the tools I intend to use.”

“So you’ll be a manager of madmen.”

“That’s it exactly. I want to be a manager of madmen, of all the countless apocryphal geniuses, of all the crazy people who can’t find a place in spiritualist or bolshevik groups … all the lunatics … and I’m telling you this because I have plenty of experience of them … if they’re properly duped, and their passions aroused, they’re capable of doing things that would make your hair stand on end. All the coffee-bar intellectuals. All the backyard inventors, parish prophets, café politicians, the social club philosophers: they’re the ones who’ll be the cannon fodder of our secret society.”

Erdosain smiled. Then, without looking at their chained prisoner, he said: “You’ve no idea how insufferably arrogant all those bordering on genius can be …”

“Yes, until they’re properly understood, isn’t that right, Barsut?”

“I’m not interested.”

“But you should be, because you’re going to be one of us. This is what I think. Tell one of these borderline people outright that he’s not a genius, and he heaps all the insolence and crassness of someone who’s misunderstood on your head. But if you systematically flatter these self-obsessed monsters, then that same person who would have murdered you at the slightest excuse becomes your willing slave. All you have to do is feed him a grandiose lie in proper doses. Then, inventor or poet, he’ll do all you ask of him.”

“So you think you’re a genius too?” growled Barsut.

“Yes, I do, of course … but only for five minutes a day … though the truth is, it doesn’t bother me that much. Words don’t matter to those born to act. It’s all the borderline people who get puffed up with empty phrases. I have set myself this conundrum, which has nothing to do with my own intellectual capacities: can mankind be happy? And the first people I am approaching for an answer are these malcontents. As a goal, I offer them a lie which will bring them happiness by inflating their vanity … so those same poor devils who, left to their own devices, would be nothing more than objects of pity, will become the precious raw material we use to produce power … steam …”

“You’re getting off the point. I was asking what your motives were for wanting to organise this secret society of yours.”

“That’s a stupid question. Why did Einstein invent his theory? The world can do without his relativity. How can I know whether or not I’m an instrument in the hands of higher powers, which I don’t believe in at all? I haven’t the faintest idea. The world is a mystery. I may be nothing more than the hand-servant, the slave preparing the perfect abode where the Chosen One, the Saint, will come to die.”

Barsut smiled faintly. To hear this man with his cauliflower ear, his unkempt mane of hair and his carpenter’s smock talking of the Chosen One produced a strange sense of contempt in him. How far was this clown putting it all on? But the strangest thing of all was that he was not angry: the feeling the Astrologer produced in him was something else, as if what he was saying were no surprise, as if he had heard it all before, in exactly the same tone of voice, on some remote occasion lost in the dim grey contours of a dream.

The Astrologer’s tone became less exalted.

“Believe me, this is what always happens in times of uncertainty and disorientation. A few people somehow foresee that something extraordinary is about to happen … And these people with intuition, this club of seers — of which I count myself a member — feel the need to arouse humanity’s awareness … to do something, even if it turns out to be merely ridiculous. In my case, that something is my secret society. Good God! Does anyone have any real idea of the consequences of his actions? When I think I’m about to set in motion a whole world of puppets … puppets that will go forth and multiply … I shudder in terror. It even occurs to me that what might happen is as far removed from what I intend as the disasters committed by an electrician who suddenly goes berserk at his controls are from the wishes of the factory owner. But in spite of that I feel the pressing need to set everything in motion, to bring together the disparate energies of a hundred diverse psychologies, to harmonise them by playing on egotism, vanity, passions and illusions, to make a lie the foundation of this effort, and to make gold its reality … red gold …”

“All you say is true … you’re bound to succeed.”

“So, what do you want from me?” Barsut countered.

“I told you before. I want you to sign a cheque for 17,000 pesos. That will leave you 3,000, to do what the hell you like with. We’ll pay you back the rest in monthly instalments out of what we make from the brothels and the gold mining.”

“And I’ll get out of here?”

“Just as soon as we cash the cheque.”

“What proof do I have you’re telling the truth?”

“Certain things can’t be proved … but if you want proof, let me simply say that if you refuse to sign the cheque, I’ll have you tortured by the Man Who Saw the Midwife, and once he’s forced you to sign, I’ll kill you …”

Barsut raised his washed-out eyes; covered in a three-day beard, his face looked as if it were enveloped in a copper mist. Kill him! The words had no effect on him. At that moment, they meant nothing. Besides, life was of so little importance … for a long time he had been expecting some kind of disaster, and now it had happened; but instead of feeling overwhelmed by terror, he discovered in himself an indifference that left him shrugging his shoulders at whatever fate might hold in store. The Astrologer continued:

“But I wouldn’t want things to go that far … what I want is for you to help us … for you to take an interest in our projects. Believe me, we’re living in terrible times. The person who can find the lie the masses need will be King of this World. Everyone is a prey to anxiety … no-one is happy with Catholicism, but Buddhism isn’t suited to our temperament, because we’re so corrupted by the need for pleasure. Perhaps we should be talking of Lucifer and the Evening Star. You can add on all the poetry our dreams need, and we can target young people … oh, it’s such a great idea, so great …”

The Astrologer collapsed on to the trunk. The speech had exhausted him. He wiped the sweat from his brow with a rough check handkerchief. The three of them sat in silence for a moment.

All of a sudden Barsut said: “Yes, you’re right, it is a great idea. Untie me, and I’ll sign your cheque for you.” He thought the Astrologer’s speech had been so much hot air, and this almost led to his downfall.

The Astrologer stood up, protesting:

“No, I’ll set you free once we’ve cashed the cheque. Today is Wednesday. You could be free by midday tomorrow, but you’ll only be able to leave our house in two months” — he was saying this because he realised the other man did not believe in any of his plans — “Do you need anything this afternoon?”

“No.”

“OK, see you later.”

“But … you can’t go just like that … stay a while …”

“No. I’m tired. I need to take a nap. I’ll come back tonight and we can talk some more. Do you want any cigarettes?” “Yes.” The two of them left the stables. Barsut lay down on his bed of hay. He lit a cigarette and blew out some smoke. As it rose, a slanting beam of sunlight picked it out in luminous steel-blue rings. Now he was alone, his thoughts fell neatly into place, and he said to himself:

“Why not give ‘that fellow’ a helping hand? His plan for a revolutionary camp is interesting, and now I understand why that cretin Erdosain is so taken with him. Of course, it’ll mean I’m out on the street — maybe so, maybe not … but I always knew it had to come to an end one way or another.” He closed his eyes to muse on the future.

His hat pulled down over his face, the Astrologer turned to Erdosain as they walked along, and said: “Barsut reckons he’s pulling the wool over our eyes. Tomorrow after he signs the cheque we’ll have to kill him …”

“No: you’ll have to kill him …”

“That’s fine by me … we’ve no other choice. Once he were free, he’d turn us in to the police. And he thinks we’re the crazy ones! We would be if we let him live.”

They came to a halt close to the house. Up in the blue heavens, the jagged edge of chocolate-coloured clouds pushed rapidly across the sky.

“Who’s going to do it?”

“The Man Who Saw the Midwife.”

“You know, it’s no easy thing to die with summer just around the corner.”

“That’s true enough …”

“What about the cheque?”

“You can cash it.”

“Aren’t you afraid I might run off with the money?”

“Not for the moment, no.”

“Why?”

“Just because. Because you more than anyone need our secret society to succeed — to save you from boredom. That’s why you’re going along with me in this … out of boredom, and anxiety.”

“You may be right. What time shall we meet tomorrow?”

“Let’s see … at nine in the station. I’ll bring you the cheque. By the way, have you got any identity papers?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, nothing can go wrong. Ah, just one thing. I advise you to be brief and calm when you speak in the meeting.”

“Are they all here?”

“Yes.”

“The Gold Prospector as well?”

“Yes.”

The two men pushed their way through the branches and made for the summer-house. This was an open construction of latticed wood, into which shoots from a honeysuckle bush pushed their purple and white clusters.

THE FARCE

As the two of them entered, the circle of men inside stood up. Erdosain halted in amazement when he saw that one was an army officer in a major’s uniform.

Apart from the Major, the Gold Prospector, Haffner, and someone he did not know were also present. Haffner had his elbows on a table, and was scanning some scribbled sheets of paper, while the Gold Prospector pored over a map opposite him. A rough stone placed on top of the sheet stopped the breeze blowing it away. The Thug shook Erdosain’s hand, and he sat down next to him, still staring at the Major, who had immediately aroused his curiosity. The Astrologer certainly was a master of surprises.

Yet the newcomer did not give him a favourable impression. He was a tall, pale-faced man with jet-black eyes. What disturbed Erdosain was the way his lower lip seemed constantly curled in a disdainful sneer, and the three creases where his long, hooked nose met his forehead. A silken moustache covered his red lips, and after being introduced he scarcely seemed to give Erdosain more than a cursory glance before he sank down on to a hammock, leaning back against a post with his sword between his knees and a lock of hair plastered to his flat forehead.

For a few minutes, none of them spoke, as they observed each other uneasily. Sitting close to the entrance to the summer-house, the Astrologer lit a cigarette and weighed up the men he was to call his “chiefs”. All at once he lifted his head and, taking in the five men sitting round the table, began to speak:

“I don’t see any point in repeating what we all know already and have agreed on in individual meetings … that is, the plan to organise a secret society to be paid for out of both moral and immoral ventures. We are all in agreement on that, aren’t we? What do you think (I have a liking for geometry) if we call the groups of our society ‘cells’?”

“That’s what they’re called in Russia,” said the Major. “And those in any one cell should not know the members of any other.”

“What … the leaders wouldn’t know each other?”

“No, the ones who would not know each other are not the leaders, but the members.”

The Gold Prospector butted in:

“That would make things impossible. If that’s so, what links the members of the different cells?”

“But it’s the six of us who are the links of the society.”

“No, sir … it’s me who is the society,” the Astrologer objected. “But to be serious, I would say that all the members make up the society … apart from a few restrictions concerning myself.”

The Major wanted his say:

“I think this discussion is pointless, because as I see it there will be a perfectly well worked-out system of promotion. And each promotion will bring a cell member into contact with a new leader. There will be as many promotions as there are cell leaders.”

“How many cells are there at the moment anyway?”

“Four. I’ll be in overall charge,” the Astrologer went on: “You, Erdosain, will be our Industrial Chief; the Gold Prospector” — a young man sitting at the corner of the table nodded in acknowledgement — “will be in charge of our camps and mining operations; the Major here will be responsible for spreading our society in the army; and Haffner will be the Chief of Brothels.”

Haffner stood up to protest:

“I beg your pardon, but I’m not going to be chief of anything. The fact that I’m here has no special significance. I’m simply doing you a favour by drawing up a budget for the brothels. If you’re not happy with that, I’ll leave.”

“No, stay,” the Astrologer apologised. The Melancholy Thug sat down and went back to doodling with a pencil. Erdosain could not help admiring his arrogance.

There was no doubt however that it was the Major who was the centre of everyone’s attention, due to the prestige of his uniform and the remarkable fact of his being there at all.

The Gold Prospector turned to him: “So what brings you here? Are you hoping to spread our secret society among the army?”

Everyone sat upright in their chairs. This was the big surprise of their meeting, the coup de théatre planned in silence. Beyond a shadow of doubt, the Astrologer had what it took to be a leader. The only shame was that he kept the workings of his mind such a secret. But Erdosain felt proud to be associated with him. Everyone was leaning forward in their seats to hear what the Major had to say. The Major studied the Astrologer’s face, then began:

“Gentlemen, I have carefully weighed what I am about to say. Otherwise I would not be here. This is the position: our army is full of disgruntled officers. There is no point going over the reasons for this; they would be of no interest to you. Ideas of a ‘dictatorship’ and the recent political and military events in both Spain and Chile have led many of my colleagues to think that our country might also be fertile ground for such a dictatorship.” His listeners’ jaws dropped in utter astonishment. What they were hearing was completely unexpected.

The Gold Prospector wanted to know:

“So you think then that the Argentine army … I mean, its officers, would be open to our ideas?”

“Of course they would … provided you can present them properly. I can tell you from the outset that far more officers than you would think possible are fed up with democratic theories, parliament included. No, don’t interrupt me. Ninety per cent of the parliamentarians in our country could not match an army lieutenant in terms of education and culture. Accused of participating in the murder of a governor, one politician hit the nail on the head when he replied: ‘to govern a nation requires no more skills than those of a ranch foreman.’ What he said is true of all Latin America.”

The Astrologer sat rubbing his hands with obvious glee.

The Major looked at each of them, then went on:

“The army is a superior state within an inferior society, since by definition we are the country’s strength. And yet we are subject to the government’s resolutions … but what exactly is the government? … the legislative and executive powers … in other words, people chosen by rag-tag political parties … and what representatives they are, my friends! You know better than I that to get into parliament you need to have made a career of lying, starting out as a malingerer in committees, then doing deals and communing with shysters of every description: in short, a life beyond the bounds of the law and the truth. I’ve no idea if the same happens in more civilised countries, but that’s the way it is here. In our congress and senate there are members accused of usury and murder, rogues in the pay of foreign companies — people of such crass ignorance that the parliamentary system here is the most grotesque farce ever to have sullied the life of a nation. The presidential elections are funded by United States capital, on the basis of promises to grant concessions to firms which want to exploit our national riches. I am not exaggerating when I say that in this country of ours, the contest between the political parties is no more than a squabble between salesmen vying to sell the nation to the highest bidder.”²

They all sat gaping open-mouthed at the Major. Beyond the wooden lattices and the clusters of honeysuckle the morning sky was a bright blue, but not one of them noticed. Later, Erdosain confided in me that none of those present at that Wednesday meeting had been expecting anything half so sensational. The Major dabbed his lips with a handkerchief and went on:

“I’m glad my words have struck a chord. There are a lot of young officers who think as I do, and even some recently appointed generals … what you must do — and don’t be surprised by what I am about to say — is to give the society a completely communist slant. I’m saying this because there’s no such thing as communism in Argentina — I wouldn’t describe a bunch of carpenters talking sociological nonsense in some hall where nobody takes their hats off as communists. I’d like to explain my ideas to you as clearly as possible. Every secret society is like a cancer in the community. Its mysterious processes upset the proper functioning of its host. Well … we cell leaders must make sure that those processes are entirely bolshevik” — this was the first time that the word had been uttered in the meeting, and despite themselves, everyone glanced at each other nervously — “This will attract a lot of crackpots, and help the cells proliferate. That way we can create a fictitious revolutionary force. We’ll specialise in terrorist attacks. Even a half-successful one brings out all the dark, ferocious forces in society. If we repeat the attacks over a year, accompanying them with anti-social leaflets inciting the proletariat to set up ‘soviets’ … do you know what we will have achieved? Something as striking as it is simple. We’ll have created a state of revolutionary agitation.

“I’d define this ‘revolutionary agitation’ as a kind of collective unrest, incapable of finding its true goal: everyone is on edge, their passions aroused; the newspapers stir things up still further, and the police add their bit by arresting innocent people who become revolutionaries after all they suffer at their hands; everyone wakes up in the morning anxious for the latest news, hoping to hear of an even more terrifying act of terror than before, which would confirm their worst suspicions; police brutality only further inflames the anger of those who suffer it, until some hot-head empties his pistol into a cop’s chest. The workers’ organisations start to react and declare strikes; the words ‘revolution’ and ‘bolshevism’ spread fear and hope everywhere. Then, when a whole series of bombs have gone off all over the city, when all the leaflets have been read, and the revolutionary agitation has reached its peak, that’s the moment for us military people to step in …”

The Major moved his boots out of a shaft of sunlight and went on:

“Yes, we military people will step in. We will say that in view of the government’s evident inability to defend the institutions of the fatherland, business or the family, we are taking over the state, and declaring a temporary dictatorship. All dictatorships are by definition temporary: that helps boost confidence. Bourgeois capitalists, and above all, right-wing foreign governments will immediately recognise the new regime. We will blame the ‘soviets’ for forcing us to act this way, and shoot a few poor devils who have been caught and have confessed to making bombs. We will close both houses of parliament, and reduce state spending to a minimum. Administration of the state will be in the hands of the military. In this way, Argentina will achieve an unheard-of grandeur.”

The Major fell silent. Everyone in the flowery summer-house burst into applause. A pigeon flew off.

“Your idea is fabulous,” said Erdosain, “but it means we’d all be working for you …”

“Didn’t you want to be leaders?”

“Yes, but all we’ll get will be the crumbs from the feast.”

“No, sir, you’re mistaken … the idea is …”

The Astrologer cut in:

“Gentlemen … we haven’t come here to discuss the future direction of our organisation, but to plan the activities of each cell leader. If you agree, we can get started.”

A good-looking young man who had not said a word until now raised his voice: “D’you mind if I say something?”

“No, of course not …”

“Well then, I think the first thing to sort out is: do you want to bring about a revolution or not? The organisational details can wait till later.”

“That’s right, they come later … yes, you’re right.”

The stranger finally explained who he was.

“I’m a friend of Haffner’s. A lawyer. I’ve given up the benefits my profession could offer me because I wanted no truck with the capitalist system. Do I have the right to say what I think?”

“Yes, of course you do.”

“Well then, I think that what the Major has said changes the whole direction of our society.”

“No,” the Gold Prospector objected. “It could be its starting point, without affecting any of the other principles.”

“Of course.”

“That’s right.”

The discussion was about to start up again. The Astrologer got to his feet:

“Gentlemen, leave the debate for another day. What concerns us now is not ideas, but the commercial organisation of our group. I therefore propose we leave out anything not directly related to that.”

“But that’s dictatorship,” the lawyer burst out. The Astrologer stared him in the eye for a moment, then said pointedly:

“It seems to me you see yourself as a born leader … and I think you’re right. If you’re smart, you should set about organising another society separate from ours. That way, we can both help bring about the collapse of the present system. But here, either you obey me, or you leave.”

The two men faced each other for a few moments; then the lawyer stood up, stared at the Astrologer one last time, nodded a hard man’s smile and walked out.

The ensuing silence was finally broken by the Major’s voice. He said to the Astrologer: “You were quite right to act as you did. Discipline is fundamental to everything. We’re listening.”

Diamond-shaped patches of sun threw their golden mosaic on to the summer-house’s black earthen floor. The sound of an anvil could be heard from a distant blacksmith’s; in the branches of the trees countless birds began to warble. Erdosain was chewing on a white honeysuckle flower, while the Gold Prospector sat with elbows on knees, staring at the floor.

The Thug was smoking; Erdosain examined the Astrologer’s mongoloid features, his grey smock buttoned to the neck.

An awkward silence followed the Major’s words: what did this intruder want from them? Suddenly annoyed, Erdosain stood up and protested:

“There can be as much discipline as you like in this, but it’s absurd to be talking about a military dictatorship. All we are interested in is for the armed forces to join our revolutionary movement.”

The Major sat upright in his chair and smiled at Erdosain:

“So you admit I played my role well?”

“Role?”

“Yes, that’s right … I’m as much a Major as you are.”

“Do you see how powerful a lie can be?” said the Astrologer. “I disguised my friend here as an officer, and that — despite the fact that you’re pretty much in on the secret — was enough for you all to believe there would be a revolution in the army.”³

“So what?”

“So, this was nothing more than a rehearsal, but some day we’ll act out the drama for real.”

The Astrologer’s words were so chilling that the four other men sat watching the Major, who now said:

“In fact, I never got any higher than a sergeant” — but the Astrologer cut short his explanation by saying:

“What about you, Haffner, do you have the proposed budget?”

“Yes … here it is.”

The Astrologer leafed through the figures scrawled on several sheets of paper, then explained to his audience: “The brothels are the surest way our secret society has of making money.”

He went on:

“Our friend here has given me a budget for the installation of a brothel with ten girls. This is a list of the costs:

Ten second-hand sets of bedroom furniture

$2,000

Monthly rent

$400

Three months’ deposit

$1,200

Installation of kitchen, bathrooms, bar

$2,000

Monthly pay-off to police inspector

$300

Pay-off to doctor

$150

Pay-off to local politician for licence

$2,000

Monthly local taxes

$50

Electric piano

$1,500

Manageress

$150

Cook

$150

TOTAL

$9,900

“Each girl will put in fourteen pesos a week for her food, and will have to buy all the tea, sugar, kerosene, candles, stockings, powders, soap and perfumes that she needs from the establishment.”

The Astrologer was in his stride:

“Over and above our expenses, we can count on a minimum income of 2,500 pesos a month. That means we’ll have recovered the capital invested within four months. With half of the money we make we’ll set up other brothels, we’ll use a quarter of it to pay off our debts, and the rest can be used to support our revolutionary cells. Does everyone approve the expenditure of 10,000 pesos?”

Everybody nodded, except for the Gold Prospector, who asked: “Who’ll be the accountant?”

“We can choose him once everything is set up.”

“All right then.”

“Are you with us too, Major?”

“Yes.”

Erdosain looked up and examined the false officer’s pallid face, as he stared with shifty eyes at a white butterfly fluttering on a patch of green. Erdosain could not help wondering how on earth the Astrologer found creatures like him to join his schemes. It seemed the Astrologer had read his thoughts:

“What about you, Erdosain, how much will you need to set up your galvano-plastics laboratory?”

“A thousand pesos.”

“Oh, so you’re the inventor of the copper rose, are you?” the Major asked.

“Yes.”

“Congratulations. I think it will be a great success. Of course, you’ll have to galvanise the flowers on a large scale.”

“That’s right. I’d thought of doing photography in the same laboratory, to save on the costs.”

“That’s for you to decide.”

“There’s also a trained friend of mine who can help with the galvano-plastics” — when he said that, Erdosain was thinking of the Espila family, who were also possible candidates for the secret society — but the Astrologer interrupted his thoughts by announcing:

“Now the Gold Prospector will give us news of the region where we’re thinking of setting up our camp.” At this, the other man stood up. Erdosain was amazed by his appearance. According to the idea the cinema had given him of this kind of character, he had imagined a giant of a man with a bushy blond beard, who stank of drink. The reality was very different.

The Gold Prospector was a young man of about his own age, with a very pale skin drawn tightly over flat cheekbones, and lively jet-black eyes. By contrast, his enormous barrel chest seemed to belong to someone twice his size. He had spindly bow legs. A revolver butt stuck out between his leather belt and his trousers. His voice was level and clear, but everything about him was ill-assorted, as if he had been put together from bits and pieces which belonged to different kinds of men. His face was that of a cardsharp, used to squinting at his hand; he had a boxer’s chest and the legs of a jockey. And his past was just as odd a jumble as his physique. Up to the age of fourteen he had lived in the countryside, until he killed a thief, and then years later fear of tuberculosis also sent him back to the pampas, where he had spent days and nights galloping incredible distances. Erdosain took an immediate liking to him.

The Gold Prospector unwrapped some rocks. They were chunks of gold-bearing quartz. He said gravely: “And I have with me the analysis certificate from the Department of Mines.”

