Leopoldo Marechal - Adam Buenosayres

— What’s this? I asked warily.

— A slide, answered the astrologer. It’s the holitoboggan . 20

— If we’ve got to go down there, all I can say is good night and good luck!

— It’s very simple! Schultz assured me. You sit down on the flat surface and let yourself go merrily sliding off.

Matching action to word, the astrologer hopped onto the slide and instantly disappeared, leaving me behind shouting that I wasn’t going to follow, that we should go back to Buenos Aires and he could go to hell all by himself. I listened for a long moment, leaning over the cistern. Not a voice could be heard from the depths. Then, consigning myself to the devil, I climbed onto the slide and let myself fall into the deep. I had the sensation that my body, thrown at full speed, was corkscrewing madly into the depths of the earth.

IV

Schultz’s holitoboggan rudely dumped me onto sandy ground, fortunately quite soft, where I somersaulted three times, cursing in pectore 21the infernal inventor who’d dreamed up that puerile transit system. Once I’d sat myself up and shaken the sand from my face, hair, and clothes, I saw the astrologer, indifferent to my fate, contemplating the surroundings with the unenthusiastic gaze of a professional tourist.

— Listen here! I shouted at him, still half-blind, groping around for my hat, and anxious to give Schultz a piece of my mind, which in my view he richly deserved for his lack of toboggan-esque solidarity.

But I said not another word, astonished by the strangeness of the landscape before my eyes: a lagoon whose pasty, absinthe-coloured waters splashed against the beach where we sat, depositing on its sands capricious festoons of a shiny backwash like a snail’s trail of slime. Gigantic, smoke-black monoliths in the form of rough-hewn African idols emerged in their severity from the contractile waters (and I so describe them because of their animal-like quivering, which gave the lagoon as a whole the aspect of a great irritated mollusc). As for the lighting, I couldn’t guess its source (the same thing kept happening throughout Schultz’s Helicoid), but it came down from a plafond or ceiling gelatinous like the water, and it had the grey-pink colour of pulmonary tissue.

I would have spent a long while before that diorama, had the astrologer Schultz not dragged me from my abstraction and led me to a small wharf or jetty, very well hidden on the shore. Beside the jetty, an old motor boat was rocking gently. In the stern stood a man in a blue overall, arms crossed and eyes turned toward the water. Schultz put his fingers to his lips and whistled at him, but the man gave no sign of having heard.

— Take a good look at him, the astrologer told me. See how desperately he’s trying to put on the look of Charon the ferryman.

Turning to the man in the blue overall, he shouted:

— Hey, Gallego ! Tone down the histrionics!

The man in the motor launch gave a start, turned around, and shook his fist at us:

— Bourgeois pigs! he thundered. The National Transport Corporation is a hoax! Go fly a kite!

We had reached the side of the boat, and I couldn’t hide my surprise when I recognized the man’s grouchy mug.

— The bus driver of Number 38! I exclaimed. I’m not travelling with this beast!

But Schultz had hopped aboard and he made me follow him. Then he turned to the fellow in the blue overall.

— Get moving! he ordered with an imperious gesture.

The motor roared, and the swampy water of the lagoon swirled behind the propellor. But the boat didn’t budge.

— Why aren’t we leaving? scolded the astrologer.

The man in blue crossed his arms and stared at him in a fury.

— This is an outrage! he protested. I’m taking a grievance to the Union! I didn’t sign any list of conditions. The law’s on my side.

— Are we or are we not in an inferno? Schultz argued. Here you can’t do whatever you bloody well please. Remember, you’re condemned.

— I’m going to appeal! shouted the fellow in blue, rebellious.

The astrologer’s two eyes, at once piercing and human, drilled into him.

— Do you recall your village, back in Galicia? he asked.

— I refuse to answer any questions! roared the fellow in blue. I’ll talk only with my lawyer present.

— You used to plough your land, prune your vineyard, slaughter your pig, sing the carols your mother taught you, and profess the wisdom of your grandparents. Admit it, bagpipe: 22you used to have wonderful dignity. Do you admit it or not?

— I admit it, stuttered the fellow in blue, intimidated.

— And what did you do, as soon as you got to Buenos Aires? Schultz asked him in a pained tone.

— Well, I…

— You let your hair grow like a compadrito , you tied a silk scarf around your neck. You were seen in the neighbourhood dance halls, strutting like a bully and making unheard-of efforts to imitate characters straight out of Vacarezza melodramas. 23

— But…

— There’s a “but,” I know, continued Schultz. No sooner did you open your mouth than you gave yourself away. So you started to swallow the “j”s and the “u”s that made you suspect, and you learned the local argot — cathouse and broads and slammer and hey buster! In a word, you forgot the dignity you surely once had, and crassly imitated your new environment.

— That was at first, confessed the fellow in blue, eyes downcast.

— If only you had stopped there! Schultz retorted. Because once your shyster side was awakened and you started devouring vile scandal sheets, there was no problem you didn’t have an opinion about, no truth you wouldn’t deny, no question you wouldn’t weigh in on, from the appointment of bishops to import duties, not leaving out the theory of relativity and Kantian idealism. So you lost the innocence of your people and the joyful sense of life! And then — oh, jughead! — when you found yourself at the wheel of a bus…

— I had to bring home the bacon! the fellow in blue protested.

— Sure, Schultz admitted, but by becoming such a menace? Because, once you’d got your foot on the accelerator, was there any traffic regulation you didn’t break? Was any pedestrian safe, any elderly gentleman spared your fury or any woman your insults? Soul of a slaver! You crammed them into your infernal vehicle. And with your human cargo swaying and groaning, and Death herself sitting in your lap, you — O irrepressible charlatan! — pontificated ad nauseam about brotherly love and the rights of man.

In the course of our journey, that was the only time Schultz had it out with an inhabitant of Cacodelphia. Later, when he was reminded of it, the astrologer confessed to me his tirade against the Sangallego had been delivered in the name of justice. Because, after all, the Sangallego was there not only to purge his faults, but was under the obligation of an extra job ad honorem . 24Be that as it may, when the fellow in blue heard those harsh words, he lowered his head and took the wheel of the boat.

We soon put distance between us and the shore. Schultz had become studiously silent, and the fellow in blue hardly seemed to breathe as he concentrated on steering the vessel among the black monoliths emerging like reefs from the water. We went zigzagging past them at an alarming speed. Seen up close, the human contours of those stones took on monstrous proportions: flattened heads, thick and greedily sensual lips, half-closed eyes, boobs with pointy nipples, spherical bellies covered by a living scab of a thousand little creepy-crawlers that scurried away into the water as we passed. A new discomfort was added to the malaise of the vertiginous trip: from the depths of the lagoon, great bubbles rose to the surface and broke under our propellor, releasing strong ammoniac emanations that irritated our noses and eyes. Moreover, as we advanced, the progressively dimming light deepened into a purple twilight in which lagoon and sky were indistinguishable.