The stones passed quickly from hand to hand. They all feasted their eyes on them greedily, as their fingers gently stroked the flakes and veins of gold in the quartz. The Astrologer slowly rolled himself a cigarette, all the while observing their faces as the shock of what they were seeing sank in, and temptation gripped their features. The Gold Prospector sat down again and said to them all nonchalantly:

“There is a lot of gold down there which nobody knows about. It’s near Campo Chileno. At first I was in Esquel … in the abandoned workings of a mine … then I went on to Arroyo Pescado … I walked and walked … I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but down there you can travel for days on end without seeming to get anywhere. Anyway, finally I reached Campo Chileno. It’s forest, pure forest for thousands of square kilometres. I was there with the Mask, a prostitute from Esquel who knew a way in because she had been there before with a miner who got killed when they returned to town. People down there kill each other for no reason at all. The Mask was riddled with syphilis and didn’t make it out of the woods. How well I remember her! She had been roaming around down there for more than twenty years. From Puerto Madryn she went to Comodoro, and from there to Trelew, and then Esquel. She knew absolutely all the gold prospectors. First the two of us headed for Arroyo Pescado … that’s forty leagues south of Esquel … but all I found were a few traces of alluvial gold … then we travelled for two weeks through the hills on horseback until we reached Campo Chileno.”

The Gold Prospector narrated all his adventures, his voice cool and steady as he concentrated on the details of his southern odyssey. Listening intently, Erdosain found himself transported into the company of the Mask, crossing immense ravines in the cold and dark, with the purple triangular mass of mountain upon mountain filling the horizon. Then the peaks disappeared as they entered eternal forests of trees with red trunks and dark green foliage; they pushed ever onwards, numbed by the vast smooth expanses of sky like a desert of blue ice.

Oblivious to the astonishment his words had caused, the Gold Prospector went on with the story of his months of adventure, only occasionally gesturing to emphasise a point. All the others were listening with rapt attention.

“Finally, one morning, I reached the black gulch. This was a circle of jagged black basalt rocks, a deep well crested with dark stalagmites, high above which the blue of the sky seemed infinitely sad. A few lone birds strayed over the stone crags that lay in the shadow of even higher peaks … and at the bottom of this hollow was a lake of golden water fed by the silver rivulets of waterfalls that threaded their way down through the undergrowth.”

The Gold Prospector had never before been in such sinister surroundings. Astonished, he halted to gaze at the bronze depths of the lake reflecting the black jutting rocks above. Speckled with green stains and long streaks of malachite, the rock walls fell sheer into the water, in which also shone his pale, bearded face with the immense sky behind it.

Although from its colour the Gold Prospector immediately suspected the water might be full of gold, he dismissed the idea as absurd, because he had never read or heard of anything of the sort. He went on:

“But after I got out of the forest, I was in Rawson one day in a dentist’s waiting-room, and I started to leaf through a copy of a magazine called ‘Medical Weekly’ that I saw on one of the tables there. It was then I made the discovery. I opened the magazine at random, and on the first page I came to, I found an article called: ‘Gold water, or colloidal gold in the treatment of lupus erythematosus’. I started to read it, and discovered that gold can be suspended in water in microscopic particles … and that what was a new phenomenon for me had in fact been discovered by the alchemists, who had called it ‘gold water’. They obtained it by the simplest method imaginable: plunging a white-hot piece of gold into rainwater. I immediately remembered the lake, which I had thought was that colour because of the vegetation in it. Without realising it, I had been standing beside a lake of colloidal gold, formed over countless centuries as water from the cascades passed over veins in the rocks. See what ignorance does for you? If chance had not put that magazine article in my hands, I would never have known the importance of my discovery.”

“So did you go back there?” the Major wanted to know.

“Naturally. I went back only eight months ago, when I wrote to the Astrologer … but I made a mistake … I have to study how to extract the gold … it’s all in seams there … we’d have to work hard, and get divers’ suits, because it’s the lake bottom that is golden, the water itself is colourless.”

Haffner said: “What you say is fascinating. Even if there’s no gold, it sounds better than this lousy city.”

The Major added: “If we set up a camp in Campo Chileno, we’ll need a telegraph office.”

Erdosain replied: “If that’s so, we can install a portable facility with a wavelength of between forty-five and eighty metres. It would cost 500 pesos and have a range of 3,000 kilometres.”

The Major spoke once more: “I’m particularly in favour of the camp because we could set up our poison gas factory there. I believe you know something about that, Erdosain.”

“Yes, for example mustard gas can be made by electrolysis, though I haven’t studied the matter in any depth — but you’re right, the gases and the germ laboratory are what we need to concentrate on. Especially the lab for producing the bubonic plague and Asiatic cholera. We need to get hold of some proper bacteria specimens, because the actual production is extremely cheap.”

The Astrologer interrupted them:

“I think it would be best to leave the organisation of the camp until later. For now, we should concentrate on getting Haffner’s project underway. We can only organise the first group to leave for the colony once we are making some money. Was there a family you had in mind, Erdosain?”

“Yes, the Espilas.”

Haffner butted in:

“Hold on a minute! I reckon all this is just so much hot air. I’m nothing more than a collaborator in your secret society, but I reckon we have to sort something out right now.”

The Astrologer stared at him and said:

“Are you willing to put up the money to get us started? No. Well then? Wait until we have some funds, which should be in a matter of days, and then you’ll see.”

Haffner stood up and, looking over at the Gold Prospector, said:

“Listen, friend: once the camp idea is settled, let me know; and if you need people, so much the better; I’ll supply you with a gang of lay-abouts who would be delighted to get out of Buenos Aires” — so saying, he put on his hat and was about to leave without shaking hands with anyone, until he suddenly remembered something and shouted to the Astrologer: “If you hurry up and get the money, there’s a great brothel for sale. It’s got a grill attached to it, and it’s a good place for gambling too. The boss is Uruguayan; he’s asking 15,000 cash, but he’d settle for 10,000 now and the other 5,000 in a year.”

“Could you come here on Friday?”

“Yes.”

“OK, let’s meet on Friday, and I think we can do a deal.”

“’Bye,” was all the Thug said, and left.

THE GOLD PROSPECTOR

Once Haffner had gone, Erdosain, who wanted to talk to the Gold Prospector, also said goodbye to the Astrologer and the Major. He was feeling uneasy again. As he was about to leave, the Astrologer whispered to him:

“Be sure you’re here at nine tomorrow; we have to cash the cheque.”

Erdosain had forgotten about “that”. He glanced all around him as if stunned by a blow. He needed to talk to someone; to forget the dark obligation he was under that made his heart beat faster in the hot midday sun.

He had taken a liking to the Gold Prospector. He went over to him and asked: “Shall we leave together? I’d like to talk to you about ‘down there’.”

The other man studied him with his glittering eyes, then said:

“Of course, I’d be delighted. You seem an interesting guy.”

“Thanks.”

“Especially from what the Astrologer has told me about you. You know that’s a great plan of yours to bring about the revolution using plague germs?”

Erdosain looked up. He felt embarrassed by so much praise. Could it really be that someone took the nonsense he dreamt up seriously?

The Gold Prospector insisted:

“That and the poison gases are a stroke of genius. Can you imagine? To leave a canister in Police Headquarters just when that monster Santiago is there! To poison all the cops like rats!” He gave such a loud snorting laugh that three birds flew up in unison from the branches of a lemon tree. “Yes, Erdosain my friend, you’re something special. Plagues and chlorine! We’re going to make the revolution here in this city. I can just see the day — all the shopkeepers poking their scared snouts out of their holes like weasels, while we cleanse the world of all that garbage with our machine guns. You can buy a fine machine gun for 1,000 pesos. Two hundred and fifty rounds a minute. A real treasure! Then we’ll lay down clouds of chlorine and mustard gas … Oh, you should publish your ideas in the papers, believe me.”

Erdosain interrupted this string of extravagant praise to ask:

“So you found gold, did you? Gold …”

“I take it you didn’t swallow a word of that tale about ‘gold water’?”

“What d’you mean, tale? So the gold …?”

“It exists, of course it does … it’s just a question of finding it.”

Erdosain looked so crestfallen that the Gold Prospector hastily added: “Look here … I told you that because the Astrologer said I could count on you.”

“Yes, but I thought …”

“What?”

“That amongst all the lies, that was one of the few truths …”

“It is true in essence. The gold does exist … we simply have to find it. You should be happy that everything is being organised to go in search of it. Or do you reckon that those numbskulls would move an inch if they weren’t driven on by magnificent lies? I’ve given it so much thought! That’s why the Astrologer’s theory is such a stroke of genius: men only respond to lies. He gives lies the consistency of truth; people who would never have so much as budged to get anything, guys who have become totally cynical and desperate, come to life again in the truth of his lies. Can you imagine anything more sublime? Why, exactly the same thing happens all the time, and nobody protests. Yes, everything is a sham, if we only think about it … there’s no-one who wouldn’t admit that our society is run on niggardly, stupid lies. So what great sin is the Astrologer committing? He’s simply exchanging a trifling lie for one that’s eloquent, enormous, transcendental. With his falsehoods, the Astrologer seems extraordinary to us, but he’s no such thing … or rather, he is, he is … because he’s not after personal gain from his lies; yet he’s not, because all he’s doing is applying an age-old principle that every swindler and social dreamer has always used. If one day his life story gets written, those who read it with any sense of judgement will say: he was great because the methods he employed to achieve his ideals were those available to any charlatan. And what we see as extraordinary and disturbing is simply the fear of weak, uninspired minds who believe success only comes from complicated and mysterious processes rather than from anything simple. And yet you know as well as I do that the greatest gestures are the simplest, like Columbus and his egg.”

“The truth of lies?”

“Exactly. The problem is we aren’t bold enough for these great schemes. We imagine it must be more difficult to run a state than a simple house; we put too much literature, too much stupid romanticism into things.”

“But deep down d’you feel … I mean, do you get the impression that we’re going to succeed?”

“Totally, and believe me … we’re going to be rulers of Argentina … if not the world. It must be. The Astrologer’s plan is a salvation for mankind worn out as it is by the mechanisation of our civilisation. There are no ideas any more. No good or bad symbols. I once heard the Astrologer talking about the colonies set up in the ancient world by all the misfits who did not feel at home in their own countries. We’ll do the same, but we’ll make our society something like a rowdy game … a game that wins over even thc souls of shopkeepers who like to go to watch cowboy movies. Oh, you can’t imagine all the mischief we’ll make! As a last resort we could spread nitroglycerine bombs just to laugh at the panic they cause among the rabble. What d’you think the hellraisers and neighbourhood gangs were in their day? Youngsters who had no other way to channel their energies. So they worked it off beating up some stuck-up gent or an Arab. Just think … Comodoro … Puerto Madryn, Trelew, Esquel, Arroyo Pescado, Campo Chileno, I know all the trails and all the badlands … Believe me … we’ll create a marvellous band of youth” — he was getting carried away — “Don’t you believe there is any gold? You’re like those kids at table whose eyes are bigger than their stomachs. Everything in this country of ours is gold.”

Erdosain could feel himself being swept along by the other man’s enthusiasm. The Gold Prospector talked in great gulps, his eyes twitching as he lifted first one eyebrow then the other, and he kept pumping Erdosain’s arm in a friendly way.

“Believe me, Erdosain … there’s a lot of gold … more than you could even dream of … but that’s not the point. The point is this: time is slipping by. Esquel, Arroyo Pescado, Rio Pico … Campo Chileno … league upon league … travelling for day after day … and as you know, just to get a certificate for a horse not even worth ten pesos you have to travel for weeks: time is meaningless … everything is huge … enormous … eternal down there. You have to believe it. I remember when the Mask and I were down near Arroyo Pescado. Not just gold … red gold. That’s where souls made sick by civilisation can be cured. We should send all our friends to the mountains. Look … I’m twenty-seven … and I’ve risked my life with a pistol several times” — so saying, he drew out his revolver — “See that sparrow over there?” — it was about fifty paces away — he raised his gun level with his chin, pulled the trigger, and as the shot rang out, the bird fell out of the tree. “See that? That’s how I’ve risked my life time and again. There’s no reason to be sad. Look, I’m twenty-seven now. Arroyo Pescado, Esquel, Rio Pico, Campo Chileno … all those vast empty spaces can be ours … we can organise the escort for a New Joy … the Order of the Knights of Red Gold … You think I’m getting carried away. No! You have to have been down there to understand. It’s the kind of experience that makes you aware that what’s needed more than anything else is a natural aristocracy. When you’re up against solitude, all the dangers, sadness, the sun, the infinite empty plains, you become a new man … completely different from the herd of slaves eking out an existence in the city. Do you know what the anarchist, the socialist proletariat of our cities really is? Nothing more than a herd of cowards. Instead of going to put their souls to the test in the mountains or the empty plains, they prefer comfort and entertainment; they don’t want to know about the heroic solitude of the wilderness. What would become of all the factories, the fashion houses, the city’s thousand parasites, if everyone left for the wilderness … if everyone set up their own tent down there? D’you understand now why I am with the Astrologer? It’s up to us young people to create this new life. We’ll set up a bandit aristocracy. We’ll shoot all the intellectuals infected with Tolstoy’s idiotic ideas, and put the rest to work for us. That’s why I admire Mussolini. He used a stick across the back of all those mandolin players, and from one day to the next that comic-opera kingdom was transformed into the mastiff of the Mediterranean. Cities are the world’s cancer. They destroy men; they make them cowards who are sly and envious — and it’s envy that makes them assert their rights, envy and cowardice. If those herds had any noble, courageous beasts among them, they would have smashed everything to bits long before now. To believe in the masses is to believe you can reach out and bring down the moon. Look what happened to Lenin with the Russian peasants. But everything has been organised now, and all that’s left to say is: in this century, anyone who does not feel at home in the city should head out for the wilderness. That’s what the Astrologer is suggesting. And he’s right. When the first Christians could not bear life in the cities, they went into the desert. There they found their own kind of happiness. Nowadays though, the lumpen prefers to bray in committees.”

“You know something? I like your comparison with the desert.”

“That’s right, Erdosain. As the Astrologer says: those who don’t fit in in the cities shouldn’t spoil it for those who do. For the unhappy and the misfits there are the mountains, the plains, the banks of the great rivers.”

Erdosain had not expected such a passionate outburst. The Gold Prospector seemed to read his mind, because he said:

“We will preach violence, but we won’t allow any theorists of violence in our cells: anyone who wants to show his hatred of present society will first have to give us proof of his loyalty. Can you see now what the point of the training camp is? Isn’t gold another wonderful illusion? Anyone wanting to join must sacrifice himself for us. The effort will make a superman of him. And that’s when he will be given power. Isn’t that what happens in monastic orders? Isn’t that the way the army is organised? No, don’t gawp at me like that! Even in big stores, like Gath & Chaves or Harrods, employees have told me the staff accept a level of discipline that makes the army look like a joke in comparison. So you can see, Erdosain, we’re not inventing a thing. All we’re doing is exchanging a banal goal for an extraordinary one.”

The Gold Prospector made Erdosain feel ashamed. He envied him his violence; he was irritated by his sweeping, incontrovertible truths, and wanted above all to be able to contradict him. But he said to himself: “I am not cut out for a starring role like him, I’m one of those miserable cowards who live in the city. Why can’t I feel his fervour and loathing? Yes, what he says is true. And I just smile politely at him, as if I was afraid he’d beat me up, and it’s true his violence does frighten me, I am scared by his passion.”

“What are you thinking, pal?” the Gold Prospector said.

Erdosain looked at him long and hard, then said:

“I was thinking how sad it is to have been brought up a coward.”

The Gold Prospector shrugged.

“You reckon you’re a coward because the life you’ve lived has never forced you to risk your hide. I’d like to see you the day your life depends on pulling a trigger, then I’d know whether you were one or not. The thing is no-one in the city can be brave. You know very well that if you punch some wretch the police are going to hound you so much that you prefer to be tolerant rather than take justice into your own hands. That’s the way things are. So you get used to accepting everything, to checking your impulses …”

Erdosain looked at him:

“You’re remarkable, you know that?”

“Don’t worry, pal. You’ll see how you yourself wake up soon enough … you’ll find your courageous side … all you need is to take the first step.”

It was one in the afternoon when the two men parted company.

THE CRIPPLE

That same day, just as Erdosain reached the last flight of the spiral staircase up to his room, he saw a woman dressed in an otter fur coat and a green hat talking to his landlady on the landing. A “here he comes” told him he was the person they were waiting for, and as he halted in front of them, the stranger turned her lightly freckled face towards him and asked:

“Are you señor Erdosain?”

“Where have I seen that face before?” Erdosain wondered, answering that indeed he was. The woman then presented herself:

“I’m señor Ergueta’s wife.”

“Oh, so you’re the Cripple, are you?” he said, then ashamed at his rudeness, which had even led the astonished landlady to stare at the other woman’s feet, Erdosain apologised:

“I’m sorry, you took me by surprise … you must understand I wasn’t expecting … won’t you come in?” Before opening the door, Erdosain apologised for the state she would find it in, but Hipólita merely gave a wry smile and said:

“It’s no problem.”

Erdosain felt irritated by the cold look filtering from her light verdigris eyes, and he thought to himself:

“There’s something perverse about her” — he had noticed that underneath her green hat, Hipólita’s red hair fell in two smooth bands covering the tips of her ears. He looked again at her fine red eyelashes, at her plump lips that looked out of place in the pink softness of her freckled face. “How different from that photo of hers!” Erdosain thought.

Standing at his side, she looked at him as if to say: “So this is the man.”

Next to her, he could sense her presence without really taking it in, as if she did not really exist, or was miles away from his thoughts. Yet there she was, and he had to say something; so after switching the light on and offering her a seat while he sat on the sofa, he managed to get out:

“So you are Ergueta’s wife? Fancy that.”

He still could not work out what this new being was doing suddenly flung into the midst of his disarray. A spurt of curiosity swept through his mind, but he would have liked the situation to be different, to feel he really knew this woman’s face, its oval curves giving off a coppery sheen, the violet lashes seeming to diffuse her gaze like the rays of watery sun radiating in a thousand beams out of a pinnacle of clouds behind a saint’s head in a popular print.

Erdosain was thinking: “My body is here, but where is my soul?” — and he repeated: “So you are Ergueta’s wife? Fancy that.”

Hipólita crossed her legs and smoothed the hem of her dress well below her knees, the material rustling in her rosy fingers. She raised her head slowly, as if this cost her a great effort in the strange surroundings of an unknown room, and said:

“You have to do something for my husband. He’s gone mad.”

“That’s no great surprise to me,” Erdosain reflected, and, pleased he could remain cool and collected — like one of those bankers in the novels of Xavier de Montepin — he replied, easing into the role he had invented for himself: “So he’s gone mad, has he?” Then all of a sudden, realising he could not keep up the pretence any longer, he burst out with: “D’you know something? You give me this extraordinary news, and yet it leaves me cold. It hurts me to be this way, empty of all emotion; I want to feel something, and yet I’m like a fence-post. You must forgive me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. You will forgive me, won’t you? I wasn’t always like this. I can remember I used to be as happy as a lark. Bit by bit, I’ve changed. I can’t explain: I see you, I’d like to feel I’m your friend, but it’s impossible. If you were dying here now in front of me, I doubt I’d even offer you a glass of water. D’you understand? And yet … Anyway, where is he?”

“In Las Mercedes asylum.”

“That’s odd. Didn’t you live in Azul?”

“Yes, but we’ve been here a fortnight …”

“When did it happen?”

“Six days ago. I can’t understand it. It’s like you said before. Forgive me if I’m wasting your time. I thought of you because you knew him, and he was always talking about you. When was the last time you saw him?”

“When you got married … Yes, he told me about you. He called you the Cripple … and the harlot.”

Erdosain felt Hipólita’s soul wash his eyes with a gentle glaze. He was sure he could talk to her about anything. The woman’s soul was curled up there, ready and willing to receive him. As she spoke, her hands were clasped on her lap, and this relaxed position helped increase his sense of ease. That morning’s events at the Astrologer’s seemed far away: the only memories he had were of a fragment of tree and of sky, and as these fleeting images passed through his mind, they left a glowing, unwarranted sense of pleasure. He rubbed his hands together with satisfaction, and said:

“Don’t take offence … but I think he was already crazy when he married you …”

“Tell me … d’you know if he used to gamble before we were married?”

“Yes … and I remember he studied the Bible, because he talked about a new age dawning, about the fourth seal, and a whole lot of other things as well. And yes, he gambled. He always interested me because I took him to be a typical hysteric.”

“That’s right. A hysteric. He once even staked 5,000 pesos on a poker game. He sold my jewels, a necklace a friend had given me …”

“What’s that? … Didn’t you give that necklace to your maid just before your marriage? That’s what he told me. That you gave her the necklace and your silver service … and the cheque for 10,000 pesos that other man gave you …”

“D’you think I’m mad too? … Why on earth would I give my maid a pearl necklace?”

“He lied, then?”

“So it seems.”

“How strange! …”

“Don’t be so amazed. He lied a lot. Anyway, he was in another world recently. He had studied a combination he could apply to roulette. You would have laughed to see him. He wrote out a whole bookful of numbers only he could understand. What a man! He was so worried he couldn’t sleep. He left the pharmacy unattended; sometimes when the light was already out in the bedroom and I was about to go to sleep, I would hear a loud thump on the floor: it was him — he’d leapt out of bed and was feverishly scribbling numbers as if afraid they might escape him … So he told you I’d given away my pearl necklace, did he? What a man! It was he who pawned it before our marriage … Well, as I was saying … last month he went to the Real Casino in San Carlos …”

“And he lost, of course …”

“No, he turned 700 pesos into 7,000. You should have seen the state he arrived in … not a word … I said to myself: ‘That’s it, he’s lost’ … but the remarkable thing is how scared he was at his own good luck … until then, he’d been quite sceptical about the combination …”

“Yes … I understand … he preferred to believe in it than to put it to the test.”

“That’s right, he was afraid of failing. But as I was saying … for several days he was in another world. I remember that once during our siesta he turned to me and said: ‘Well, my lady, it looks like you’ll have to get used to being Queen of the World.’”

“Exaggerating as usual.”

“I must confess that after his success, even I was tempted to believe in his combination. The first time around he’d strictly followed the numbers in it, so now he withdrew 3,000 pesos from my account to break the bank with, plus the other 6,500 — he’d used the rest to pay some debts from the pharmacy — and off we went to Montevideo. He lost every cent.”

“How long did it take?”

“Twenty minutes … I thought he was going to pass out on the way back … but, did he really tell you I had given my necklace to the maid? What a man!”

“It was probably to give me a good impression of you. What was the journey back like?”

“All right … he didn’t say a word. His eyes were glazed over though, and his face was terrible, all puffy and shapeless. As soon as we got back to Buenos Aires, he went to bed … that was a Monday. He stayed there till nightfall, then left the house … I don’t know why, but I knew deep down something was going to happen … he wasn’t back by ten o’clock, so I went to bed. At about one in the morning, I was awakened by his footsteps in the room. I was about to switch on the light when he leapt over towards me and grabbed my arm — you know how strong he is — pulled me out of bed in my night-dress, and dragged me along the corridors to the front door of the hotel.”

“What did you do?”

“I didn’t scream, because I knew that would only make him even angrier. In the hotel doorway he stood staring at me as if I was a total stranger, his forehead creased with pain, his eyes bulging. Outside, a high wind was whipping back the tree branches, and I was trying to protect myself with my arms, but he just stood there in silence staring at me, until a policeman came running up, and the hotel porter, who had been woken by the noise, leapt on him from behind. Then he started shouting, so loudly they could hear him at the corner of the street: ‘This is the Harlot … the one who loved thugs whose flesh is as that of asses.’”

“You remember the exact words?”

“It’s as if it was all happening in front of my eyes right now. There he is, struggling to get back inside, with the policeman trying to pull him out and the porter throttling him to try to weaken him, while I’m standing there like an idiot waiting for it all to be over, having to put up with the stares of people who had gathered and thought it was more fun to laugh at me than to help the policeman. Just as well I always wear a long nightdress … in the end, with the help of other policemen who had responded to a youngster’s cries for help from inside the hotel, they managed to drag him down to the police station. They thought he was drunk … but it was a fit of madness … that’s what the doctor said. He was raving about Noah’s Ark …”

“I see … but how can I help you?” Erdosain felt yet again that her essence was becoming part of his life like something from a novel, something that needed to be taken care of like the knot of a necktie in the hurly-burly of a dance.

“Well, I was wondering if you could lend me some money. I can’t count on his family at all.”

“Didn’t you get married in his house?”

“Yes, but when we got back from Montevideo after our wedding, we visited them one day … can you imagine … visiting a house where I’d been a maid!”

“That’s amazing!”

“You can’t imagine how indignant they all were. One of his aunts … but why talk about such spiteful, mean things, don’t you agree? That’s how life is, and that’s all there is to it. They threw us out, and we went. Better luck next time.”

“What’s odd is that you were a maid.”

“There’s nothing so strange about that.”

“It’s just you don’t seem the type …”

“Thanks … the thing is, when I left the hotel I had to pawn a ring, and I need to be careful with what little money I have left …”

“What about the pharmacy?”

“It’s being looked after by someone we can trust. I cabled for him to send money … but he replied saying he had strict instructions from the Ergueta family not to give me a cent. So …”

“So what are you thinking of doing?”

“That’s what I don’t know … whether I should go back to Pico, or stay here.”

“What a mess!”

“I’m really fed up with it, believe me.”

“I’m sorry, but today I don’t have any money. Tomorrow I will, though.”

“You see, I want to keep the few pesos I have for any emergency …”

“You’re welcome to stay here until you find something long-term. There’s an empty room next to mine. What else can I do for you?”

“See if you can get him out of the asylum.”

“How can I do that if he really has gone mad? Anyway, we’ll see … for tonight, you can sleep here. I’ll manage on the sofa … although it’s likely I won’t sleep here at all …”

Yet again the woman radiated her green-tinged, malevolent gaze from behind red eyelashes. It was as though she was casting her soul on to the outlines of the man’s thoughts to take an imprint of his intentions.

“All right, I accept.”

“Tomorrow, if you like, I’ll give you some money to go to a hotel with, if you prefer that to staying here.” But then, suddenly angry with her for a thought which had just crossed his mind, he said:

“You don’t really seem to love Eduardo, you know …”

“Why is that?”

“It’s obvious. You come here, tell me about all this drama so coolly it amazes me, and naturally … what am I supposed to think of you?”

Erdosain had started to pace up and down the tiny room as he was saying this. He was ill at ease again, and glanced sideways at her freckled oval face, with its fine red lashes under the green hat-brim, the lips that looked swollen, and the two bands of copper-coloured hair pulled down over her ears, while her transparent eyes shot out their beams of light.

“She hardly has any breasts,” Erdosain thought. Hipólita was looking around her; suddenly, with a bright smile, she asked:

“What exactly did you expect of me, darling?”

Erdosain was irritated by this sudden cheap whorehouse “darling”, coming after the casual “better luck next time”. After a while, he said:

“I don’t know … I suppose I didn’t think you were so cold … there are moments when you give the impression of being a bit unnatural … I may be wrong, but … well, anyway … that’s your business …”

Hipólita stood up:

“Darling, I’ve never gone in for play-acting. The reason I came here is quite straightforward: I knew you were his best friend. What d’you want? For me to cry like Mary Magdalene when I don’t feel sorry about anything? I’ve already cried enough …”

Erdosain had also stood up. She was staring at him, but the harsh lines — rigid beneath the skin of her face like an armour-plated will — drooped with fatigue. With her head tilted slightly to one side, she reminded Erdosain of his wife … it might well be her … she was standing in the doorway of a strange room … indifferent, the Captain looked on as she left for ever, and did not bother to stop her … the streets beckoned her … maybe she was headed for some sordid hotel … suddenly, moved to pity, Erdosain said:

“Forgive me … I’m a bit on edge. You’re welcome here. I’m only sorry you arrived when I have no money to offer you. But tomorrow I will.”

Hipólita sat down again. As he paced back and forth, Erdosain felt his pulse. His heart was beating rapidly. Weary after the day with the Astrologer and Barsut, he said bitterly:

“Life’s an effort, isn’t it?”

The stranger stared down at the tip of her shoe in silence. She raised her eyes and a tiny wrinkle lined her brow. Then she said: “You seem worried. Is something the matter?”

“No, nothing. Tell me … was it difficult being with him?”

“A bit. He’s violent …”

“It’s so strange! I’d like to be able to picture him in the asylum, but I can’t. All I can make out is a fragment of his face and one eye … I must tell you, I saw the disaster coming. I met him one morning and he told me the whole story. All at once I knew you’d be unhappy with him … but you must be tired. I have to go out. I’ll tell the landlady to bring you dinner here.”

“No … I’m not hungry.”

“OK, well then, I must be off. Put the screen up if you like. Make yourself at home.”

As Erdosain left, the Cripple looked him over in an extraordinary way, like a fan opening and slicing down through a man from head to toe, then snapping shut on the whole layout of his interior world.

IN THE CAVERN

Out in the street, Erdosain realised there was a light rain falling, but he walked on, driven by an obscure anger, annoyed at being unable to think.

Everything was getting so complicated … and what was he, caught up in all these blind cogwheels that were taking over more and more of his life, pushing him ever deeper into a despairing mire? Then on top of it all, there was this … this inability to think, to think things through clearly, like moves in a chess game, a lack of mental clarity that made him resentful of everyone.

He was irritated above all by the animal content of the shopkeepers, standing at the doorways of their holes spitting into the slanting rain. Erdosain imagined they were endlessly scheming, while in the back rooms their unfortunate wives could be seen, laying cloths on rickety tables, hashing up disgusting stews which gave off a stale smell of peppers and grease, or the rancid odours of reheated escalopes when the lids were taken off.

Erdosain walked on sullenly, trying to fathom the ideas being hatched in those narrow minds, openly peering at the wan faces of the shopkeepers as they spied, a spark of fury deep in their eyes, on the customers they could see in the stores opposite them. At times, Erdosain felt on the point of shouting insults at them; he longed to call them cuckolds, thieves, sons of bitches, tell them to their faces that if they were fat it was because they were swollen with leprosy, and if they were thin it was because they were consumed with envy of their neighbours. And in his mind, he poured dreadful curses on their heads, imagining they were all so deep in debt they were on the verge of bankruptcy, while at the same time he wished that the unhappiness that cast him into the pit of despair would also fall on their filthy wives who, with the same fingers they had used a few moments earlier to remove the towels they menstruated into, were now cutting the bread they would eat together, slandering their rivals with each mouthful.

Although he could not explain why, Erdosain felt repelled by even the most respectable of these chisellers: the whole tribe was as vicious and ruthless as a band of Moorish pirates.

As he walked past upholsterers, general stores and dressmakers’ shops, Erdosain was thinking that these people were without any noble aim, that they spent their whole time spying with malicious glee on their neighbours’ private lives — neighbours who were as worthless as them, gloating with expressions of fake compassion at all the misfortunes that befell them, spreading tittle-tattle on all sides out of sheer boredom. This suddenly made him feel so angry he realised it would be best if he got off the street before he became involved in an incident with one of these brutes, whose revolting image was for him a symbol of the soul of the entire city, every bit as mean-spirited, remorseless and vicious as them.

He had no firm idea in mind, though he knew he was tainted with disgust for life, but all at once he saw a tram heading for Plaza Once, so he ran and jumped on the back platform. At the station he bought a return to Ramos Mejía. It made little difference to him where he was going. He was weary, at a loss, convinced he had thrown his soul into a ditch from where he would never recover it. And with the Cripple at home waiting for him. How much better to be the captain of a ship, to command some super-dreadnought! The funnels would be belching out plumes of smoke, while on the bridge he would be talking with the first officer, the image of a woman — perhaps not his wife — tattooed on his heart. Why on earth was his life like this? And other people’s lives too, they were “like this”, as if the “like this” were a seal guaranteeing unhappiness, which we simply found harder to spot in others.

What had become of the power of life, which some men seem to have coursing through their veins like the blood of a lion? A power which makes someone’s existence suddenly stand out before us without any rehearsal, as clearly defined as a film plot. Wasn’t that what photos of great men showed? Who had any record of Lenin arguing in a miserable room in London, or of Mussolini wandering the roads of Italy? And yet there they suddenly were, on a balcony haranguing the hirsute crowds, or striding among the shattered columns of a recent ruin, in sports shoes and a straw boater which failed to conceal their fierce conqueror’s features. By contrast, Erdosain’s life was filled with tiny images of the Cripple, the Captain, his wife, Barsut: all of them people who as soon as they were out of his sight were reduced to the minuscule dimensions that distance confers on physical objects.

He rested his head against the glass window. The carriage started to move off, then came to a halt; the guard’s whistle sounded a second time and the whole train pulled out, clanking as it crossed the points which screeched as the wheels forced them apart.

The green and red lights of the tunnel dazzled his eyes for an instant, so he shut them again. In the darkness, the train conveyed its quivering hesitancy to the rails, and its mass multiplied by the speed it was travelling at, lent Erdosain’s thoughts a similarly ponderous, relentless impetus.

Clackety-clack went the wheels at the end of each length of rail, and gradually this dull, insistent rhythm soothed his anger and lifted his spirits, while the speed of the train lulled his body into a state of somnolence.

He began to think about Ergueta’s madness. He remembered the other man’s words when he himself had been staring ruin in the face: “get lost, you bum, get lost”. He settled his head on the padded seatback and recalled earlier days. He closed his eyes to focus better on the images in his memory. These were a puzzle to him at first: this was the first time he realised that whereas some figures in the mind’s eye are the same size as we have known them in reality, other people and things are tiny, like lead soldiers, and only appear in silhouette, without any depth to them. So, next to a huge black man whose hand had strayed to a young boy’s rear, he saw a tiny table like something out of a doll’s house, on which drooped the minute heads of a gang of hoodlums, although the ceiling above them was at its proper height, all of which only served to make the grey outlines of his recollection even more desolate.

An obscure crowd milled about inside his mind; then a shadow covered his anguish like a cloud of weariness, and next to the table where the tiny adult criminals lay sleeping, he could make out the huge looming shape — like an ox’s skull — of the bar owner, digging his fingers into bulging arm muscles.

Another flash of memory showed Erdosain how true his sense of imminent downfall had been, before he had even begun to think of swindling the Sugar Company, but was already searching in dark corners for a possible reflection of his personality.

How many pathways there were in his brain! He pursued the one which took him back to the enormous bar which sunk its morose block into the deepest recesses of his mind, and although this block piercing the length of his skull sloped at an angle of twenty degrees, the tiny tables where the criminals sprawled asleep did not — as would have been logical — slide down, but thanks to the way his mind was accustomed to immediately adjusting the perspective, straightened up beneath them. Erdosain’s body too had grown used to the hurtling mass of the underground train, so he lolled back in his seat in a kind of dizzy stupor, and now that memory had overcome every ounce of resistance in him, he was flooded by the clear, precise outlines of the bar.

These outlines seemed to project themselves directly into his chest, so that he could almost imagine that if he looked at himself in a mirror, the front of his body would show the interior of a narrow room, stretching out towards the mirror. And so Erdosain found himself walking along inside himself on a floor covered with spit and sawdust, the image perfectly framed in a way that reflected on to an infinite repetition of the same sensations.

And he thought that if the Cripple had been with him, he would have said of this recollection:

“That was before I was a thief.”

Erdosain imagined the Cripple turning to look at him while he continued in an off-hand way: “Next to the old Crítica building in Sarmiento there used to be a bar.”

Then, as his train clattered across the junction at Caballito, he imagined Hipólita raising her eyes to him inquisitively. Erdosain saw himself as a character who had lived outside the law but had now gone straight, so he added to his invisible companion:

“The regulars there were a mix of newspaper vendors and criminals.”

“Is that so?”

To avoid the windows being smashed in one of the many fights these unsavoury characters got into, the bar owner kept the metal shutters permanently down. The only light reaching the saloon came in through the blue-tinted panes of the door, so that this den with its grey walls like an Arab butcher’s shop was perpetually sunk in a gloom relieved only by the milky gleam of cigarette smoke.

In that dimly lit cavern, with its heavy-beamed ceiling and filled with steam from vegetable stews and cooking fat, seethed a dark throng of the criminal fraternity, men with caps pulled down over their faces, and kerchiefs casually knotted at the neck of undershirts.

Between eleven and two in the afternoon they crowded round the greasy marble tables to gulp down rotten clams or play cards over a few glasses of wine.

Faces amid the foul-smelling gloom confirmed the lowlife atmosphere. Some were long and drawn-out, as if their owners were being strangled, their mouths gaping open, their lips swollen and floppy as sausages. Black men with porcelain eyes and gleaming white teeth between thick blubbery lips were touching up youngsters, grinding their jaws with pleasure; petty crooks and informers who looked like tigers, with sloping foreheads and unwavering gazes.

An indistinct babble of voices rose from these men, slumped on benches or gathered around the tables, in between which strolled the con-men in their decent clothes — soft collars, grey waistcoats, seven-peso bowler hats. Some of them were just out of Azcuenaga gaol, and passed on messages they had been given by prisoners there; others were wearing tortoise-shell glasses to inspire confidence; each and everyone of them quickly scanned the place when they came in. They all talked in whispers, bought bottles of beer for their odd companions, and came and went several times in a quarter of an hour, as they were called out on some shady business or other. The boss of this establishment was a huge man with an ox’s head, green eyes, a bulbous nose and thin, tight lips.

Whenever he got angry, his bellowing immediately subdued his customers, who were all terrified of him. He controlled them with the threat of violence. If one of the criminals made more noise than was tacitly allowed, the owner would suddenly come over: the offender knew what was about to happen, but sat there waiting in silence until the giant started pounding on his skull with short sharp blows.

The rest of the bar would fall silent as the others enjoyed the punishment. The unfortunate victim was kicked out into the street, and the hubbub rose again, as fresh clouds of smoke wafted towards the glass front door.

Sometimes musicians found their way into this den, usually with a bandoneon and a guitar. As they tuned up, an expectant hush fell over the denizens of this aquatic world, and an imperceptible wave of sadness swept through the room.

As the plaintive strains of a lowlife tango rose from the instruments, all the crooks accompanied it with their rage and misfortunes. The silence was like a many-handed monster that raised a dome of sound over heads drooping on to marble tables. Who knows what their thoughts were! And that huge, terrible dome pierced all their hearts, amplifying the mournful sounds of the guitar and bandoneon until there was something sublime in a whore’s suffering, or in the oppressive boredom of prison when the inmate imagines his friends living life to the full on the outside.

At some point even the most fetid souls there, the most bestial of features, gave way to an unheard-of trembling — but this vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, and when the musicians passed round their cap, not a single hand stretched out to drop in a coin.

“That’s where I used to go,” Erdosain told his imaginary companion, “to confirm my anguish, to know for sure I was lost, and to think of my wife suffering alone at home because she had married someone so worthless. How often in a corner of that bar have I pictured her running away with some other man, while I was sinking lower and lower; and that hole was nothing but the foretaste of what was to happen to me later on. How often, looking at those poor wretches, have I thought to myself: perhaps one day I’ll be exactly the same? I don’t know how, but I’ve always felt I knew beforehand what was going to happen to me. I’ve never been wrong. Can you imagine? Then one day in that cavern I met Ergueta deep in thought. Yes, Ergueta. He was sitting alone at a table, and some of the newspaper boys were staring at him in amazement, although others must have thought he was simply a well-dressed thief.”

And Erdosain imagined that at this point the Cripple asked him:

“What, my husband was there too?”

“Yes, gnawing at the handle of his cane with that dog-catcher’s face of his, while a black man was busy caressing some young boy’s rear. But Ergueta didn’t notice anything going on around him. It was as if he was nailed to the floor of the cavern. He told me he was there waiting for a contact to give him a tip for the next race, but the truth is, it was as if he had suddenly felt lost and had come in there in the hope of finding some meaning to life. It may have been exactly that. Looking for a meaning to life in those crooks’ behaviour. That was when I found out he planned to marry a whore, and when I asked him about his pharmacy he told me he’d put someone from Pico in charge, because his intention was to come to Buenos Aires and gamble. I don’t know if you heard he was thrown out of one club for cheating. It was even said he was trying to pass off fake chips, but that was never proved. I first heard of you when I asked him about his fiancee, a young millionairess from Cachari who was madly in love with him:

“‘I broke that off a while back,’ he told me.

“‘Why?’

“‘I don’t know … I was fed up … bored.’

“I insisted:

“‘But why did you drop her?’

“A sour gleam shone in his eyes. He waved his hand to drive off the flies circling round his beer mug, and growled:

“‘How should I know? Because I was so bored … because I’m such a mug. And the poor girl really loved me. But what could I offer her? Anyway, all that’s water under the bridge …’”

“Ergueta said that?”

“Yes. His exact words were: ‘that’s all water under the bridge, because tomorrow I’m marrying someone else’.”

The train pulled out of Flores. Hunched in his seat, Erdosain recalled how he had studied the pharmacist’s face as a nervous muscular twitch lent it an evil look.

“And who are you marrying?”

Ergueta’s face turned white. As he leant his huge head forward towards Erdosain, his left eye winked, while the other one seemed to disassociate itself from the rest, holding back to observe the surprise that would soon render Erdosain speechless:

“I’m marrying the Harlot,” he said, lifting a face in which his eyes had now rolled back completely.

“I didn’t move,” Erdosain told me later.

The pharmacist had an expression of such ecstasy on his face that he looked like one of those saints in a popular lithograph kneeling with hands clasped to his chest in devotion.

Erdosain remembered that while this was going on, the black man who had been touching up the boy’s behind now placed the youngster’s hands on his private parts; a gaggle of newspaper vendors was engaged in a shouting match, and the giant bar owner was striding across the room with a plate of soup in one hand and a reddish stew in the other, ordered by two famished pick-pockets over in a corner.

And yet he was not really surprised by the decision. Ergueta had made this kind of desperate choice because he was one of those hysterics whose obsessions lend them a kind of slow-burning fury, a deep-down explosion they do not hear go off, but whose shock waves increase their sensitivity a hundred times. However, Erdosain put on a show of remaining completely calm and asked him:

“The Harlot … who is the Harlot?”

Blood rushed back to Ergueta’s face. His eyes began to sparkle.

“Who is she? … She’s an angel, Erdosain. In front of these eyes, my very own eyes, she tore up a 2,000-peso cheque a lover had given her. She gave her maid a pearl necklace worth 5,000 pesos. She gave the porter and his wife all her silverware. ‘I’ll enter your house naked,’ she told me.”

“But that’s all lies!” Erdosain imagined Hipólita saying to him.

“At the time, I believed him. And he went on:

“‘If you only knew all that woman has suffered. Once, after her seventh abortion, she was so desperate she went to throw herself out of the fourth-floor window of the clinic. All of a sudden … it’s incredible … but Jesus appeared to her on the balcony. He stretched out his arm and would not let her jump.’”

Ergueta was still smiling. All at once he put his hand in his pocket and handed Erdosain a photo.

The delicious creature was very appealing.

She was not smiling. The background contained a scattering of palm trees and ferns. She was sitting on a bench with her head slightly tilted as she read a magazine on her knee. With her legs crossed, this gave her dress a bell shape above the grassy lawn. Her hair was scraped back and piled high on her head, which made the moon of her forehead seem even broader and more luminous. Her eyebrows formed a slender arch above her fine nose, perfectly setting off her slightly slanting eyes in the delicate oval of her face.

As he stared at the photograph, Erdosain felt sure he would never feel any desire for Hipólita, and this certainty made him so happy he began to imagine how wonderful it would be to caress this odd creature under her chin, or to hear the sand crunching beneath her sandals. He muttered:

“How beautiful she looks! She must have a sensitive soul!”

How different she was in reality!

By now, the train was passing through Villa Luro. The electric lights shone sadly among the coal heaps and the gasometers shrouded in mist. Great black holes opened in the side of engine roundhouses, and the sight of red and green lights suspended here and there in the distance only made the train whistles sound even more plaintive.

How different the Cripple was in reality! Yet Erdosain rcmembered saying to Ergueta:

“How beautiful she is! … She must have a sensitive soul!”

“Yes, that’s right. Everything about her is delightful. I like adventure. Imagine the faces of all those who doubted my communist credentials! I’ve dropped a money-bags, a virgin, to marry a prostitute. But Hipólita’s soul is what really marks her out. She also loves adventure and noble hearts. Together we can do great things, because the times are at hand …”

Erdosain took up the pharmacist’s phrase:

“So you think the time is at hand? …”

“Yes, dreadful things are bound to happen. Don’t you remember you once told me even President Roosevelt was full of praise for the Bible?”

“Yes, but that was a long time ago.”

Erdosain said that because in fact he could not recall ever having said anything of the sort to Ergueta, who now insisted: “I’ve been reading the Bible a lot in the country …”

“Which doesn’t stop you living as recklessly as ever.”

“That’s not the point,” Ergueta cut in sharply. Irritated, Erdosain stared at him, but the pharmacist merely smiled a childish smile and as the barman placed another mug of beer in front of him, went on:

“Just listen to these mysterious words I found in the Bible: ‘And I shall save the Cripple, I will lead the lost sheep back into the fold and raise their names up to be praised in every country of confusion.’”

At this, an extraordinary silence fell over the bar. All that could be seen were bowed heads or little groups staring at the antics of flies on the sticky grime of the table-tops. One thief was showing a colleague a jewelled ring; their two heads bent together to examine the stones.

A ray of sunlight shone in through the half-open glass door, slicing the smoky blue atmosphere in two like a bar of sulphur.

Ergueta said again: “and I shall save the Cripple, and will lead the lost sheep back” emphasising with a malicious wink the words as he finished, “and raise their names up to be praised in every country of confusion.”

“But Hipólita isn’t a cripple …”

“No, but she is the lost sheep and I am the swindler, the ‘son of perdition’. I’ve gone from brothel to brothel, from anguish to anguish in search of love. I thought I was looking for physical love, but after I read the holy book I saw that what my heart was yearning for was divine love. See? The heart follows its own secret path. You get big ideas, you think you know what you want, and yet you can’t get it … you don’t know why … it’s a mystery … Then one day, out of the blue, the truth appears. And as you know, I’ve lived the life of a ‘son of perdition’; that’s been my life. Before he died coughing up blood in Cosquin, my father wrote me a terrible letter full of recriminations. And he didn’t sign it with his name, but put: ‘Your father, the Cursed one’. What d’you make of that?” At this, Ergueta’s nervous wink lifted both eyebrows so alarmingly that Erdosain asked himself:

“What if he’s mad?”

Then the two of them left the bar. Cars glided down Corrientes gleaming in the sun, a crowd of people passed by on their way to work, and the yellow shop awnings gave all the women’s faces a colourful tinge. They went into the Ambos Mundos café. Groups of shady-looking characters sat round the tables, playing cards or dice. Others were playing billiards. Ergueta took a good look round, then spat and said out loud:

“A load of pimps. They should all be strung up without even bothering to see who they are.”

No-one took the insult personally.

Despite himself, Erdosain found he could not forget some of Ergueta’s earlier words: “I was looking for divine love.” In those days, Ergueta was leading a sensual, frenzied life. He spent all day and night in gambling dens and whorehouses, dancing, getting drunk, picking terrible fights with crooks and pimps. A blind impulse drove him to commit the most appalling deeds.

One night Ergueta was in Flores Square, opposite the Niers cafeteria. He was with Delavene the drunk, who had qualified as a lawyer a month earlier, and lots of other rowdies from the Flores Club. They were jostling and abusing all the passers-by. Spotting a Spanish immigrant coming up to them, Ergueta undid his fly and as the man reached level, sent a stream of urine over him. The Spaniard thought better than to argue, and walked off cursing. So then the pharmacist challenged Delavene, who was always boasting of his exploits:

“OK … I bet you won’t piss on the first person to come by.”

“You’re on.”

Everyone guffawed, because they knew Delavene the Basque was a wild animal. Soon, a man turned the corner in front of them, and Delavene started to urinate. The stranger tried to move out of the way, but the Basque almost fell on top of him, and succeeded in soaking him.

Then something terrible happened.

Without a word, the victim came to a halt. The gang of men was laughing and whistling, when all of a sudden he pulled out a gun, a shot rang out, and Delavene fell to his knees clutching his stomach. The Basque had a slow and horrible death. Before he died, he nobly admitted he had been the one to blame, and afterwards whenever Ergueta got drunk and Delavene’s name was mentioned, he would kneel down and trace a cross with his tongue in the dust.

Erdosain asked him:

“Do you remember the Basque?”

As he rolled a cigarette, the pharmacist gave him a long, hard look, then said:

“Yes, he had a noble heart … he was one in a million. Some day I’m going to pay for him,” but then, switching his thoughts back to a more recent concern, he went on: “I’ve been thinking a lot lately. I was wondering if it was right for a sterile, ill, dissolute man like me to marry a virgin …”

“Does Hipólita know?”

“Yes, she knows everything. And besides, if the woman is a virgin, the man should be too. He should be virgin of body and soul. That’s how things will be some day. Can you imagine a handsome, strong and virgin male like that?”

“That’s how it should be,” Erdosain murmured.

The pharmacist glanced at his watch.

“D’you have something to do?”

“Yes, I need to go home to see Hipólita soon.”

“That really surprised me,” Erdosain told the author of this story later on — the Ergueta family had a luxury mansion, and the mentality of the people who crept around like snails in it was completely conservative and conventional. Erdosain asked him:

“What d’you mean? You took her home?”

“You can’t imagine all the tales I had to invent! She didn’t want to go … or rather, she accepted the idea, but insisted on hiding nothing …”

“She didn’t!”

“She did: I only managed to get her to change her mind at the very last moment. I told mamma I had snatched her from her relatives just as they were boarding a ship for Europe … a real cock and bull story!”

“What about your mother?”

Erdosain had been on the point of asking him if his mother had been taken in by a lie like that, as if Hipólita’s face bore the traces of the harsh ways she had earned her living …

“How did your mother react?”

“She told me to take her home at once. When I presented her, she kissed her and asked: ‘Has he respected you, daughter?’ And Hipólita lowered her gaze and responded ‘Yes, mamma.’ What’s more, it was true. I should tell you that both she and my sister Sara are delighted with her.”

When he said that, Erdosain had the sudden foreboding that this hapless couple were heading for disaster. He had not been mistaken, and as he sat in the underground train while it rumbled through Liniers, he remembered how right he had been and said to himself: “It’s strange, first impressions are never wrong.” Back then, he had asked Ergueta when they were getting married:

“We’re leaving for Montevideo tomorrow. That’s where we’re holding the ceremony, in case we don’t get on” — as he said this, his eyebrow shot up again and he smiled cynically, adding: “I’m nobody’s fool, you know.”

Erdosain was incensed at this kind of precaution. Unable to restrain himself, he protested:

“How’s that? … You’re not yet married but you’re already thinking about divorce? So what kind of a communist act is that? Deep down you’re still just a cheating gambler.”

The pharmacist simply gloated at this, as proud of himself as a loan shark who will accept any insult provided it’s made by someone paying up. He cackled:

“You have to be on the ball, my friend.”

Erdosain was appalled by such a callous attitude.

He thought of the delicious creature in the photo and imagined her having to put up with this monster under a sky swept by dark dust clouds and an awful burning yellow sun. She would wilt like a fern transplanted to a rock pile. Erdosain stared angrily at his companion.

The gambler noticed how annoyed he was, but said:

“I have to do something to bring down this society. There are days when I suffer unbearably. It’s as if everything that happens is out of control, like a plunging wild beast. It makes me want to go out into the street and preach mass murder, or to set up a machine gun on every street corner. You must see it: terrible times are coming.

“‘The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father.’ We have to do something to strike back at this accursed society. That’s why I’m marrying a prostitute. As the Scriptures say: ‘And you, son of man, are to judge the bloodthirsty city, and to show all its abominations.’ And what about this, just listen to this: ‘And she fell in love with thieves whose flesh is as that of asses, whose liquids stream out like those of horses.’” At that he turned and pointed to the pimps clustered round the tables playing cards, and said: “Look at them. Go into the Royal Keller, to Marzzoto’s, to the Pigall or the Maipú, and you’ll see them everywhere. Lost souls. Even riff-raff like them are bored to death. Come the revolution and they’ll either be strung up or sent to the front line. Cannon fodder. I could have been like them, but I changed my mind. A terrible time is coming. That’s why the holy book says: ‘I will save the Cripple and return the lost sheep to the fold because the city is enamoured of its thieves, and they are the ones who crushed the Cripple and led the sheep astray, but some day soon they will have to prostrate themselves and kiss their feet.’”

“But do you love Hipólita?”

“Of course I do. Sometimes I think she must have climbed down from the moon on a ladder. Wherever she is, people will be happy.”

And for an instant Erdosain truly believed she had indeed climbed down from the moon so that the whole of mankind could rejoice in her calm simplicity.

The pharmacist went on:

“A time of blood is at hand, a time of vengeance. The soul of mankind is weeping. But no-one wants to listen to the tears of their angel. And our cities are like the whores, enamoured of their criminals, their thieves. It can’t go on.”

He stared out into the street for a moment, and then said in a sorrowful tone, as if listening to a voice inside him in this sad café:

“What we need is for someone, some angel, to appear. People would fall to their knees in the Avenida de Mayo. Cars would come to a halt, bank managers and the rich in their hotels would come out on to their balconies and wave their arms about, shouting at him indignantly: ‘What do you want, toad face? Don’t bother us’, but he will arise, and their arms will drop to their sides when they see his tiny soulful face, his eyes burning with fever, and he’ll address all these stuck-up people, he’ll talk to them, ask them why they have done wrong, why they have forgotten the orphans and abused their fellow man, why they’ve made a hell out of life when it can be so beautiful. And they’ll not know what to answer, and the voice of the avenging angel will ring out so loudly that their hair will stand on end, and even the most heartless of them will weep.”

The pharmacist’s bulging mouth twisted in anguish, as if he had swallowed a viscous, bitter poison.

“Yes, we need Christ to come again. Even the lowest of men, even the most disgusting cynics are full of suffering. And if He doesn’t come, who else can save us?”

THE ESPILA FAMILY

The train stopped at Ramos Mejía. The station clock was showing eight at night. Erdosain got off.

A dense fog hung over the muddy streets of the suburb.

Away from the station in Centenario, with a wall of fog in front and another behind him, he remembered that the next day they were going to kill Barsut. It was true. They were going to kill him. Erdosain would have liked to have a mirror to hold up so he could see his murderer’s body, so incredible did it seem that he was the one (the “I”) who through this crime was about to separate himself from the rest of humanity.

The streetlamps shone feebly, their shafts of woolly light only penetrating the dark of the pavements for a couple of yards, while the rest of the suburb remained invisible. Filled with an immense sorrow, Erdosain walked on as disconsolate as a leper.

He felt as though his soul had finally become detached for ever from any human emotion. His anguish was that of a man who carries a fearful cage inside him, where prowling, blood-stained tigers yawn among a heap of fish bones, their remorseless eyes poised for their next leap.

As he walked on, Erdosain considered his life as if it were this other person’s, trying to understand the forces that rose from the tips of his fingernails to howl in his ears like a hot dusty wind.

Immersed in the fog whose clammy dankness penetrated even the furthest recesses of his lungs, Erdosain eventually reached Gaona, where he stopped to wipe the sweat from his brow.

He banged on a wooden gate, the only entrance to a huge shed lit by a single kerosene lamp. A hand pulled the door open, then the figure of a young man muttering obscenities disappeared round the corner of the building along a brick path that rocked uneasily under his feet in the mud.

Erdosain came to a halt outside a lighted glass door. He clapped his hands and a hoarse voice shouted: “Come in!”

Erdosain went in.

The sooty flame of an oil lamp lit the five heads of the Espila family, as they peered up from their supper plates. They all greeted him with cheerful smiles, and Emilio Espila, a tall thin youngster with a mop of hair, leapt up to shake his hand.

Erdosain greeted them one by one: first the mother, bent double by her years and dressed all in black; then Luciana and Elena, the two young sisters; then Eustaquio, who was deaf and such a long thin streak of a man it seemed he must have tuberculosis. As usual, he was poring over a magazine while his nose was deep in his plate, his grey eyes flitting to and fro as they deciphered the pictures.

The warm smiles the two girls gave him made Erdosain feel a little better. Luciana was blonde, and had a long face with a snub nose and a wide thin mouth with bright pink sensual lips, while there was something of the nun about Elena, with her waxy, oval face and long skirts, her plump pale hands.

“Will you eat with us?” the mother wanted to know.

Noting how little there was in the pot, Erdosain replied that he had already eaten.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes … I’ll just have some tea.” They made room for him at the table, and Erdosain sat down between deaf Eustaquio, who went on puzzling out his magazine, and Elena, who shared out the rest of the stew between Emilio and her mother.

Erdosain looked at them with a sense of pity. He had known them for many years. At first the family had been relatively well-to-do, but then a series of disasters had left them in complete misery. One day Erdosain had bumped into Emilio in the street and had paid them a visit. He had not seen them for seven years and was amazed to find them all living in a wretched hovel when before they had had a maid, parlour and living-room. The three women slept in the same room cluttered with old furniture, that they used to eat lunch and supper in; Emilio and Eustaquio slept in the lean-to kitchen with its tin roof. They took on a fantastic variety of jobs to try to make ends meet: selling brochures, homemade ice cream, dressmaking in the case of the two sisters. One winter they were so hard up they stole a telegraph pole and sawed it up in the night. On another occasion, they took a whole row of fence-posts; the scrapes they got into to raise money amused and at the same time saddened Erdosain.

The first time he had seen them in their new surroundings had been a great shock. The Espila family had moved into a ramshackle three-storey building near Chacarita, divided up by corrugated iron sheets. From the outside the tenement looked like a huge ocean liner, with kids swarming all over it as if it were a religious commune. For days afterwards, Erdosain walked around trying to imagine what the Espila family must have to put up with to live in such a state. Later, when he invented the copper rose, he thought that this new hope might lift their spirits, so with part of the money he stole from the Sugar Company he bought a second-hand accumulator, an amp-meter and the other equipment needed to set up a simple galvano-plastics workshop.

He managed to persuade the Espilas to devote their spare time to his experiments, arguing that if they were successful they would all be rich. And he, whose life was so bereft of consolation or hope, he, who had felt so lost for so long, instilled such keen hopes in them that they agreed to give it a try. Elena began to seriously study galvano-plastics, while Eustaquio learnt how to prepare the chemical baths and to join up the amp-meter wires in series or in opposition, and to measure the resistance. Even their mother took part in the experiments, and when they managed to coat a sheet of tin with copper, they were all convinced that all they had to do was to apply the process to roses, for their fortunes to be made.

Erdosain also spoke of making gold lacework, silver curtains, copper veils for hats. He even mentioned the possibility of a metallic necktie, which astonished them all. Or they could make shirts with metallic fronts, cuffs and collars, by taking cloth, soaking it in a saline solution, then putting it through a galvano-plastic bath of copper or nickel. Gath Chaves, Harrods or San Juan would buy the patent. One day Erdosain, who only half-believed in all this, began to think he had gone too far in stimulating these fantasies, because now, despite the fact that they made no money and were almost dying of hunger, they dreamt at the very least of buying a Rolls-Royce and a mansion, which had to be on Alvear Avenue or nowhere at all. As Erdosain bent over his tea-cup, Luciana, blushing slightly, responded to Emilio’s questioning smile with a shake of the head — but he carried on regardless, blurting out with a ferocious lisp because he had hardly a tooth in his head:

“Gueth what … the rothe is a realithy …”

“Yes, we’ve managed to make one, thank God!”

Luciana jumped up, opened a sideboard drawer, and Erdosain smiled with delight. Between the fingers of the fair maiden gleamed the copper rose. The marvellous metal flower spread its vermilion petals through the wretched hovel. The lamp’s quivering flame picked out a red transparent glow, as if the flower contained a botanical life that had been consumed by the acids, but was its very soul.

The deaf brother lifted his nose from his plate of endives. He looked first at his pictures then at the rose, and exclaimed in a booming voice:

“There’s no two ways about it, Erdosain… you’re a genius …”

“Yeth … with thith we’re bound to be rithch …”

“God willing …” said the old lady.

“Don’t be tho doubting, mother!”

“Was it a lot of work?”

With a serious smile, Elena launched into a scientific explanation: “Listen, Remo, the first time round Emilio here gave it too many amperes, so the rose was singed …”

“And the bath didn’t precipitate?”

“No … so we warmed it up a bit …”

“And then for this one, we added some fixing agent …”

“Thath’s right … a bath of fixer … thlowly …”

Remo examined the rose again, marvelling at its perfection. Each red petal was almost transparent, and below the metal film he could just make out the veins of the natural petal, which the fixing agent had turned slightly black. It weighed hardly anything, and Erdosain added:

“How light it is! It weighs less than a five-cent piece …” But then, noticing a yellow stain on the flower’s pistils that spread up into the petals, he went on:

“When you take the flowers out of the chemical bath you need to wash them very carefully. See these yellow lines? They’re from the cyanide in the bath, which is eating away the copper.”

The circle of heads clustered round him, listening in religious awe. He continued: “It forms copper cyanate, and we don’t want that because it attacks the nickel plating. How long did it take?”

“An hour.”

When Erdosain raised his eyes from the flower, he found Luciana staring at him. Her eyes were velvety with a mysterious warmth, and her broad smile revealed gleaming teeth. Puzzled, Erdosain looked at her. Her deaf brother was examining the rose, while all the other heads peered over his shoulder at the yellow streaks of cyanide. Luciana was still staring at him. All at once, Erdosain remembered that the next morning he was to help kill Barsut, and an intense sadness led him to lower his eyes. This gave way almost immediately to a feeling of anger at these deluded people who had no idea of all the suffering and anguish he had been through over the past few months. He stood up and said:

“All right then, I’ll be seeing you.”

Even the deaf Eustaquio looked up in horror. The old woman stood rooted to the spot, her hand outstretched holding a plate she was about to give him. Elena pushed back her chair: “What’s the matter, Remo?”

“But … Erdosain …”

Elena looked him up and down:

“Is something wrong, Remo?”

“Nothing, Elena, believe me …”

“Are you angry?” asked Luciana, her eyes full of their mysterious, sad warmth. “No, not at all … I really wanted to see you all … but now I have to go …”

“Are you sure you’re not angry?”

“No, señora.”

“I understhand … all the worries you hafth …”

“Shut up, you fool!”

Eustaquio decided to abandon his magazine and repeat what he had said earlier. “I warn you, you’ve got to take this seriously, it means you’ll be rich.”

“Are you sure nothing is wrong?”

Erdosain picked up his hat. He felt a deep disgust at having to say all these useless things. Everything was settled anyway. So what was the point of talking? Yet he made one last effort, and said:

“Believe me … I like you all a lot … just as much as before … don’t worry … I’m not angry … I’ve got lots more ideas … we can set up a dog’s hair salon and sell pets dyed green, blue, yellow and purple … as you can see, I’m not short of ideas … you’ll get out of this horrible misery one day … I’ll make sure of that … as you can see, I have more than enough ideas.”

Luciana looked at him with pity in her eyes. She said:

“I’ll come with you.”

The two of them went out to the street.

The fog blocked off the road beyond sad patches of light around the oil streetlamps. Suddenly, Luciana grasped Erdosain’s arm and whispered to him:

“I care for you so much, I really do.”

Erdosain shot her an ironic glance. All his anguish had turned to cruelty. He said: “I know.” She went on: “I love you so much that just to please you I’ve studied how a blast furnace and a Bessemer converter work. D’you want me to explain what the joists are for, or how the cooling process is carried out?”

Erdosain stared at her coldly. He was thinking: “There’s something wrong with this woman.”

She went on:

“I always think of you. D’you want me to explain how to analyse different types of steel, or how to smelt copper? Or the gold-washing process; or what muffles are in furnaces?”

Erdosain gritted his teeth. He stumbled along the street thinking only that man’s existence is absurd, and an inexplicable anger rose in him again, directed against this sweet girl who was clutching his arm and saying:

“D’you remember that time you told me your ideal was to be in charge of a blast furnace? The thought drove me crazy. Why don’t you say anything? So I began to study metallurgy. Shall I tell you the difference between an irregular carbon distribution and a molecularly perfect one? Why don’t you say anything, dear?”

A train rushed by in the distance, the cotton wool of the fog turned to pitch blackness a few feet from the streetlamps, and Erdosain would have liked to speak, to tell Luciana of all his misfortunes, but still his obscure, angry resentment kept him tense and silent at her side, as she went on:

“What’s the matter? Are you angry with us? But it’s you we’ll have to thank for our fortune.” Erdosain looked her up and down. He grasped her arm roughly and growled:

“I’m not interested in you.” Then he turned on his heel, and before she had time to react, strode off quickly into the fog.

He knew he had gratuitously insulted her, but this only gave him such a cruel sense of satisfaction that he muttered under his breath:

“I hope they all croak and leave me in peace.”

TWO SOULS

At two the next morning, Erdosain was still struggling through walls of wind in the downtown streets, searching for a brothel.

A dull buzzing rang in his ears, but still a frantic instinct drove him on through the shadows that the tall house-fronts cast on the pavement. He was filled with an overpowering sadness. He wandered on aimlessly.

Like a sleepwalker he went on, staring glassy-eyed at the nickel arrows of the badges on policemen’s helmets as they glinted in street-corner lights, the scrolls of brightness from the neon lamps … an extraordinary impulse kept him striding on. He had come all the way from the Plaza de Mayo, and now was heading up Cangallo past the Plaza Once.

He was filled with a dreadful sadness. His mind was stuck endlessly on the same point. He said over and over to himself:

“It’s useless. I’m a murderer.” Yet whenever he glimpsed the red or yellow light over the porch of a brothel, he stopped, hesitated for a moment, bathed in the coloured mist, then said to himself: “It must be another one,” and went on his way again.

A car passed silently by him and disappeared at speed. Erdosain thought of the happiness he would never enjoy, of his lost youth; and his shadow first stretched out across the pavement, then grew shorter, disappeared under his footsteps, and reappeared dancing at his back or flickering across a shiny sewer grating … but his anguish was getting heavier by the minute, like a tidal wave sapping the strength from his limbs. In spite of this, Erdosain imagined that by a stroke of providence he had finally found the brothel he was searching for.

The madam opened the door to the bedroom, and he flung himself down fully dressed on the bed. In one corner water was boiling on a small paraffin burner … all of a sudden the half-naked girl came in … and stopping short in an astonishment that only the two of them understood, the prostitute exclaimed:

“Ah, so it’s you … it’s you … you came at last!”

And Erdosain replied:

“Yes, it’s me. If you only knew how I’ve searched for you!”

But since it was impossible for this to happen, Erdosain’s sorrow bounced back like a lead ball off a rubber wall. And he also knew that as the days went by his wish to have an unknown whore take pity on him would become as useless as that lead ball for piercing a hole in the armour of life. He said to himself once more:

“Ah, so it’s you … it’s you … you came at last, my sad love! …” but it was all pointless, he would never find that woman; and so once more a fierce energy born of desperation filled his muscles, spread through his seventy kilos, gave him a fresh impetus to plunge on through the shadows, while within the block of his chest, an immense sadness tore his heartbeats to shreds.

To his surprise he found himself outside the front door of his rooming-house. He decided to go in. His heart was pounding wildly.

He crossed the corridor to his room on tiptoe, and opened the door carefully. He felt his way over to the corner where the sofa was, and slowly curled up on it, trying hard not to make any noise. Later on, he could not explain why he had done this. Then he stretched out on the sofa and lay with his hands cupped behind his head. It was even darker in his soul than in the darkness around him, which would turn into a wall-papered box if he lit the lamp. He tried to think of something outside himself, but it was impossible. This created a childish fear in him; he strained his ears, listening for some sound, but in vain, so he closed his eyes. His heart was pounding loudly, pushing the mass of blood round his body; the hairs on his back stood on end as if cold water was pouring down it. With his eyelids clamped shut and his body rigid, he waited for something to happen. Then he realised that if he stayed like that he would cry out with fear, so he drew up his feet until he was sitting cross-legged like a buddha, and sat in the darkness. He felt torn to pieces, but could not call out to anyone, or even cry. But he could not stay squatting like that all night.

He lit a cigarette and was frozen with shock.

The Cripple was standing at the edge of the screen, staring at him with her poisonous cold gaze. Her hair hung down to the tips of her ears in two smooth bands, and her lips were pursed. She seemed anxious to help him, but Erdosain was frightened. At last he mumbled:

“You!”

The match was burning his fingers … then an impulse stronger than his shyness drove him to get up. He went over to her in the darkness and said:

“You? Why weren’t you asleep?”

He sensed she was stretching out her arm, then felt her fingers cupping his chin. Hipólita said gravely: “And why can’t you sleep?”

“You’re stroking me?”

“Why can’t you sleep?”

“You’re touching me? How cold your hand is! Why is it so cold?”

“Light the lamp.”

Light poured down from the ceiling. Erdosain stood staring at her as she sat on the sofa. He murmured shyly: “Shall I sit beside you? I couldn’t sleep.” Hipólita made room for him. As he sat next to her, Erdosain found it impossible to keep his hands still, and caressed her forehead with his fingertips.

“Why are you the way you are?” he asked.

Hipólita looked at him coolly.

Erdosain stared at her for a moment in mute despair, then reached out for her slender hand. He was about to raise it to his lips when some strange force prevented him doing so. With a sob, he slumped on her lap.

He started weeping uncontrollably as she sat straight-backed, watching his body shaking without any sign of emotion. He wept blindly, his life a knotted ball of hopeless fury; he could not cry out in pain, but choking back the rage only served to increase his dreadful sorrow; suffering poured out of him in endless waves, drowning him as it sobbed from his throat. He broke down in this way for several minutes, biting his handkerchief to keep from screaming, while her silence was a soft cushion for his exhausted spirit. Slowly this intense agony wore itself out; the last tears welled up in his eyes, while his breathing was a confused rattling sound in his chest. He found comfort in being stretched out like this, wetcheeked, on a woman’s lap. He felt completely drained; the figure of his distant wife finally disappeared from the surface of his torment; and as he lay there a twilight calm descended on him, an acceptance of whatever disasters were in store for him.

He raised his face, red from the tears and imprinted with the folds of her dress.

She was still eyeing him coolly.

“So you’re sad?”

“Yes.”

They both fell silent as a violet flash of lightning lit the corners of the dark patio outside. It began to rain.

“Should we have a drink of maté?”

“Yes.”

He boiled the water without saying anything more. As he poured the maté leaves into the container, she stared absent-mindedly at the rain beating on the windows. Smiling through his tears, he said:

“You’ll like the way I make it.”

“Why were you so sad?”

“I don’t know … a feeling of anguish … I haven’t felt at peace with myself for so long now.”

He was drinking the maté in silence. Hipólita stood out perfectly against a corner of peeling wallpaper, wrapped in her fur coat and with the two bands of her hair covering the tips of her ears.

Erdosain smiled a childish grin, and confessed: “When I’m on my own, I drink a lot of maté.”

She smiled in a friendly way. She was leaning forward, one leg crossed over the other, elbow cupped in her hand as she sipped slowly through the nickel-plated drinking straw.

“Yes, I felt at the end of my tether,” Erdosain said again — “but how cold your hands are! Are they always like that?”

“Yes.”

“Can I take your hand?”

Hipólita straightened up and held it out to him with an almost regal gesture. Erdosain took hold of it gently, then raised it to his lips. She stared at him for a long moment, all the coldness of her eyes melting in a sudden warmth that brought colour to her cheeks. All at once Erdosain remembered the chained-up prisoner, but this did not entirely demolish the pale sense of hope being kindled in him. He said:

“Listen … if you asked me here and now to kill myself, I would. I’m so happy!”

The warmth that an instant earlier had lit the depths of Hipólita’s eyes was snuffed out, replaced once again by her cold gaze. She stared at him intrigued.

“I’m being serious. I’m going to … no. It’s better for you to ask me to kill myself … tell me, don’t you think it would be better if certain people just ceased to exist?”

“No.”

“Even though they do terrible things?”

“That’s in God’s hands.”

“Then it’s not worth talking about it.”

Again they sat drinking their maté in silence. This gave him the chance to enjoy the spectacle of this red-headed woman dressed in her fur coat, her transparent hands clasped round the knee of her green silk dress.

Unable to contain his curiosity, he burst out:

“Is it true you were a maid?”

“Yes … what’s so strange about that?”

“It’s odd.”

“Why?”

“It just is. Sometimes I think I’m going to find what’s missing in my life in someone else’s. I feel that some people have found the secret of happiness … and if they would only tell us that secret, we could be happy too.”

“But my life is no secret.”

“Have you never felt how strange life is?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It was when I was a young girl. I worked in a beautiful house on Alvear Avenue. There were three daughters and four servants. I would wake up in the morning and still could not believe I was the one moving in and out of all this furniture that wasn’t mine, among people who only spoke to me to give orders. Sometimes I felt everyone else was well-anchored in their existence, in their houses, but I was loose, only attached to life by a thread. I heard other people’s voices in my ears like when you’re half-asleep and you’re not sure whether you’re dreaming or it’s real.”

“That must be really sad.”

“Yes, it’s sad to see other people happy, to see they don’t understand that you are unhappy and always will be. I remember that when it was time for my afternoon nap I would go to my room and instead of mending my clothes or whatever, I would sit thinking: ‘Am I going to be a maid all my life?’ It wasn’t the work I found tiring, but this constantly going over things in my mind. Have you noticed how sad thoughts refuse to go away?”

“Yes, that’s true. How old were you then?”

“Sixteen.”

“And you hadn’t slept with a man?”

“No … but I was angry … angry at the thought of being a maid all my life … and there was one thing that stuck in my mind more than anything else. It was one of the sons. He was engaged to be married, and he was a staunch Catholic. I caught him several times making love to a cousin of his who I now realise must have been his fiancee: she was very sensual, and I always asked myself how he could reconcile his Catholicism with this disgusting way of carrying on. Despite myself, I ended up spying on him … although he was always the perfect gentleman with me, not at all like he was with her. Later on I realised that what I had been looking for was … but by then it was too late … I was already working in another house …”

“And then?”

“I was still haunted by my obsession. What did I want from life? I hadn’t the slightest idea. Everybody treated me very well. Since then, I’ve heard people do down the rich … but I never saw their cruelty. That’s just how things were. They had no need to be cruel, did they? They were the daughters, and I was the maid.”

“And then?”

“I remember that one day I was on a tram with one of my employers. Opposite us a pair of young men were chatting. Have you noticed how some days there are certain words which explode in your ears like bombs … as if you had always been deaf and all of a sudden you really hear people speak for the first time? That’s how it was. One of the young men said: ‘If an intelligent woman, no matter how ugly, decided to sell herself, she would get rich and if she was careful not to fall in love with anyone, she could rule a whole city. If I had a sister, that’s what I’d tell her.’ His words made me freeze in my seat. They drove away all my shyness, so that by the time we got off the tram I felt it was not someone else who had spoken these fateful words, but me, although I had forgotten them until that moment. For days after that, I was troubled by the problem of how one actually goes about selling oneself.”

Erdosain smiled: “That’s amazing!”

“I spent my first month’s wages on buying books to try to find out. That was a mistake, because almost all of them were stupid, pornographic books … they weren’t about selling yourself, but the sadness of pleasure … And, believe it or not, none of my friends could explain to me properly what it meant.”

“Go on … I’m not surprised that Ergueta fell in love with you. You are an extraordinary woman.”

Hipólita blushed with pleasure.

“Don’t exaggerate … I have common sense, that’s all.”

“Tell me more, delicious creature.”

“What a child you are! Well then …” — Hipólita pulled the lapels of her coat across her chest, and went on — “I was working the whole day as before, but the work seemed increasingly strange to me … I mean that while I was scrubbing or making a bed, my thoughts were far away, or buried so deep inside that sometimes I got the feeling that if they got any bigger they would burst through my skin. But still I couldn’t solve my problem. I wrote to a bookshop asking if they could sell me a manual on how a woman should sell herself, but I had no reply. Then one day I decided to see a lawyer about it. I went to the court district, and looked at plaque after plaque until finally I came to Juncal, where I stopped in front of a fine building. I talked to the doorman, and he took me up to see a qualified lawyer. I can remember it as if it were yesterday. He was a thin, serious-looking man who looked like a wicked bandit, but he had the smile of a little kid. Thinking it over afterwards, I decided he must be someone who suffered a lot.”

She sipped the maté, then gave him back the gourd, and said:

“It’s so hot in here! Couldn’t you open the door?”

Erdosain half-opened one side of it. It was still raining. Hipólita went on:

“I didn’t hesitate, but told him straight out: ‘I’ve come to see you because I want to know how a woman goes about prostituting herself.’ He sat staring at me in amazement. After a few moments, he asked: ‘For what reason do you wish to know this?’ I calmly explained my reasons, and he listened carefully, frowning and pondering on what I was saying. Eventually he said: ‘For a woman, selling her body means to engage in sexual acts without love and for money.’ ‘You mean,’ I replied, ‘that by selling your body you can free yourself from it … you can be free.’”

“That’s what you told him?”

“Yes.”

“That’s so remarkable!”

“Why?”

“And then?”

“I left his office almost without a word of goodbye. I was happier than I had ever been before. To sell your body, Erdosain, that meant freeing yourself of it, having your mind and will free to achieve whatever you wanted. I felt so happy that when a nice-looking young guy came past and propositioned me, I went with him.”

“And then?”

“I got such a surprise! Once the man … I’ve already told you he was a good-looking young fellow … once he had had his fill, he collapsed like a pole-axed steer. At first I thought he must have been taken ill — I never imagined anything like that. But once he’d explained to me it was natural in men, I couldn’t stop myself laughing. So men, who seem as strong as bulls … well! D’you remember that story about the thief in a room full of gold? At that moment I, the maid, was the thief in the room full of gold. I realised the world was mine … afterwards, before I became a real prostitute, I decided to study everything about it … yes, don’t look so surprised, I read all I could get my hands on … from all the novels I read, I came to the conclusion that men thought educated women had extraordinary powers of love … I don’t know if I’m making sense … what I mean is that culture was simply a veneer to increase the value of the goods for sale.”

“Did you ever enjoy being possessed?”

“No, but to return to what I was saying: I read everything.”

Erdosain felt a wave of sympathy for her uncompromising attitude, and said softly: “Would you give me your hand?” She did so, gravely. He took it gently, and raised it to his lips. She stared at him in silence, but Remo suddenly remembered the chained-up prisoner, who by now must be awake in the stables. This image could not dispel the gentle sweetness lulling his senses, and he said:

“Look, if you … if you were to ask me to kill myself here and now, I’d do it with pleasure.”

She stared at him through her red eyelashes.

“I’m being serious. Tomorrow … today … it’s better … ask me to kill myself … tell me, don’t you think it’s better if certain people just cease to exist?”

“No, that isn’t right.”

“Even though they become criminals?”

“Who can judge another person?”

“Then there’s no more to be said.”

He drank the maté in silence as before. Erdosain suddenly saw how sweet many things could be. He stared at her, then said:

“What an extraordinary creature you are!”

She smiled with pleasure, and his soul rejoiced.

“Shall I make some more?”

“Yes.”

Hipólita stared at him solemn-eyed.

“Where did you get that soul of yours?”

Erdosain was about to tell her of all he had suffered, but a sense of shame held him back. Instead, he said:

“I don’t know … I’ve often thought about purity … I would have liked to be a pure man …” — then, warming to his words — “I’ve often felt sad at not being one. Why? I’ve no idea. But can you picture a man with a spotless soul falling in love for the first time? And for everyone to be the same? Can you imagine how great the love must be between a pure woman and a pure man? Before they gave themselves to one another, they would kill themselves … or rather, she would give herself to him … and then the two would commit suicide, knowing it was pointless to live without hope.”

“But that’s impossible.”

“And yet it does happen. Haven’t you seen how many shopkeepers and seamstresses commit suicide together? They are in love … but cannot marry … they go to a hotel … she gives herself to him, then they kill themselves.”

“Yes, but they do it without knowing what they’re doing.”

“Maybe.”

“Where did you eat last night?”

Erdosain told her about the Espila family, explaining how they had fallen into abject poverty.

“Why don’t they work?”

“How are they supposed to? They’re always looking for work, but there is none. That’s the worst of it. It seems to me that misery has destroyed their will to live. Eustaquio — he’s the deaf one — has a great talent for mathematics … he can do infinitesimal calculus; and yet it’s no use to him. He also knows ‘Don Quixote’ by heart … although there is something not quite right about him … I’ll just give you one example: when he was sixteen they sent him to buy some maté tea and instead of going to a grocer’s store he went to a chemist’s. After a lot of arguing, he said it was because maté is a medicinal herb … he’d studied it in botany.”

“You mean he has no common sense.”

“That’s right. And he’s also a serious gambler … and he’s capable of going without his supper just to solve a riddle. Whenever he has a few cents he goes down to the shops and stuffs himself with cakes.”

“He sounds weird!”

“Emilio, though, is a good sort. He’s convinced … he told me so himself … that their strange lack of will is because of hereditary reasons, and that thought dominates his life — he moves about as slowly as a tortoise. He can take two hours to get dressed: it’s as if everything he does throws him into a state of total indecision.”

“What about the two sisters?”

“The poor things do what they can … they sew … one of them looks after a friend’s hydrocephalic boy — his head is swollen as big as a melon.”

“How terrible!”

“What I don’t understand is how they came to accept all that. That’s why after I’d seen them in their hovel I was determined to give them some hope … and since I’m a good talker, I managed to convince them. Now they’re all enthusiastic about my copper rose.”

“What’s that?”

Erdosain explained his talents as an inventor. It had all started soon after his marriage, when he dreamt at night of discovering something that would make him rich. His imagination filled the night with extraordinary machines, huge blocks of machinery turning on their greased cogwheels …

“So you’re an inventor?”

“No … not any more … but it used to be important to me. I used to be hungry, terribly hungry for money … maybe I was crazy in a way I no longer am … when I mentioned the copper rose to the Espilas, it wasn’t because of the money I might make, but because I needed to offer them some hope; I needed to see with my own eyes how those two poor girls dreamt of silk dresses, of handsome boyfriends, of a car at the door of a mansion they would never own. And now I’m convinced they believe every word.”

“Have you always been this way?”

“No, only sometimes. Have you never felt the urge to perform works of charity? I can remember this other instance. I’m telling you this because you asked me what kind of soul I have. I remember now. It was a year ago. It was at two o’clock early one Saturday morning. I remember I was feeling sad and went into a brothel. The salon was full of people waiting their turn. All at once the bedroom door opened and the girl appeared … just picture it … she had the round face of a sixteen-year-old … bright blue eyes and a schoolgirl’s smile. She was wearing a green robe and was quite tall … but she had the face of a schoolgirl … She looked round, but it was too late … a ghastly negro with coal-black lips stood up, and so after giving the rest of us a look that offered a promise, she went sadly back inside while the madam glared at her.”

Erdosain paused for a moment and then, with a clearer, slower voice, went on:

“Waiting in a brothel like that fills you with shame, believe me. There’s nothing sadder than to be there, surrounded by pale faces trying to hide their dreadful lust beneath false, evasive smiles. And there’s something even more humiliating … it’s hard to say what it is … but time rushes through your ears, and you can’t help hearing a bed creaking inside, then a silence, and later, the sound of the washbasin … But before anyone else could sit in the black man’s seat, I got up and sat there. I waited with my heart pounding, and when the girl appeared in the doorway I stood up.”

“That’s how it always is … one after the other.”

“I stood up and went in. The door closed behind me; I left the money on the washstand, but when the girl started to open her robe, I took her by the arm and told her: ‘No, I haven’t come here to do that.’”

Erdosain’s voice had taken on a warm glow.

“She stared at me, and it was obvious she must be thinking I was some kind of pervert; but I looked at her with only pity in my eyes, believe me, and I said: ‘Look, I came in here because I felt sorry for you.’ By now we were sitting next to a dresser with a gilded mirror on it, and she was scrutinising my face. How I remember! As if it were happening right now. I said to her: ‘Yes, I felt sorry for you. I know you must earn two or three thousand pesos a month … and that there are families who would be delighted to live on what you splash out on shoes … I know that … but I felt sorry for you, so sorry, when I saw how you were destroying all that’s good in you.’ She stared at me silently, but there was no smell of wine on me. ‘So then I thought … as soon as that black guy came in, I thought I should leave you something nice … and the nicest thing I could think of leaving you was this … to come in but not to touch you … so that you’ll always remember my gesture.’ While I was talking, the girl’s robe fell open, revealing her breasts, and above her knee … all of a sudden, she saw in the mirror what had happened, and quickly smoothed the robe down over her knees and covered her chest. Her gesture had a strange effect on me … she was looking at me without saying a word … heaven knows what she was thinking … then the madam rapped on the door, she glanced towards it in dismay, and turned back to look at me … stared at me for a moment … stood up, took the five pesos and tried to stuff them back into my pocket. She said: ‘Don’t come here again, or I’ll have the doorman throw you out.’ Both of us were standing … I was about to leave by the other door, when I felt her put her arms round my neck … she was staring me in the face, and kissed me on the mouth … how can I possibly describe that kiss? … she drew her hand across my forehead and as I was stepping out of the door, called after me: ‘Good-bye, noble-hearted man.’”

“And you never went back?”

“No, but I still hope that one day I’ll meet her … who knows where … but I’m sure she, Lucienne, will never forget me. Time will go by, she’ll end up in the foulest brothels … turn into a monster … but I’ll always be with her just as I had hoped, as the most precious memory in her life.”

The rain was beating on the door-panes and on to the patio tiles. Erdosain was slowly sipping his maté. Hipólita stood up, went over to the door and stood looking out at the darkened yard. Then she turned back to him and said:

“You’re a strange man, d’you know that?”

Erdosain hesitated for a moment.

“I’ll be honest with you … I don’t know what’ll become of my life … but believe me, it was not in my power to be a good man. Dark forces pulled me away … dragged me down.”

“What now?”

“Now I’m trying an experiment. I met a genius of a man who’s firmly convinced that lies are the basis of human happiness, and I’ve decided to throw in my lot with him.”

“And does that make you happy?”

“No … for a long time now I’ve felt I can never be happy again.”

“But don’t you believe in love?”

“Don’t even mention that!” But then suddenly he realised what the point had been of all his confused attempts to explain, and said: “What would you think of me if tomorrow … or some day … if some day you learnt I had killed a man?”

Hipólita had sat down again. Leaning her head against the sofa back, she looked up at him slowly, that cold look of hers spreading once more from behind her red eyelashes. She said:

“I’d think you were a tremendously unhappy man.”

Erdosain got up from his chair, put away the burner, the maté tea and the gourd in the wardrobe drawer. Hipólita said: “Come here … lie at my feet.” He felt an enormous sweetness inside him. He sat on the carpet, leaning against her legs, and let his head drop into her lap. Hipólita closed her eyes.

He felt wonderful. He was curled up in her lap, and could feel the warmth of her body on his cheek through her dress. It all seemed so natural to him: just as he had always wished, life had become like the cinema; and it never occurred to him in the slightest that Hipólita, sitting stiffly on the sofa, was thinking how weak and sentimental he was … in the pauses of its movement, the ticking of the clock let fall a drop of sound that dripped like water into the room’s hollow silence. Hipólita said to herself:

“He’ll spend all his life whining and suffering. What good’s a man like that to me? I’d have to keep him. And I bet the copper rose is so much junk. What woman is going to want to wear heavy metal ornaments on her hat, especially if they turn black? That’s how all men are. The weak ones are intelligent but useless; the others are brutes and a bore. I’ve never found one capable of slashing all the others’ throats, or of becoming a dictator. They make me sick.”

She increasingly thought this way, as reality tore to shreds the phantoms her imagination briefly dressed in bright colours. She could point them all out. The stiff rag doll, perfumed and stern as he went about his business, priding himself on being so grave and silent, was a lascivious cretin underneath; the small, well-mannered one, always so kind, discreet and sensible, was a slave to the most atrocious perversions; the other one, as violent as a haulier and as strong as an ox, was as clumsy as a schoolboy … so they all filed past her, all linked by that same, unquenchable desire: and all of them had at one time or another let their weary heads droop on to her bare knees; and all the time she put up with their clumsy hands, the fleeting desires that stiffened these sad dummies, she thought of life as having to go thirsty in the midst of a desert.

That’s how life was. Men were only moved to act by hunger, lust or money. That’s how life was.

In despair, she even came to think that the only man who really interested her was the pharmacist. He at least had been able to rise for a few moments above the dreadful call of the flesh; but the lure of gambling had broken his mechanism, and now he lay even more in pieces than any of the other dolls.

What a life she had led! In her youth, when she had been a destitute young girl, she had known she would never have any money, nor a house filled with beautiful furniture, nor gleaming china services … and that impossibility had made her as sad then as she was now in the knowledge that none of the men she might seduce had it in him to be a dictator or a conqueror of new lands.

INNER LIFE

What dreams she had dreamt!

Some days she dreamt of a sensational encounter with a man whose talk would be of jungles and who kept a pet lion in his house. He would be a tireless lover, and she would worship him like a slave; she would take pleasure in shaving her armpits for him, or painting her breasts. Disguised as a boy, she would accompany him to ruins where giant centipedes lurk, to places where black tribes built huts in the forks of trees. But Hipólita had never found her lions, only flearidden dogs, and the most adventurous men she had met were bar-counter heroes, mystics worried about their next meal. She fled their petty lives in disgust.

As time went by, the few people she met who could have been characters from a novel proved to be less interesting than she had imagined, precisely because what made them stand out in the novel were the revolting characteristics that made them unbearable in real life. Yet she gave herself to them.

Once they were satisfied, they soon left her, as though ashamed of allowing her to see their weakness. From then on, she sank into the sterile wastes of her life as if she were wandering through a familiar desert of sand.

It was as impossible to transform men’s souls as it was to turn lead into gold.

How often had she collapsed naked into the arms of a stranger and whispered to him: “Wouldn’t you like to go to Africa?” At this, the man would leap up as if he had been lying next to a rattlesnake. Hipólita ended up feeling that these bodies, with their muscles and their splendid bone structures, were in fact weaker than little children, more frightened than the babes in the wood.

At the same time, she detested women. She saw how everywhere they prostrated themselves beneath male passion, then went around displaying their hideously swollen bellies. They seemed born to suffer: they were a race of tired people, sleepwalking phantoms that reeked of the earth in their gravid somnolence, like huge slow-moving monsters from prehistoric times. To see them all weighed down in shackles like that crushed her soaring soul. Hipólita would have liked to live in a less dense universe, one as light as a soap bubble, defying gravity. She imagined how happy she would be if she could skip along all the paths of the world changed to suit her desire, if she could turn each passing day into a game that would make up for all those she had never played in her childhood.

When she was little, everything had been denied her. She recalled that as a child, one of her fondest dreams had been that if only she could have wallpaper in her room she would be happy.

In hardware stores she had seen rolls of wallpaper that — to her impoverished imagination — looked like a guarantee of bliss for anyone who surrounded themselves with it; wallpaper that was like bringing the enchanted wood to a house, with its whorling, fantastic blue flowers on golden backgrounds. This seven-year-old dream was every bit as intense as the illusion when she was a maid that happiness would come from owning a Rolls-Royce. Its leather upholstery was no more precious in her mind than the equally impossible wallpaper at sixty cents a roll.

Her mind strayed to former times. Sitting with Erdosain’s head on her lap, she remembered Sunday afternoons when the sky suddenly turned stormy and a gust of cold wind sent the family scurrying in from the garden to the drawing-room. The rain would beat on the window-panes as she sought refuge in the gleaming, spotless kitchen, the voices of the visitors reaching her from distant rooms as the women chattered and the young girls leafed through magazines, pausing to look at the photos of society weddings, or played the piano.

She meanwhile sat at her table twisting the tip of her apron in her fingers, bending forward to catch the sounds, which always seemed sad to her even when they were talking of pleasurable topics. She felt as excluded as a leper from happiness. The piano music brought her images of different worlds, of mountain hotels, where she would never be the newly-wed who came down on the arm of her handsome spouse to dinner, with its warm chink of china, and birds fluttering outside windows that gave on to a splendid waterfall. Legs crossed, she twisted the tip of her apron between her fingers, head down as she listened.

She would never have a husband like Marcelo in a popular novel, nor spread her shawl over the velvet hand-rail of an opera box, while diamonds glittered in duchesses’ ears, and violins scraped softly in the orchestra pit.

Nor would she ever be one of those young married women she was used to serving, women tenderly spoilt by their husbands as pregnancy swelled their aching stomachs. And sorrow spread through Hipólita like darkness through the twilight.

“To be a servant … always a servant!” At this, her anguish became tinged with anger: her brow felt heavy, her red eyelashes closed in resignation.

Sounds of the piano from the drawing-room took her dreamy imagination through a succession of countries; Hipólita imagined that the young ladies’ education must make their minds more beautiful and desirable for their suitors. Her head was as heavy as if her skull had become a helmet of lead bones.

Everything around her, from the pots and the stove, the spotless kitchen shelves to the bathroom mirrors or the red lampshades, seemed to her so valuable she would never be able to afford anything like them; everything, from dishcloths to carpets to the children’s tricycles, seemed to her to be there to bring happiness to people made from some different stuff.

She even thought the girls’ clothes, the fine materials they used to adorn their precious bodies with, their lace and their ribbons, must be totally different from whatever she was able to buy for the same money. This feeling of living for a short while with people who inhabited a world separate from her own left her in dismay, to the point where despair was as plain as a blotch on her face.

What could she possibly be except a servant, always a servant!

An obscure refusal gradually took shape in her heart, a response to the invisible phantom that was consuming her with rage. Her life became one long resistance to domesticity. She did not know how she was going to escape from this chain of unhappiness, but she never failed to tell herself that this was only a passing phase, even though she had no idea what was going to become of her. She spent days observing the way the girls of the house behaved; she studied the way they moved their heads, how they said goodbye to their friends at the door; later on in front of her mirror she imitated what she remembered of their gestures. And for a few short hours, these imitations in her cramped lonely room left on her lips and in her mind the sensation of being one of them, of being every bit as precious as they were — so that she rejected her own previous clumsy way of being, as if she had grown out of it now she had assumed her true personality as a refined young lady.

So for a few hours her life took on the delicate, penetrating softness of a vanilla-flavoured cream; she almost felt the melodious sounds of the “yeses” and “noes” in her own throat, to the point where she imagined herself replying to a delightful companion wearing a blue fox fur round her neck.

Her maid’s room was filled with elusive phantoms. Seated in a chair lined with alligator silk, she received friends who had come to say goodbye before a trip to “Paris, France” and talked endlessly about boyfriends. “Her mother wouldn’t allow her to spend her summer holidays with X … because they would be sure to run into S … that gossip who was courting her too assiduously.” Or she saw herself crossing the ocean, which was as flat and calm as the lakes in Palermo Park, sitting in a wicker chair just like the ones she had seen in the photos of the luxury liners, when in reality she was crossing the street to buy groceries at the market. She would be sitting with a Kodak on her lap while a young man would have come, cap in hand, to bow and talk timidly to her.

Her maid’s soul was overflowing with happiness. She thought it must be so wonderful, that if only she had been rich in this way her charity would have been boundless. She pictured herself on a dark winter’s evening scurrying along a miserable street, wrapped in her squirrel coat, to meet an orphan girl, the daughter of a poor blind man. She helped raise her, adopted her as her own daughter, until eventually she came out in society, by now a radiant young beauty, bare shoulders rising out of a frenzy of organdie, while across her clear brow a lock of golden hair perfectly set off the delicate curve of her almond eyes.

Just then a voice called out:

“Hipólita … serve the tea, would you?”

A CRIME

Erdosain suddenly lifted his head and Hipólita said, as if she had been thinking of him:

“You too … you were unhappy too, weren’t you?”

Erdosain took her cold hand and brushed it against his lips.

She went on slowly:

“Sometimes life seems like a bad dream. Now I feel I am yours, the heartbreak from earlier times comes flooding back. Always, everywhere, there is suffering.”

Then she said:

“What do we have to do not to suffer?”

“The problem is, we carry it around inside us. I used to think it was outside, floating in the air … but that was ridiculous: the fact is, unhappiness is within us.”

They fell silent. Hipólita was softly stroking his hair, then all at once took her hand from his head and Erdosain felt it pressed against his lips.

He got up and sat beside her, murmuring:

“Tell me, what have I done for you to make me so happy? Don’t you see you’ve brought heaven within my grasp? I was feeling so bad before …”

“Has no-one ever loved you?”

“I don’t know; but I’d never seen the terrible passion of love. I was twenty when I married, and believed in it as pure spirituality.” He hesitated for a moment, but then got up, blew out the lamp, and sat down on the sofa next to Hipólita. He said:

“Maybe I was a fool. Before we were married, I hadn’t even kissed my wife. I’d never felt the urge to do so, because I mistook the coldness of her feelings for purity … because I thought one should not kiss a decent young woman.”

Hipólita smiled in the darkness. By now, Erdosain was perched on the edge of the sofa, his elbows digging into his knees, his chin cupped in his hands.

A violet lightning flash lit the room fleetingly.

He went on slowly:

“To me, a well brought-up young woman was the true expression of purity. And also … don’t laugh … I was shy … on our wedding night, when she got undressed quite naturally with the light on, I turned my head away, embarrassed … and I got into bed with my trousers on …”

“You did that?” Hipólita’s voice trembled with indignation.

Erdosain began to laugh excitedly:

“Why not?” He started rubbing his hands, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye. “I’ve done that and a lot worse. Not to mention what I will do … ‘The time is at hand,’ your husband used to say. I think he was right. Of course the things I mentioned were from a period in my life when I behaved like an idiot. I’m telling you this so you can be sure that if I did sleep with you I wouldn’t keep my trousers on …”

Hipólita was suddenly anxious. Erdosain kept on glancing at her out of the corner of his eye, rubbing his hands all the time. She said cautiously:

“You must have been ill. Like me when I was a maid. You weren’t in your element.”

“That’s right, not in my element … exactly that. I remember when people called me an idiot.”

“You too?”

“Yes, to my face … I would stand there staring at whoever insulted me, and while all my muscles relaxed and went loose, I asked myself what I had done, at any time in my life, to allow me to bear so much humiliation and cowardice. I suffered so … so much that I often thought of going and offering myself as a servant in some rich man’s house … How could I suffer any more humiliation? So I felt terrified, a ghastly fear of not having any noble goal to my life, no great dream. But now at last I’ve found one … I’ve condemned a man to death … no, don’t stand up … tomorrow, because I’m not doing anything to stop it, a man will be murdered.”

“But that’s not possible!”

“Yes, it is. The man who believes in lies, the one I mentioned to you earlier, needed money to finance his plan. And it will happen, because I want it to. Tomorrow he’s going to give me a cheque to cash. When I do, the condemned man will die.”

“It’s not possible!”

“It is. And what’s more, if I don’t go back, they won’t kill him, because without the money the crime is pointless … it’s 15,000 pesos … I could run off with the money … then his secret society would never happen … and the other man would be saved … d’you follow me? Everything depends on my thief’s honour.”

“My God!”

“I want the experiment to go ahead … isn’t it strange how certain circumstances turn you into a god? For a long time now I’ve been determined to kill myself. If you had said ‘yes’ when I asked you earlier, I would have done it. If you only knew how fine and noble I feel now! Don’t say anything more about the other matter … it’s all settled, and I’m even glad to think of the pit I’m flinging myself into. Can you understand that? And then some day soon … no, it won’t be a day … some night, when I’ve had my fill of all this farce and confusion, I’ll be gone.”

A line creased Hipólita’s forehead. There was no doubt about it: the man was mad. Like the adventuress she was, she was already foreseeing future problems, and said to herself: “you’ll have to be careful where this imbecile is concerned”. Folding her arms across her coat, she asked him:

“But do you have the courage to kill yourself?”

“That’s not the point. It’s not about courage or cowardice. I know deep inside that killing oneself is just the same as going to have a tooth pulled. Once I realise that, I feel perfectly calm. It’s true I had thought of other journeys, other lands, another life perhaps. There’s something in me that wants everything that’s fine and beautiful. I’ve often thought that if … say with those 15,000 pesos I get tomorrow … I could go to the Philippines … or to Ecuador to start a new life, marry a gentle young millionairess … we could sleep our siestas in a hammock under the coconut palms, while black waiters bring us slices of orange … and I would gaze sadly out to sea … d’you know something? … this certainty I have that wherever I go I’ll gaze sadly out to sea … this conviction I can never be happy again … at first it drove me wild … but now I’ve got used to it …”

“So why carry on with the experiment?”

“Why? I feel I still haven’t got to the bottom of myself … this crime is my last hope … and the Astrologer knows that, because when I asked him if he wasn’t afraid I would run off with the money, he answered: ‘No, not for the moment, no … you more than anyone need this to be able to escape from your anxiety …’ So you can see how caught up in it I am.”

“I’d never have dreamt it. They’re going to kill him in Temperley?”

“Yes. And yet … Who knows? Anguish! Have you any idea what that means? To feel that anguish has made you rotten to the core like syphilis? Listen, I’ll tell you something that happened four months ago: I was waiting for the train in a country station. It was going to arrive in forty-five minutes, so I walked across to the town square. A few minutes later, a young girl about nine years old came to sit beside me on the bench. We began to talk … she was wearing a white schoolgirl’s apron … she lived in one of the houses opposite … Slowly, unable to control myself, I turned the conversation to an obscene topic … but cautiously, feeling my way. I was obsessed with an appalling sense of curiosity. Hypnotised by some kind of instinct, the child listened to me trembling … while slowly my face took on a criminal look … so that back in the signalmen’s box two railway workers began to watch me closely … but still I revealed to her the mystery of sex, and encouraged her to lead her friends astray …”

Hipólita squeezed her temples between her fingers.

“You’re nothing but a monster!”

“Now I’ve reached the end. My life is a disaster … I have to create the foulest messes for myself … to commit sin. Don’t look at me. Perhaps … listen: people have forgotten the meaning of the word sin … sin is not simply a mistake … I’ve come to realise that sin is an act by which a man breaks the slender thread still linking him to God. It means God is denied him for ever. Even if after committing the sin that man’s life were purer than the purest saint’s, he could never reach God again. And I’m going to break the slender thread that connected me to divine charity. I know it. As from tomorrow, I’ll be a monster on the face of this earth … just picture it, a little creature … a foetus … a foetus that was somehow living outside its mother’s womb … unable to grow … covered in hair … tiny … with no fingernails … walking among men without being one itself … its fragility horrifying all those around it … and yet there’s no force on earth capable of restoring it to the lost womb. That’s what’s going to happen to me tomorrow. I’ll cut myself off from God for ever. I’ll be alone on this earth. My soul and me, just the two of us. With infinity in front of us. Alone for ever. Night and day … under a yellow sun. Can you picture it? Infinity growing all the time … a yellow sun up above, and the soul which cut itself off from divine charity wandering alone and blind under that yellow sun.”

The floor shook with a dull thud, and all of a sudden something extraordinary happened. Aghast, Erdosain fell silent. Hipólita was kneeling at his feet … She took his hand and smothered it with kisses. In the darkness she exclaimed:

“Let me … let me kiss your poor hands. You’re the unhappiest man on earth.”

“Get up, Hipólita. It’s you who have suffered so much! Get up, please, I beg you …”

“No, I want to kiss your feet” — he could feel her arm, clutching his legs — “You’re the most unfortunate man on earth! How you’ve suffered, dear God! How noble you are … how noble your soul is!”⁴

With infinite tenderness, Erdosain lifted her up. Overwhelmed by a sense of infinite pity, he drew her close to him, smoothed the hair on her brow, and said:

“If you only knew how easy it will be for me to die. Just like a game.”

“What a noble soul you have!”

“D’you have a fever?”

“Poor boy!”

“Why? We’re like gods. Come and sit beside me. Is that all right? Look, little sister, all my suffering has been erased by your words. We can live a little longer …”

“Like an engaged couple …”

“And when the great day arrives, you’ll be my bride.”

“I love you so much! … What a noble soul!”

“Then we’ll leave all this behind.”

They said nothing more. Hipólita’s head lay across his chest. It was almost dawn. Erdosain stretched her tired body out on the sofa … she gave an exhausted smile; then he sat down on the rug, leant his head against the edge of the sofa, curled up and fell asleep.

PRESENCE OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS

That same night, reclining on his sofa in his darkened study with his arms folded and his hat down over his eyes, the Astrologer was pondering the problems facing him. He could dimly hear the rain beating on the window-panes, but his mind was fixed on his many plans. And something strange was happening to him.

As the moment for the crime drew near, he felt a second, personal sense of time growing within the space of normal time. So he felt he existed in both of these times. One was that of all the normal states of life, the other was fleeting but heavy, part of his heartbeats, slipping through his fingers locked in meditation like water out of a reed basket.

So the Astrologer, held within clock time, could feel this other accelerated time speed endlessly through his brain like a cinema film that has slipped and spools out its images, in a blurred, exhausting way that exasperated him, because before he could clearly grasp an idea it had vanished and been replaced by another. So much so that when he lit a match to look at his watch, he found only a few minutes had passed, whereas he had thought that those mechanical minutes, speeded up by his anxiety, had been so long they were immeasurable.

This feeling kept him on the look-out in the dark. He understood that any mistake he made in his current state could be fatal to him later on.

He was not so much concerned about Barsut’s murder as about the precautions needed to keep it from assuming too much importance. And even though he was supposed to be working out an alibi, he found it difficult. He felt that the person sitting there in the dark was not him, but his double, someone forged by emotion to his exact same shape, with the same oblong features, folded arms, and hat down over his eyes. But he found himself unable to fathom the thoughts of this double so closely linked to himself, yet so distant from his understanding. At these moments he felt that this sensation of existing had taken over from his mere bodily existence. When he came to explain this feeling later on, he said it was the awareness of the different time-scale that emotions moved in, set inside that other clock time — like people who say: “that minute seemed like a century”.

This inability to think was important because he had to take a man’s life, to stop the circulation of his five litres of blood, to turn all his cells cold, rubbing him out of life like a blot from a piece of paper, leaving no trace behind. Since the Astrologer could not rid himself of such a weighty problem, he sensed that his physical being was part of mechanical, clock time, whereas his double was located in the slowed-down speed of this other time that no clock could measure — and that this double was also deep in thought, in not just an enigmatic but a truly mysterious way, busy with who knew what alibis that would later take the thinking man completely by surprise.

The certainty that the impending crime had transformed him into a twin mechanism with two such different rhythms and pauses left him limp and sombre in the darkness. A terrible weariness overwhelmed his muscles, his powerful limbs, the joints of his bones.

The rain started up the brief croaking mechanism of the frogs in the ditches, but he, the man of action, pounded by anxiety to the point where he felt all his bones had been flattened until he could not even stand, said to himself: “I, a man of action, am unable to move, stuck in this mechanical measure of time while I am prey to another time I have no control over — a time which makes me drop my guard. Because while there’s no doubt that killing a man is as simple as slitting a lamb’s throat, that’s not how it seems to others — and although they are remote, and my behaviour is a mystery to them, this abnormal time draws them closer, so that I can barely move, as if they were all there in the shadows, spying on me. It must be this subconscious time that’s paralysing me, the subconscious Astrologer who’s keeping his ideas to himself, and leaving me as limp as a squeezed orange when it comes to thinking up the ideas I need. And yet, once Barsut is dead, life will go on as if nothing had happened … and the truth is, nothing will have happened, if only this state of mind passes.”

He lit another match. Arrowheads of moving shadow flickered round the room. Scarcely a minute had gone by. His thoughts were simultaneous, and swept together in this absence of time facts which, if they had taken place in real time, would have needed months if not years to become apparent. So, he had been born forty-three years and seven days earlier, but this past was constantly being swallowed up by the present, which itself was so fleeting it was always the Astrologer of the next minute who was being consumed in the instant. Now his life was pointed towards an action that did not as yet exist but which in a few hours would be a fact; it was as if he were a bow drawn back within mechanical time, a bow whose primed violence conveyed a dim sense of its extraordinary tension to that ordinary clock time.

Despite the fact that he had always said that if he had the chance to kill someone he would not miss the opportunity, he still found himself worrying about this mysterious other time. Then he began to imagine a dictatorship which would keep itself in power through terror imposed by a whole series of executions; picturing all the people shot as horizontal corpses helped him escape from his fears of the moment. He conjured up the image of a tiny man stretched out in the midst of a huge plain, and comparing the length of this dead body with the thousands of kilometres he ruled over, he convinced himself that the life of one man was insignificant.

So the man would rot underground, while he, rid of this human obstacle that measured less than a tiny fraction of the lands he controlled, would go on to further glorious conquests.

Then he thought of Lenin rubbing his hands and telling the Soviet commissars: “This is madness. How can we make a revolution if we don’t shoot anyone?” The Astrologer’s heart leapt for joy. He would make sure his society adopted the same principle. The future founders of races would be instilled with this strict political discipline; the thought gave him fresh impetus. Then it occurred to him that any innovator has to struggle against outmoded ideas that form part of his own make-up, and he saw that all his current hesitations were a result of a conflict between principles yet to impose themselves and those already established.

Time slipped through his fingers, clasped together in thought.

Today’s murderer would be tomorrow’s conqueror, but in the meantime he had to put up with the sordid resistance of a present mixed with all it contained of the past. He stood up, feeling angry. It was still raining. He went out to the front steps, and stood there staring out into the darkened garden, where the slow, heavy rainfall was making the trees and shrubs quiver. It seemed as though the dark shadows were a monster panting heavily in the black night. The soaked earth had turned a dark ochre colour … and there he was, a strong man in the night, the driving force for great events, and yet no phantom rose out of the darkness to confirm his presence. He wondered whether men in earlier times had been so indecisive, or if they had marched off to their destinies happy in the knowledge that death was sufficient armour for their struggle. Was death that important, though? He told himself that as a philosophical being all that could possibly interest him was the species, not the individual; but at the same time his feelings were assailing him with doubts, splitting the time he needed into two against his will.

A flash of lightning drove blue distances between the mountainous banks of cloud. Soaking and dishevelled, the Man Who Saw the Midwife was standing beside the steps.

“Oh, it’s you!” the Astrologer gasped.

“Yes, I wanted to ask how you interpret the verse from the Bible that says: ‘the heaven of God’. Surely that means there are other heavens not of God’s making …”

“Whose are they then?”

“I mean, it could be that there are heavens where God does not exist. Because the verse goes on: ‘And the new Jerusalem will descend.’ The new Jerusalem? Does that mean the new church?”

The Astrologer thought for a moment. He wasn’t interested in the matter, but he knew that to keep his prestige in the other man’s eyes he would have to say something, so he replied:

“We, the enlightened ones, secretly know that the new Jerusalem is the new church. That’s why Swedenborg says: ‘Since our Lord cannot show himself in person, and given that he has announced that he will come and establish a new church, it follows that he will do this by means of a man, who not only will receive the doctrine of this church but will publish it in the press …’ But why from just this one reference do you assume that there must be various heavens?”

Bromberg came and sheltered under the porch. He stared out at the wet, panting darkness and said:

“Because heavens are something you feel, like love.”

The Astrologer stared at him in surprise, but the Jew went on:

“It’s like love. How can you deny love if it’s inside you and you feel the angels making it stronger all the time? It’s the same with the four heavens. Everything in the Bible is a mystery, of course, otherwise the book would be completely absurd. The other night I was reading the Book of Revelation. I was sad at the thought we had to kill Barsut, and wondered if it was permitted to shed human blood.”

“There’s no blood shed when you strangle someone,” the Astrologer observed wryly.

“And when I got to the part speaking of the ‘heaven of God’ I understood why mankind was so sad. God’s heaven had been denied it by the church of darkness … and that’s why men have sinned so much.”

In the darkness, Bromberg’s childish voice sounded as mournful as if he were lamenting being cast out of the true heaven. The Astrologer put in:

“The winged man who speaks to me in my dreams has told me that the end of the church of darkness is nigh …”

“That must be true … because hell is growing day by day. So few people are saved that compared to hell, heaven is the size of a grain of sand next to the ocean. Hell grows year after year, and the church of darkness which should have saved mankind only swells its numbers; so hell grows and grows, with no chance of ever shrinking. And the angels look on in fear at the church of darkness and the fiery hell that is swollen like the belly of a dropsy victim.”

The Astrologer answered, in a lofty tone:

“That’s why the winged man told me, ‘Go, holy man, to enlighten mankind and preach the good news. Drive out the antiChrist and reveal the secrets of the new Jerusalem to Bromberg’” — at this, he seized his companion by the arm and said — “Don’t you remember when your spirit talked to angels and you served them white bread at the roadside, then sat them on your doorstep and washed their feet?”

“No, I don’t remember.”

“Well, you should. What will the Lord say when he hears that? How will I vouch for your soul to the angel of the new church? He’ll say to me: ‘What has become of my beloved son, my pious Alfon?’ And what will I say to him? That you’re a craven swine. That you have forgotten the times when you led an angelic existence, and that now you spend the whole day in a corner breaking wind like a mule.”

Mortally offended, Bromberg objected:

“I do not break wind.”

“Yes, you do, and noisily too … but that doesn’t matter … the angel of the new church knows your spirit burns with true devotion, and that you are the sworn enemy of the King of Babylon, the Pope of darkness. That is why you have been chosen to be a friend of he who following the Lord’s command will establish the new church on this earth.”

The rain fell softly on the leaves of the fig trees; all the acrid, soft darkness released a damp smell of vegetation into the heaving shadows. Bromberg prophesied gravely:

“And the Pope, the Pope himself will run barefoot into the street in horror, and everyone will flee from him, while along the roads arches will be garlanded with flowers to honour the Holy Lamb as he passes by.”

“That is how it will be,” the Astrologer agreed. “And heaven will open to reveal all the repentant sinners and the golden gates of the new Jerusalem. God’s charity is so boundless, my beloved Alfon, that no man may come into direct contact with it without first falling to the ground, their bones turned to mush.”

“That’s why I want to share my view of the Apocalypse with mankind, then head for the mountains to do penance and pray for them all.”

“That’s right, Alfon, but go to bed now, because I have to think, and it’s time for the winged man to come to whisper in my ear. You have to sleep too, because otherwise you won’t be strong enough to strangle the criminal in the morning …”

“— and the King of Babylon.”

“That’s right.”

The Man Who Saw the Midwife slowly moved away from the steps. The Astrologer went back into the house, climbed a staircase that rose from one side of the hallway, and found himself in a long, narrow room with bare rafters beneath the tiles of the sloping roof.

There were no pictures on the flaking walls. Barsut’s trunks were in one corner, while under a round bull’s eye window stood a red-painted wooden bed. A black bedspread clashed with the white sheets. The Astrologer sat on the edge of the bed deep in thought. His coat fell open, revealing his naked, hairy chest. He stroked his drooping moustache with open fingers, then sat staring with a frown at one of the trunks.

He wanted to project his thought on to something new outside himself that would break up the rhythm of his feelings and help him rediscover the presence of mind he had prided himself on before the plan to murder Barsut had complicated things.

“Twenty thousand pesos” — he thought — “twenty thousand pesos to set up the brothels and our training camp … our camp …”

But he still could not think clearly. Ideas slipped away from him like shadows; in his permanently divided state, his thoughts spooled out, making it impossible to concentrate. Then all of a sudden the Astrologer slapped himself on the forehead and jubilantly went into the adjoining loft and dragged out a loosely fastened old trunk, which gave off a thick cloud of dust.

Unconcerned about getting this all over his coatsleeves, he opened the box. Inside was a jumble of lead soldiers, wooden dolls, a heap of clowns, toy generals, princesses and strange fat monsters with chipped lips and frog’s mouths.

He took out a piece of rope and tied it to two nails across one of the corners of the room. Then he fished several puppets out of the box and threw them on to the bed. He tied a piece of string round the neck of each of them; he was so absorbed in his work he did not even notice that as the rain fell harder and harder, the wind was blowing it in through the half-open window.

He was enjoying himself. He finished tying the strings round the puppets’ necks, then cut them into different lengths, went over to the corner, and hung the dolls from the rope. When he had finished, he stood back to stare at his creation. The five hanged dolls threw hooded, quivering shadows on to the pink wall. The highest was a harlequin who had lost his trousers but still had his black-and-white checked jacket. The next was an idol with chocolate-coloured skin and scarlet lips, whose watermelon head was level with the harlequin’s feet; the third was a clockwork pierrot, with a bronze disc on his stomach and a monkey’s face; the fourth was a blue cardboard sailor; fifth and last came a black puppet which had lost his nose and showed a plaster wound in the white expanse of his stiff cravated neck. The Astrologer stood back to consider his work. His back was to the lamp, and his huge dark shadow rose to the ceiling. He shouted out loud:

“You, harlequin, are Erdosain; you, big fellah, are the Gold Prospector; you, clown, are the Thug; and you, black man, are Alfon. Everyone agreed?”

His speech over, he pulled Barsut’s trunk away from the wall, set it in front of the puppets and sat looking at them. Then a silent dialogue began, with the Astrologer asking the questions and receiving the replies inside him whenever he looked directly at one of the figures.

This helped make his thoughts crystal-clear. He needed to express his ideas in this staccato telegraphic form, without interruption, as if everything about him had to keep up with the emotional turmoil he felt deep inside.

These were his thoughts:

“Important: set up poison gas factories. Get the chemicals. For the cells, not cars, but trucks. Solid tyres. Training camp in mountains, nonsense. Or no. Yes. No. Also, factory on banks of River Parana. Cars with nickel steel armour plating. Poison gases important. Revolution breaks out in Chaco and in mountains. Kill brothel owners. Gang of murderers in aeroplane. Everything possible. Radio-telegraph for each cell. Changeable code and wavelength. Electric current from flow of water. Swedish turbines. Erdosain is right. Life is limitless. Who am I? Lab for bubonic bacillae and contagious typhus. Set up academy comparative studies French and Russian revolutions. Also school revolutionary propaganda. Cinema important element. Note: see film-maker. Get Erdosain to study it. Film-maker devoted to revolutionary propaganda. That’s it.”

The rhythm of his thoughts slowed down. He said to himself:

“How to instil in everyone’s mind the same revolutionary fervour I feel? Yes, yes! What lie or truth to use? How quickly time rushes by! And how sad! Because it’s true; there’s so much sadness in me, they would all be amazed if they knew. And it’s me who has to keep the whole thing going.”

He curled up on the sofa. He was cold. The veins at his temples throbbed.

“Time slipping away. Yes. Yes. And all of them as heavy as sacks of potatoes. Not one who wants to fly. How can I convince those donkeys they have to fly? True life is different; different from anything they have ever dreamt of. The soul like an ocean crashing inside seventy kilos of flesh. That same flesh that wants to fly. Everything within us yearning to reach the clouds, to make castles in the sky a reality … but how to do it? There’s always that ‘how’, and me … me here, suffering for them, loving them as if I had given birth to them, because I do love those men … I love them all. They’re here on this earth for no particular reason, but they could be so different. And yet I love them. I’m sure of it now. I love all humanity. I love them as if they were all attached to my heart by a fine thread. And they suck out my blood, my life, and in spite of it all there’s so much life left in me that I’d like there to be millions more of them so I could love them even more, and offer them my life. Yes, offer it them like a cigarette. Now I understand Christ. How he must have loved humanity! And yet, I am ugly. My huge fat face is ugly. I should be beautiful like a god. But I have a cauliflower ear, and a bony boxer’s nose. But what does that matter? I’m a man and that’s enough. And I need to conquer. That’s all there is to it. I wouldn’t give up a single one of my thoughts for the love of the most beautiful woman.”

All of a sudden some earlier words of his crept into his mind. The Astrologer said to himself:

“Why not? … We could make cannons, just like Erdosain says. It’s an easy enough process. Besides, they won’t need to be fired a thousand times. Any revolution which took that long would be a failure.”

He has run out of words. In the darkness the interior of his skull is filled with the image of a gloomy passage-way with beams holding up the sides of a corrugated iron shed; at the centre, among clouds of coal dust, rise the blast furnaces, their cooling systems like monstrous armour plating. Tongues of fire leap from the reinforced furnace mouths, while outside thick, impenetrable jungle stretches into the distance.

The Astrologer feels he has regained his personality from the strange double time that stole it from him.

He is thinking it would be possible to make chrome-plated steel and recoiling guns. Why not? His thoughts glide agilely now over the possible problems. With the money they earn from the brothels, they can buy plots of land all over Argentina for next to nothing. There the society members could build reinforced concrete emplacements for the artillery, disguising them as grain silos.

He is excited by the idea of creating a revolutionary army throughout the country, which would rise up on a radio signal from him. Why not? Steel, chrome, nickel. The words echo in his brain like a spell. Steel, chrome, nickel. Each cell leader would be in charge of an artillery battery. What was essential? For their cannon to fire four or five hundred shells. And machine guns mounted on trucks. Why not? For every ten men a machine gun, a truck, a cannon. Why not give it a try?

Slowly, deep in the dark night, a giant white-hot steel egg supported on two struts lifts its tip up to the roof. This is the Bessemer converter operated by a hydraulic piston. A stream of sparks and flames pours out of the end of the egg. This is the iron being converted into steel thanks to a jet of air blasted through it at hundreds of pounds’ pressure. Steel, chrome, nickel. Why not give it a try? His thoughts focus on a hundred details. A little earlier, the voice inside him had asked:

“Why is it that there’s so little room for human happiness?” This truth makes him sad. The world should be for the few. And those few should stride out like giants.

First create a complicated situation. Then resolve it with clear thought. First, kill Barsut, then set up the brothel, the training camp in the mountains … but how would they get rid of the body? Wasn’t it stupid for someone like him, who found it so simple to make a cannon or manufacture steel, chrome and nickel, to find it so hard to dispose of a single dead body? He shouldn’t waste so much time thinking about it … they can burn it … 500 degrees should be enough to destroy a body in a container. Five hundred degrees.

Time and weariness are gradually taking over his mind. He would like not to think, but suddenly the voice from inside, the one separate from his own voice and will, whispers more suggestions to him:

“The revolutionary movement will rise up simultaneously in every town in Argentina. We’ll attack every barracks. We’ll start by shooting all those who might cause trouble. A few days beforehand, we’ll release some kilos of typhus and bubonic plague in the capital. From aeroplanes at night. Each cell on the outskirts of the capital will cut the railway lines. We won’t let any trains in or out. With control of the country’s nerve centre and all communications cut, and the leaders shot, power is in our hands. All this may sound crazy, but it’s possible. When you’re about to carry out something like this, you’re always in a dream-like state, as if you were sleepwalking. Yet you go towards your goal with a kind of slow-motion speed that makes it all seem so surprising once you’ve got there. All you need is the willpower and money … Apart from our revolutionary cells, we can organise a gang of murderers and thieves. I wonder how many planes the army has? But once the communications are cut, the barracks taken over, and all the leaders shot, who is going to call them out? This is a country of dumb animals. We have to have firing squads. That’s indispensable. We’ll only win respect if we spread terror. Men are nothing but cowards. With a machine gun … How will they organise the forces meant to fight us? With the telegraph and the telephones out, and the railway lines cut … ten men can keep a town of 10,000 people in fear. All they need is a machine gun. Eleven million people in Argentina. The tea plantations of the north would be with us. The sugar-cane areas of Tucuman and Santiago del Estero … San Juan, they’re already half-communist there … the only opposition would be the army. We could take the barracks at night. Once we’ve seized their weapons, shot the officers and strung up all the sergeants, we’d only need ten men to hold a barracks of a thousand soldiers — provided we have a machine gun. It’s so easy. And what about the hand grenades, where do they come into it? If we can take them by surprise at the same time through the entire country, with ten men per town Argentina is ours. The soldiers are young and would follow us anyway. We’ll make officers of the non-commissioned and create the most unlikely army in the history of America. Why not? What are the raids on the San Martin bank, or the hospital in Rawson, or the Martelli agency in Montevideo, compared to this? With three determined newspaper vendors we can take a city.”

An ill-defined anger makes the blood pound in his veins. The blood rushes through his sturdy body, all geared up as if for an attack. He feels stronger than ever, the strength of someone with the power to shoot others.

Each crash from the storm sent the electric light swinging, but the Astrologer went on sitting on the trunk with his back to the bed, legs crossed, chin in hand, staring fixedly at the five puppets, whose ragged shadows leapt and danced on the pink wall.

Behind him, the puddle from the rain seeping in at the window grew, and still the silent questions and answers flew through the air. Sometimes a frown darkened the Astrologer’s face, then a slow blink of his unmoving eyes in the broad face showed he had found a reply that satisfied him. He sat there until dawn, then stood up and turned his back on the five puppets, who were left in the solitude of the room, swinging on their gibbet like five hanged men.

The Astrologer hesitated for a moment, then rushed down the stairs, out of the front door, and strode over in the first light to the coachhouse where Barsut was being held.

The rain had stopped. The clouds had broken up, leaving the sight of a yellow slice of moon in a clear blue sky.

THE REVELATION

While all this was happening, in Las Mercedes asylum Ergueta was experiencing what he was later to call his “meeting with God”. This is how it happened.

He woke at dawn in the ward. An oblong of moonlight painted a blue rectangle on the whitewashed wall opposite his bed. The sky stood out framed by the wooden bars of the open window, a powdery dry blue like plaster dipped in methylene. Between the bars twinkled the watery beams of a distant star.

Ergueta scratched his nose energetically. He was not particularly worried. He understood that he was in a madhouse, but it “was something that didn’t concern him”.

He was worried they might have imprisoned his spirit, but what was actually locked up in the asylum was his body, his body weighing ninety kilos, which he now remembered with a surge of shame he had dragged through so many brothels. Unable to stop himself, he saw again the circus parade his dissolute life had been. What did his spirit have to do with all the fury of his flesh?

He saw this as so obvious he was amazed that the doctors had still not realised it.

Ergueta was delighted at his discovery. He was no longer a man, but a spirit, “a pure sensation of the soul”, its outlines clearly defined within the framework of his flesh, like clouds in the infinite blue.

He felt happy and light. On previous nights he had become convinced he could leave his body, casting it off as casually as a suit of clothes. This sudden conviction made him slightly afraid. At certain moments he even had the sensation that he was only in contact with the tips of his soul, so that the balance between his body, about to fall behind, and the surface of his skin left him nauseous, as if he were travelling down in a speeding lift.

He was also afraid of completely leaving his body behind. If it was destroyed, how would he ever get back into it? The nurse looked a vicious sort, and although Ergueta would have liked to be sure he would not do away with his body before he came back, he could not trust him. But once he had got over this first impression, Ergueta saw him more as a weak child, although this did not stop the nurse laughing at the sight of him trying to control his ninety kilos, unaware of the fact that Ergueta could go wherever he liked … but no … he did not want to play games. His goodness would not allow that. And how beautiful it was to feel himself so full of charity! His compassion spread over the world like a cloud over the roofs of the city.

His body lay further and further below.

Now he could see it as if it were at the bottom of a box: the asylum was just one white cube among a whole row of them; the streets glinted blue among banks of shadow; the green lights of the railway shone feebly; then space entered him like the ocean into a sponge, and time ceased to exist.

The heights fell beneath him in his soaring joy: Ergueta was at peace with himself, a wellspring of goodness willed by some outside force. He rejoiced like a dry lake must rejoice when heaven sends it rain.

As he turned to look on the earth with his charity, he saw its green rounded edges with their filmy coating of the blue ether. And since the sight left him speechless, all he found to say was: “Thank you … thank you Lord.”

He felt no stirring of curiosity. A sense of submission reinforced his humility.

In the celestial fields he suddenly caught sight of a rocky hill. Although it was night, the rocks were bathed in a golden glow, and the blue in the distance fell from the golden heights into deep ravines. His body restored to him, Ergueta walked cautiously forward, his fierce eyes unwavering in his hawk-like features.

Of course he could feel anxious, because his body had fallen into sin on countless occasions, and because he knew that in spite of its present solemn expression, his face bore the violent features of a thug, just like the ones he had imitated as a child in the gangs of his poor neighbourhood.

Yet his spirit was seeking forgiveness, and that might be enough, though he could not help but exclaim: “What will the Lord say of my ‘mug’? How dare I show myself before him?” When he looked down at his shoes and saw how they needed a polish, he was even more afraid.

“What will the Lord say of the way I look; when he sees what a gambler and a pimp I am? He’ll ask about my sins … he’ll remember all the stunts I’ve pulled … and how will I answer him? … that I didn’t know … but how can I say that, when he left proof of his existence with all the prophets?”

He gazed down at his dirty, scuffed shoes once more.

“He’ll say to me: ‘You’ve even turned into a bum … a filthy tramp: you who went to university … you gambled on horses, you besmirched the immortal soul I gave you in orgies, you dragged your guardian angel into brothel after brothel while he wept after you, as you filled your slobbering mouth with abominations …’ And the worst of it is I won’t be able to deny a thing … how can I deny my sin? What a mess, dear Lord!”

Above his head the sky was a blue plaster dome. Distant planets revolved on their axes like oranges, and Ergueta looked humbly up towards the golden rocks.

All at once he became greatly troubled. Lifting his head he saw — not ten paces to his left — the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ.

Wrapped in a sky-blue robe, the Nazarene turned his gaunt profile towards him. One calm, almond-shaped eye shone.

Ergueta was thrown into great confusion — he could not kneel because “a gent never bends his back” and would never kneel before a Jewish carpenter, and yet he felt a tremendous sob wrenching his soul, and silently stretched out his arms, hands clasped in entreaty, towards the silent God.

He felt all his ignoble frame being filled with devotion to him.

Ergueta stared in silence at Jesus perched on the rocks. His eyes brimmed with tears. He lamented that there was no-one else there to come to blows with, just to demonstrate his great love to the Lord, and finally the silence grew so unbearable he overcame his terrible bewilderment and humbly said:

“I’d like to be different, but I can’t.”

Jesus gazed at him.

“Believe me … I find it so hard to tell you I love you.”

Ergueta turned his back, walked three steps away, then turned round and came to a halt again.

“I’ve committed every sin and a lot of cra … nonsense … I’d like to repent, but I can’t … I’d like to be able to kneel … to kiss your feet, you who died on the cross for us … Oh, if you only knew all the things I wanted to tell you, but they’ve slipped my mind … and yet, I do love you. Can I say it because it’s just the two of us here?”

Jesus gazed at him.

A fresh smile graced Jesus’ face.

Ergueta was silent for a moment, then blushed and said shyly:

“Oh, how good you are! How good! You deign to smile on me, a miserable sinner … D’you see? You smiled. Next to you, believe me, I feel like a child, a mere kid. I’d like to worship you my whole life, to be your bodyguard. From now on I will never sin again, I’ll think of you my whole life, and woe be it on anyone who doubts you … I’ll smash his face in …”

Jesus gazed at him.

Then Ergueta, who wanted to give the best he had to offer, said:

“I kneel before you” — he took a few steps forward and when he came level with Jesus bent his head, put one knee on the golden rocks — but just as he was about to prostrate himself, Jesus reached out his pierced hand, touched him on the shoulder, and said:

“Come. Follow me always and sin no more, because your soul is as beautiful as those of the angels who praise the Lord.”

Ergueta wanted to say something, but found himself surrounded by a silent, rushing emptiness. Ergueta understood he had met God. This was obvious, because when he turned to listen to the voices calling out in the dark ward, a madman who had been dumb since birth shouted out in astonishment:

“You look as if you’ve just come down from heaven.”

Ergueta was amazed.

“You have a halo of light round your head like the saints.”

Fear took hold of Ergueta. He leant his head back against the wall. A one-eyed inmate who had been quiet until now suddenly exclaimed: “Miracles … you can perform miracles. You gave the dumb man his speech back.”

Their conversation woke a third lunatic, who spent the whole day squashing lice between his worn, calloused fingers. Turning his bearded face to Ergueta, he said:

“You came to resurrect the dead …”

“And to restore sight to the blind,” the dumb man added.

“And to the half-blind,” the lunatic with one eye missing insisted. “I can see with this eye now.” The deaf-mute pushed himself upright in his bed, and went on:

“But it’s not you doing this, it’s God, who is in your body.”

Bewildered, Ergueta replied:

“It’s true, brothers … it’s not me … but God who is inside me … how could I, a wretched whoremonger, perform miracles?”

At this the louse-hunter, who was sitting on the edge of his bed, swinging his naked feet, suggested:

“Why don’t you do another miracle?”

“That’s not why I’m here, but to preach the word of the living God.”

The louse-hunter swung one foot up over his knee and said nastily:

“You should do a miracle.”

The deaf-mute put his pillow on the floor, sat on it and declared: “I’m not saying another word.” Stunned by all he saw, Ergueta took his head in his hands. The one-eyed man added amiably:

“Yes, you should bring the dead man back to life.”

“There’s no dead man here!”

The one-eyed man limped over to Ergueta. He took him by the arm and almost dragged him over to a bed opposite, where a tiny man with a round head and an enormous nose lay without moving.

The deaf-mute came over, pursing his lips.

“Can’t you see that he’s dead?”

“He died this afternoon,” the one-eyed man added.

“I tell you this man is not dead,” Ergueta shouted angrily, convinced they were making fun of him. But the louse-hunter leapt from his bed and, going over to the other one, bent over the little man with the round head. He pushed the body until it fell to the ward floor with a dull thud, stuck between the two beds with its legs in the air, like the fork of a newly pollarded tree.

“Now can you see he’s dead?”

Their nightshirts billowing in the wind, the four madmen stood around the upturned body, silhouetted against the blue rectangle of moonlight.

“See that he’s dead?” the bearded man repeated.

“Do a miracle for us,” the one-eyed man begged Ergueta. “How can we believe in Him if you don’t perform a miracle? What’s it to you?”

The deaf-mute nodded his head rapidly, egging Ergueta on. Ergueta leant sombrely over the body, and was about to pronounce the life-giving words when suddenly the walls of the room started to spin before his eyes, a dark wind howled in his ears, and he just had time to catch sight again of the three madmen silhouetted in the blue rectangle of moonlight, their nightshirts ballooning out in the wind, before he fell down a slope through the whirling darkness, into unconsciousness.

THE SUICIDE

For almost an hour Erdosain remained at Hipólita’s feet. His earlier emotions were blurred in his present somnolent state. He felt remote from all that had happened during the day. Anguish and resentment hardened in his heart like mud in the sun. Yet he lay there without moving, overcome by the desire for sleep that weariness instilled in him. And he was frowning deeply. His other great fear, the fear of finding himself standing like a lost ghost beside a granite dike, pierced the mist and darkness. The grey waters formed layers that swirled in different directions. Iron-clad whaling boats took indistinct masses of people to distant shores. There was a woman decked out like a coquette: she wore a diamond choker, and sat with her head in her bejewelled hands at a bar-room table. While she was talking, Erdosain scratched the tip of his nose. When he searched for the reason for this, Erdosain remembered that four young girls had appeared, wearing knee-length dresses, and with straw-coloured hair dishevelled round their horsy faces. As they passed by him, they held out a tin cup, which made Erdosain wonder: “Can they earn enough to eat by begging like that?” Then the star, the coquette, with the diamonds sparkling beneath her chin, replied that yes, the four girls lived from begging, and in her most alluring voice embarked on a story about a Russian prince whose way of life did not at all fit in with that of the four girls, try as she might to fix things. It was only then that Erdosain realised why he had heen scratching his nose while the gorgeous creature had been talking.

His sadness increased when he saw the silent crowds of people look back as they climbed aboard an endless train, which had all its shutters down. No-one asked about destinations or stations on the way. Twenty yards from the track stretched a dark desert of dust. Erdosain could not see the locomotive, but heard the screech of chains as the brakes were let off. He could run, the train was moving off slowly, he could reach it, climb the steps and stand for a moment on the platform of the last carriage, watching as it picked up speed. There was still time for him to get away from this grey solitude, devoid even of dark cities … but, held in the claws of his immense despair, he stood watching, a sob in his throat, as the last carriage pulled away, all its windows firmly shut.

When he saw the train round the curve and head into the wall of fog, he realised he had been left on his own for ever in this ashen desert, that it would never return but keep rolling sullenly on and on, its carriage windows shut tight.

He slowly lifted his head from Hipólita’s lap. It had stopped raining. His legs were freezing, and his joints ached. He looked at the face of the sleeping woman, barely visible in the faint blue light of day seeping in through the door-panes, and stood up as carefully as he could. The four little girls with their horse faces and straw-coloured locks were still with him. He thought: “I should kill myself …” but then, noting the red glint of the sleeping woman’s hair, his ideas took on a more sinister bent. “She must be ruthless. And yet I could kill her …” He felt for the revolver butt in his pocket. “It would only take one bullet in the head. The bullet’s made of steel, it would only make a tiny hole. Of course, her eyes would be blown out of their sockets and her nose would probably pour blood. Poor soul! She must have suffered so much. But I’m sure she’s cruel.”

A stealthy malice made him lean over her. The longer he looked at her asleep, the wilder, more crazed his expression became. In his pocket, his hand cocked the gun. Then a peal of thunder burst in the distance, and the strange madness shrouding his brain was lifted. Erdosain felt for his coat as quietly as possible, shut both sides of the door with great care to avoid them creaking, and stepped out of the room.

As he reached the bottom of the stairs, he realised with satisfaction that he was hungry. He headed at a shambling run for one of the countless grills around the Spinetto market.

The moon was riding the purple crest of a cloud, and in the moonlight whole stretches of the pavement looked as if they were covered in zinc sheeting; the puddles glinted as though silver coins were hidden in their depths, the rainwater gurgled and swirled in the gutters, licking at the granite kerbs. The pavement was so wet it looked as though all the blocks were recently smelted lead.

Erdosain dodged in and out of the blue shadows that fell between the rows of buildings. The smell of damp lent a kind of maritime desolation to the morning solitude.

There was no doubt about it, Erdosain was not in his right mind. He was still worried about the four horse-faced young girls and the sinister sea with its iron waves. The stench of burnt cooking oil belching from a yellow-painted café door made him feel nauseous and so, changing his mind, he decided to aim for a brothel he remembered in Paso. When he got there, he found the door already locked, so, at a loss, shivering with cold, his mouth full of a bitter taste of copper sulphate, he went into a nearby café that had just raised its metal shutters. After a long wait, they served him the tea he had ordered.

He thought about the sleeping woman. He half-closed his eyes, leant his head back against the wall, and surrendered utterly to his despair.

He did not suffer for himself, for the person registered on his birth certificate, but his consciousness, split off from his body, looked at him like a stranger, and he said to himself:

“Who will have pity on mankind?”

And these words, which summed up all his thinking, upset him even more, filling him with a painful tenderness towards his invisible fellow men.

“Falling … falling lower all the time. And yet others are happy, they find love — but they all suffer. The thing is, some realise it and others don’t. Some blame it on what they haven’t got. What a ridiculous dream that was! Yet her face was lovely. What made the most sense was what she said about the unscrupulous prince. Oh! If only I could sleep at the bottom of the sea, in a lead chamber with thick portholes. Sleep for years and years, while the sand piled up, and I went on sleeping. That’s why the Astrologer is right. The day will come when people will make the revolution because they have no God. Mankind will declare itself on strike until God appears.”

The bitter smell of cyanide drifted into his nostrils; through his half-closed eyelids he could dimly make out the milky light of morning, but he felt as distant as if he had been on the sea-bed and the sand was piling up endlessly on top of his leaden hut. Somebody tapped him on the shoulder.

He opened his eyes to find the waiter saying to him:

“You can’t sleep here.”

He was about to reply, but the waiter had moved on to wake up another customer. This was a stocky man who had fallen asleep with his bald head in his arms, which were folded across the table-top.

The sleeping man did not respond to the waiter’s urgings, so the café owner, a man with a handlebar moustache, came over and shook him so violently his body almost doubled up, and only the edge of the table kept it from toppling over.

Intrigued, Erdosain got to his feet, while the other two cast sidelong glances at each other and at their odd client.

The sleeping man did not move from his absurd position. His head lolled back on one shoulder, giving them a glimpse of a flat, pockmarked face and a pair of dark glasses. A trickle of reddish saliva ran down from his blue-tinged lips to his green tie. A sheet of paper with writing on was trapped under his elbow on the table. They suddenly realised he was dead. They went off to call the police, but Erdosain remained rooted to the spot, fascinated at the sight of this sinister suicide in dark glasses, with blue blotches slowly spreading over the skin. And still the smell of bitter almonds hung in the air, apparently coming from his gaping mouth.

A part-time policeman arrived, then a sergeant, followed by two more policemen and an inspector. They all poked and prodded at the dead man as if he were a steer. All at once the part-time policeman said to the inspector:

“Don’t you know who he is?”

From the dead man’s pocket the sergeant took a hotel bill, a few coins, a revolver, and three sealed envelopes. “So this is the man who killed that girl over in Talcahuano?” They took the dead man’s glasses off, and now his eyes were visible, squinting, with their whites turned up, and the eyelids shot through with red as if he had been crying tears of blood. “Didn’t I tell you?” the first policeman said. “Here’s his identity card.”

“He was going to go to Ushuaia for the rest of his life.”

When he heard that, Erdosain remembered the story as if he had read about it in the distant past. (In fact, he had seen it in a newspaper only the morning before.) The dead man was a crook. He had left his wife and five children to live with another woman, whom he had three children with. But then two nights earlier he had appeared at a hotel in Talcahuano with his new lover, a young girl aged seventeen. And at three in the morning he had covered her face gently in a pillow, and shot her through the side of the head. Nobody in the hotel heard a thing.

At eight the next morning the murderer got dressed, left the door to the room ajar, and called the maid to ask her not to wake his wife until ten o’clock because she was very tired. Then he went out, and the dead girl was finally discovered at noon.

But what most impressed Erdosain was the thought that the murderer had spent five hours alone with the dead girl, five hours with her body in the loneliness of the night … and that he must have loved her a lot.

And yet hadn’t he felt exactly the same a few hours earlier with the red-headed woman? Was it an unconscious memory, or did it come from the suicide doubled up in front of him?

The hospital ambulance drew up and the body was loaded into it.

The police asked him questions. Erdosain told them the little he knew, then went out into the street, still intrigued. An ill-defined, painful question lay at the back of his mind.

He recalled that the turn-ups of the dead man’s trousers were muddy; his shirt was dirty and grimy: how in spite of all this had he succeeded in winning the love of the young girl he had killed?

Did love exist then? In spite of his two wives and scattered children, in spite of his sordid life as a thief and a swindler, the murderer had known love. Erdosain pictured him in the cruel night, there in that hotel frequented by prostitutes and people with no real jobs, in a room with peeling wallpaper, staring at the waxen, cold face of the young girl spattered with blood. Five mournful hours staring at the girl who a short while before had taken him in her bare arms. Erdosain reached the Plaza Once in this painful daze.

It was five in the morning. He went into the railway station, looked all around him, and, still feeling sleepy, went and huddled on a bench in a corner of the waiting-room.

At eight he was woken out of a deep sleep by the noise a passenger made with his suitcases. He rubbed his aching eyes. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky.

He went outside and caught a bus to Constitución Station.

The Astrologer was waiting for him on the platform at Temperley.

Erdosain immediately recognised his stocky figure in its overcoat, his hat down over his eyes and his drooping Gallic moustache.

“You’re very pale,” the Astrologer said.

“I’m pale?”

“Yellow.”

“I didn’t sleep well … and to top it all, I saw a suicide this morning …”

“OK, here’s the cheque.” Erdosain examined it. It was made out for 15,373 pesos, to be paid in cash — but the date was for two days earlier.

“Why did he put that date?”

“It’ll look better. The bank clerk will know that if the cheque had been lost, by the time you present it, it would have been stopped.”

“Did he argue a lot?”

“No … he smiled. He thinks he’s going to send us all to gaol … ah! and before you go to the bank, visit a barber’s and get a shave.”

“Does Bromberg know?”

“No, we’ll wake him when it’s time.”

There were only a few minutes before the train arrived. Erdosain smiled at the Astrologer and said:

“What would you do if I ran away?”

The Astrologer stroked his moustache, and replied:

“That’s as impossible as the idea that the train won’t stop here.”

“But let’s admit the possibility for a moment.”

“I can’t. If I thought it even for a second, I wouldn’t send you to cash the cheque … Ah! … Who was it that committed suicide this morning?”

“A murderer. Very odd. He killed a girl who refused to go and live with him.”

“A waste of effort.”

“Would you be capable of killing yourself?”

“No … you must realise I’m destined for greater things.”

Erdosain asked a strange question:

“Tell me, d’you think red-haired women are ruthless?”

“I wouldn’t say that … it’s more that they’re asexual; that’s why the cool way they look at everything leaves such a harsh impression. The Melancholy Thug told me that in all his years as a pimp he’d dealt with hardly any redheads … Anyway, don’t forget to shave. Go to the bank at eleven, not before. I’ll see you at lunch, right?”

“Yes, see you then.”

Erdosain got on to the train, closely followed by the Major, who signalled to the Astrologer in acknowledgement. Erdosain did not see him.

Slumped in his seat, Erdosain thought:

“What an extraordinary man! How on earth did he know I wouldn’t run out on him? If he’s as right about everything else, he’s bound to succeed.” Then, lulled by the rocking of the train, he dozed off to sleep again.

The Major was sitting behind him. When Erdosain got to the bank, his heart was pounding. The clerk called him, and he went up to the window:

“Large or small notes?”

“Large.”

“Sign here.”

Erdosain signed the back of the cheque. He thought they would ask for his identity card, but the clerk, forearms protected by plastic cuffs, merely counted out ten 1,000 peso notes, five of 500, and the rest in smaller notes. Erdosain was so nervous he wanted to run away as fast as he could, but instead he slowly counted out the money, put it in his wallet, put that in his trouser pocket, and walked out of the bank, keeping a tight grip on it.

A spiral of sky glowed like newly forged metal in between banks of white cloud. Erdosain felt happy. He thought that in a different climate, under permanently blue skies like the one he could glimpse above, there must be remarkable women. They would have shining glossy hair, and big almond eyes, shaded by long lashes. And the scented air would waft from the caverns of morning to all the street corners in cities that rose through grassy lawns, their spherical towers rising high above all the waving plumes of greenery in the parks and terraces.

The thought of the Astrologer’s broad face, with his drooping moustache covering the corners of his mouth, made him feel even more content: if the society succeeded, he could go on with his electro-magnetic experiments. He strode down the streets like an emperor down on his luck, not noticing that his easy swagger caught the eye of washerwomen passing by with baskets under their arms, and of seamstresses returning from the sweatshops with their bundles.

He would invent the death ray, a sinister violet beam with millions of volts’ power, which would melt the steel of dreadnoughts like a furnace melts a blob of wax, and would blow the cement cities to smithereens, as if volcanoes of dynamite had exploded under them. He saw himself as the Lord of the Universe. He summoned the ambassadors of the great powers with a terse command. He found himself in a huge glass-walled room with a round table in the middle. All around it, the old diplomats sat slumped in their armchairs, bald, ashen-faced, with hard, shifty eyes. Some tapped their pencils on the glass table-top, others smoked in silence, while a gigantic negro in green livery stood motionless beside the red velvet curtains draped over the doorway.

And he! Erdosain, Augusto Remo Erdosain, the ex-thief, the ex-debt collector, stood up. The glass table reflected the top half of his body, elegant in a double-breasted black blazer, with four fingers of his right hand thrust into his pocket, a sheaf of papers in the other. He stood and stared coldly at the ambassadors’ expressionless faces. A delicious frisson drained the blood from his face. The great heroes of the past came to life in him. Ulysses, Demetrius, Hannibal, Loyola, Napoleon, Lenin, Mussolini flashed in front of his eyes like huge burning wheels, then sank beneath the lonely earth in an other-worldly twilight.

His words poured out in short chunks, as hard and solid as steel. Captivated by the spectacle, he observed himself in an imaginary mirror, vibrant and proud.

He was imposing conditions.

The nations had to hand over their fleets, thousands of cannons and great stocks of rifles. Then a few hundred members of each race would be selected, taken to an island, and the rest of humanity destroyed. He would use the ray to blow up cities, sweep clean the fields, turn livestock and forests to ashes. All memory of knowledge, art and beauty would be lost for ever. An aristocracy of cynics, bandits as sceptical as they were civilised, would seize power, with him at their head. And since to be happy all men need to base their hope on a metaphysical lie, they would strengthen the clergy, and set up an inquisition to root out any heresy that might threaten the foundations of the dogma or unity of faith that would be the basis for human happiness. In this way, mankind could return to primitive society, and as in the time of the pharaohs devote itself to agriculture. This metaphysical lie would give mankind back the happiness that rational thought had killed off in its heart. His words fell with short sharp thuds, like steel rods. He told the ambassadors:

“Our city, the city of kings, will be of white marble, set beside the sea. It will measure seven leagues round, and will have lakes and woods, and rosy copper domes. This will be the dwelling-place of all the fake holy men, the false prophets, the quack magicians, the apocryphal goddesses. All science will be magic. Doctors will travel round disguised as angels, and when mankind multiplies too much, it will be punished by glowing dragons flying through the air to drop the bacteria of Asiatic cholera.

“Mankind will live immersed in miracles, and will be rich above all in faith. At night we’ll use powerful searchlights to project ‘The entry of the just into heaven’ on to the clouds. Can you imagine it? All of a sudden, a green and purple ray rises from behind the mountains, and the clouds become a garden where the dazzling air floats like snowflakes. An angel with rose-coloured wings will cross the divide, come to a halt at the gates of paradise, and with open arms will welcome in the just man, a man of the people, with his battered hat, long beard, and stick. Can you see it, you professional scoundrels, you eminent cynics? Can you? The angel with rose-coloured wings welcomes the man who on earth sweats and suffers. D’you realise how brilliant my idea is, how wonderful my simple miracle? And the masses will worship God on their knees, and only we, the sad bandits who have power, knowledge and the ultimate truth, will know that heaven does not exist.”

He shook as he spoke.

“We’ll be like gods. We’ll offer mankind tremendous miracles, delicious beauties, we’ll present them with the certainty of such a glorious future that all the priests’ promises will pale beside the reality of our apocryphal wonders. And finally, they’ll be happy … Can you see it, you cretins?”

A careless passer-by bumped into him and sent him flying against a wall. Erdosain got his breath back fearfully, clutching the money in his pocket. He was excited, like a tiger cub let loose in a brick jungle, and spat his defiance at the window of a fashion boutique:

“You will be ours, city.”

The Major followed close behind him.

THE WINK

The Astrologer was waiting for him at Temperley Station. He smiled warmly at Erdosain, who almost ran to meet him, but the other man took hold of his arms and stood looking into his eyes for a moment. Then he said:

“So, are you satisfied?”

Erdosain blushed. At that instant a double mystery was revealed to him. First, the Astrologer had not been lying, and second, he felt so close to him he could have talked endlessly with him, telling him all the most intimate details of his desolate life. All he managed to say was:

“Yes, I’m very happy.” The Astrologer came to a halt for a moment on the platform. Suddenly serious again, he said:

“D’you know something? Many of us have a superman inside. The superman is our will when it is fully realised, when it overcomes all moral scruples and carries out the most dreadful acts, with an almost naive joy … what you might call the innocent game of cruelty.”

“Yes, and you no longer feel fear or anguish, it’s as if you’re walking on clouds.”

“Right, and the ideal would be to arouse this carefree, naive ferocity in as many men as possible. It’s our job to usher in the age of the Innocent Monster. It will happen, there’s no doubt about it. It’s simply a matter of time and being bold enough, but when men realise that their spirit is being swept down into the cesspit of this civilisation, they must change direction before they drown. The problem is, cowardice and Christianity have prevented them from realising just how sick they are.”

“But didn’t you want to bring everyone faith?”

“No, only the masses … but if that fails, we can always try the opposite tack. We haven’t finally chosen any one principle, and the wisest thing would be to have opposing ones ready just in case. Just like in a pharmacy, we’ll have a wide variety of perfect lies, each one labelled for a different disease of the mind or soul.”

“D’you know I reckon you’re the craziest of all of us, as Barsut said yesterday?”

“What’s known as madness is simply what most people aren’t accustomed to thinking. Look, if that porter over there told you all the ideas in his mind, you’d lock him up in an asylum. Of course, there can’t be many like us … the essential thing is that our actions will bring us fresh strength and energy. That’s where our salvation lies.”

“What about Barsut?”

“He hasn’t the faintest idea of what’s in store for him.”

“How will you do it?”

“Bromberg will strangle him … I don’t know, it doesn’t concern me.”

The two of them stepped round the puddles in the bright sunlight. Erdosain said to himself: “Our city, the city of kings, will be of white marble, set beside the sea … and we’ll be like gods” — at that he turned to his companion, eyes gleaming, and exclaimed — “d’you know that some day we’ll be like gods?”

“That’s what the common herd doesn’t understand. They’ve had their gods slaughtered. But the day will come when they run down the paths shouting: ‘We love God, we need God.’ What imbeciles! I can’t understand how they have killed God. But we’ll bring him back to life … we’ll invent grandiose gods — the epitome of civilisation … and life will be changed for ever!”

“What if it all fails?”

“It doesn’t matter … someone else will come … someone else will come to take my place. That’s what must happen. All we should wish for is that the idea sprouts in people’s imaginations … the day it exists in many souls, wonderful things will happen.”

Erdosain was amazed at how calm he felt.

He had lost all fear, and the room with the ambassadors came into his mind once more, his baleful gaze on the ancient diplomats gazing at him in consternation, their bald heads, ashen faces, hard, furtive eyes. Unable to contain himself, he shouted out:

“What a lot of fuss over wringing one blasted man’s neck!”

The Astrologer stared at him in surprise:

“Are you nervous, or do you get worked up for no particular reason, like an elephant?”

“No, it’s just that I’m so sick of these old-fashioned scruples I feel.”

“That’s what all you kids are like,” the Astrologer replied. “Like a cat not knowing whether to come in or go out.”

“Shall I watch the execution?”

“Does it interest you?”

“A lot.”

But as they entered the Astrologer’s property, a sick feeling churned Erdosain’s stomach, and the gastric taste of vomit rose in his throat. He could hardly stand up. He saw everything through a milky white haze. His arms hung down as heavy as bronze. He walked without any sense of distance; it seemed to him as though the air was turning to glass, as though the ground was heaving beneath his feet, and every now and then the vertical line of the trees seemed to zig-zag in front of his eyes. He panted wearily, his mouth was completely dry, and he could not moisten his parched lips or his burning throat. Only a sense of shame kept him on his feet.

When he next looked through half-closed eyes, he was going into the coachhouse with Bromberg.

The Man Who Saw the Midwife was walking along as if in a daze, his thick hair completely unkempt. His trousers were only loosely held up by his belt, and a bit of white shirt stuck out of the front of his flies like a handkerchief. He was trying to stifle enormous yawns with his fist. His sleepy, absentminded look did not fit in with his criminal intentions. He had fine eyes, blank and solemn as those of some great dumb beast, which gazed out from thick lashes that cast shadows on his rounded, girlish cheeks. Erdosain stared at him, but the other man did not even appear to notice him, so caught up was he in his own magnificent absurdity. Then with the same blank look he gazed across at the Astrologer, who nodded to him, and he undid the padlock. The three men stepped into the stable.

Barsut leapt to his feet: he wanted to talk. Bromberg sprang through the air, and there was the sound of a crack of skulls against wood. The sun painted a yellow rectangle in the dust. Muffled groans came from the shapeless heap on the floor. Erdosain watched the struggle with a cruel fascination, and suddenly, as Bromberg was throttling the other man with his powerful arms, his trousers slipped down, revealing two white buttocks under a crumpled shirt-tail. The groans had stopped. There was a moment’s quiet as the half-naked murderer continued to press his hands round the victim’s throat.

Erdosain stood there looking on immobile.

The Astrologer looked on with watch in hand. They all stayed motionless for two minutes, which to Erdosain seemed like an eternity.

“OK, that’s enough.”

Clumsily, his hair matted on his brow, Bromberg stood up. Without looking at anyone with his blank gaze, he hitched his trousers up, and fastened them as quickly as he could.

Then he left the stables. Erdosain followed him, while the Astrologer cast one last look at the murdered man. Barsut was lying on the floor staring at the ceiling, his jaws slack and his tongue lolling out of his twisted mouth.

Then a strange thing happened, without Erdosain being aware of it. Pausing at the stable door, the Astrologer turned back to look at the dead man, when all of a sudden Barsut raised his head and winked⁵ at him. The Astrologer touched his hat brim with one finger, then went out to join Erdosain, who burst out:

“Is that all?”

The Astrologer cast him a pitying glance.

“Did you really think it would be like in the theatre?”

“How are you going to get rid of the body?”

“We’ll dissolve it in nitric acid. I’ve got three containers full. But, to change the subject, what happened with the copper rose?”

“It came out perfectly. The Espilas are really happy. I saw a fine specimen last night.”

“OK then, let’s have lunch … we’ve earned it.”

As they were going into the dining-room, a thought struck the Astrologer: “Aren’t we going to wash our hands?”

Taken aback, Erdosain stared at him, then lifted his hands to look at them. The three of them filed out quickly to the bathroom, took off their jackets, and turned on the taps. Erdosain rolled his sleeves up and carefully washed himself with a bar of soap. Then he rinsed his hands and dried them briskly on the towel. Before they went out again, the Astrologer did something odd.

He took the towel and threw it into the bathtub, then took a bottle of alcohol and sprinkled it over the cloth. He struck a match, and for a minute both their faces were lit up in the dark room by the blue flames of the fuel consuming the towel. Eventually all that was left was a blackish pile of ashes: the Astrologer turned the tap on, and the water gushed out, flushing away the remains. The two men headed back to the dining-room.

An ironic smile flitted across Erdosain’s face.

“So you’re Pontius Pilate, are you?”

“You’re right, and quite unconsciously.”

Through the half-open shutters of the shady dining-room, they could see the garden. Tender shoots of honeysuckle curled towards the windowsill. Transparent insects buzzed around the lemon tree, and the house’s white walls were reflected in the honeyed depths of the waxed floor. The tablecloth fringe fell down over square table legs. A spray of carnations gave off its spicy scent in an Etruscan vase, while the silver cutlery shone against the linen and the china; shadows twisted up the glassy outlines of their glasses, or crept in triangles across their plates. There was lobster salad in an oval serving dish.

The Astrologer poured wine. They ate in silence. Then the Astrologer brought in egg broth, a platter of asparagus swimming in oil, an artichoke salad, and finally fish. For dessert there was ricotta cheese sprinkled with cinnamon, and fruit.

Afterwards he served coffee. Erdosain gave him the money, and the Astrologer counted it. “Here’s 3,500. Go and have a few suits made. You’re a good-looking fellow and you should dress well.”

“Thanks … but listen … I’m dead tired. I’d like to sleep a while. Could you wake me at five?”

“Of course, follow me” — and the Astrologer led him to his bedroom. Completely drained, Erdosain took off his boots, and threw his jacket over the bedpost. His eyes were smarting with fatigue, his chest was running with sweat, and then he thought no more.

He awoke in the dark to the sound of the Astrologer opening a shutter. He sat up with a start, while the other man said:

“At last! You’ve been asleep for twenty-eight hours.” And when Erdosain could not believe it, he brought him that day’s newspapers, and it was true, two days had gone by since he had last seen them.

Suddenly remembering Hipólita, Erdosain leapt from the bed.

“I have to go.”

“You were out like a dead man. I’ve never seen anyone sleep like that, so exhausted, you even forgot to go to the bathroom … oh, by the way, where did you get that story about the suicide in the café? I looked in yesterday evening’s papers and in this morning’s. There’s no sign of it. You must have dreamt it.”

“But I could take you to the café.”

“You must have dreamt the café as well.”

“Perhaps … it doesn’t matter … well?”

“Everything’s taken care of.”

“Everything? What about the acid?”

“We’ll tip it down the drain.”

“So then he …?”

“It’s as if he never existed.”

As they were saying goodbye, the Astrologer told him:

“Come on Wednesday at five. There’s a meeting that evening. Don’t forget to buy a suit off the peg while they’re making the other ones for you. You must come; the Gold Prospector, the Thug and others will be here. We’ll talk over our ideas, and don’t forget I’m really interested in that poison gas scheme. Draw up a plan for a small-scale factory for chlorine and phosgene gases. Ah, and see if you can find out what on earth mustard gas is. It destroys anything that’s not watertight and covered in oil.”

“Phosgene is based on carbon monoxide.”

“Don’t lose any time, Erdosain. A small factory that could be a training tool for revolutionary chemists. Remember our activities are divided into three areas. The Gold Prospector will be in charge of the training camp, you’re our Industrial Chief, and Haffner will look after the brothels. Now we’ve got the money, we mustn’t lose time. You have to set to work. What d’you say we set up a story that is the Argentine equivalent of Krupp in Germany. We have to believe in ourselves. Our society can spring a whole lot of surprises. We’re discoverers who have only a vague idea of which direction we’re heading in.⁶ If that!”

Erdosain stared for a second at the other man’s broad face. He grinned and said:

“Did you know you look like Lenin?”

And before the Astrologer could reply, he was gone.

Footnotes

¹ In the second part of this work, we shall offer an extract from Barsut’s notebook.

² This novel was written during 1928–1929, and published by Rosso in October 1929. It would be ridiculous therefore to think that the Major’s pronouncements were suggested by the revolutionary movement of 6 September 1930. It is however remarkable that the declarations made by the army revolutionaries of the 6 September movement should coincide so precisely with the Major’s, and that subsequent events should so closely follow his predictions.

³ It was later discovered that the Major was a real rather than an imaginary officer, and that he had been lying when he said he was playing a role.

⁴ Later Hipólita was to tell the Astrologer: “I knelt down in front of Erdosain when it occurred to me to blackmail you, after he had told me about the murder plan.”

⁵ The decision to fake the murder was decided on at the last minute by the Astrologer, and discussed at length with Barsut.

⁶ The story of the characters in this novel will continue in a second volume, The Flamethrowers.