Leopoldo Marechal - Adam Buenosayres

“I don’t know if you have ever been in one those antechambers that some waggish politician once dubbed “cooling tanks.” Once inside, the postulant with any optimism soon cuts the throat of his illusions; the irate postulant metamorphoses into a lamb; the loquacious postulant loses the very rudiments of language. My cooling tank comprised three interconnected rooms corresponding to three different degrees of “initiation” through which the catechumen had to pass before being admitted into the Presence. In the first room, the postulant would destroy his will, confound her memory, and abandon his intelligence, gradually renouncing human nature until he had descended into the animal realm. In the second room, he adopted elements of animal behaviour, pacing back and forth like a lion, roaring like a bull, yawning like a dog, licking her paws like a cat, or scratching himself like a chimp. Then, in the third room, the postulant descended dreamily into the vegetal realm. Therein he was to experience only vague vegetative sensations, perhaps those of hunger and thirst, of fingernails growing, the circulation of lymphatic fluids. By the time he finally entered my sancta sanctorum , the postulant had been reduced to the mineral realm. A few still managed, by dint of desperate exertions, to wave their letter in the air, as did the warrior from Marathon with his laurel bough. Others, as if they’d just woken up, actually asked me who they were and what they had come there for. In short, gentlemen, throughout my long days I was the focal point of that doleful procession: names written in red pencil, names written in blue! After the last postulant, I would flee the office, the building, the downtown area. Evening found me wandering residential streets in search of some sign of life, a child, a tree, or a just a dog to pet. The next day I would be back in my role as puppet: names in red, names in blue!

”To tell the truth, my Personage mask, on the outside, had consolidated quite nicely. No need for a mirror, for I could feel it on my face: absolutely rigid facial muscles, hardened mouth, a jaw of stone. Only my eyes continued publicly to betray hints of mercy, anguish, or grief. I finally decided to hide them behind dark glasses, under the pretext of an ocular ailment. All in all, however, while the external mask was indeed hardening, the other mask, the one trying to master the muscles of my soul, was failing to gel. Among those condemned by my red pen there abounded seekers of justice, invalids, the wretched of the earth. Some of their claims were so just, my heart would suddenly rebel against the Secretary, my pent-up anger flaring. But that man, surely my demon, would quickly douse the flames of my incipient revolts. What’s more, he seemed to take special pleasure in putting his finger on one more sensitive fibre within me and then killing it with the caustic venom of his Digests, Rules and Regulations, and Customs.

”One afternoon the unexpected happened. For several days I’d noticed an old man and a young woman waiting in the hall at my office door, motionless and seemingly disoriented. The old man caught my attention; he bore an extraordinary resemblance to a ranch hand who had taught me as a kid how to lasso sheep in the corral at La Rosada. He wasn’t the same man, certainly, but he was a close enough likeness to bring the image alive for me. Guessing that his letter of “recommendation” was too insignificant to gain him access even to the first room, I had the old man shown into my office, flagrantly flouting all protocol. Timorously, he handed me his letter: former labourer at a slaughterhouse gone bankrupt; in need of work; large family to support. I re-read the letter and looked at him. He said not a word. All he did was smile beneath his grey mustache as he gave me a long look, a large tear caught in the corner of each eye. At his side, meanwhile, the young woman was silently smiling as well. Suddenly, I felt an internal warmth melting my mask. Then I turned to the Secretary and ordered: “A job as labourer, right now.” With no display of any emotion, the Secretary picked up a Digest, opened it, and read the following article: “The General Directorate shall not admit labourers aged forty years or more.” He closed the Digest, and I saw his eyes gleam in triumph. But that set off my Third Dionysian Rebellion, the last of them. I climbed up on my desk, jumped heavily to the floor, flapped my arms like wings, and let go with an ear-splitting, a divine, a morning-glorious “cock-a-doodle-doo!” Then, before the old man’s astonished eyes and the girl’s pallid face, I turned to the Secretary and said: “If that job order isn’t ready in one minute, I’ll go to the antechambers and do the rooster again there.” He flew from the room as though chased by the devil, and returned immediately, still green with panic, waving a job order aloft like a white flag. After handing it to the old man, I gently pushed him and the girl out the door. Then I collapsed on a sofa, still trembling, my forehead clammy, my heart a bewitched echo-chamber: the look I threw at the Secretary was meant to pierce him like the sword of Saint George.

”My victory so excited me that I mysteriously disappeared from the General Directorate. Three days later they found me in a tavern on the Paseo Colón, happily drunk, playing truco with three sailors I’d just met. They were with the Genoveva , a barge that plied the Upper Paraná River. Theoretically, I had joined the the barge’s crew twenty-four hours earlier. Since then, my card-playing companions had been filling me with visions of tobacco-hued women beneath flowering orange trees, in a land of paradisal bliss, where red and blue pencils were unheard of. It was all a dream! Once I was sobered up, it was back to work at the General Directorate. Adiós, tobacco-hued women! Adiós, Genoveva ! Back to work at the General Directorate: names in red pencil! Back to work: names in blue pencil!…

At this point the Personage fell to rambling, humming an improvised “Ditty of the Pencils” over and over again — “like a broken record,” as Schultz later declared; “monotonous as an old prison song,” I thought at the time. With a few friendly slaps, we brought him round, and he concluded his tale thus:

— Well, gentlemen, I later called that episode the Swan Song of My Sensibility. From then on, I no longer lived in human time but in Personage Time, a nebulous chronology I’d be hard put to account for here. Let me just recall that I gradually surrendered to the mechanism of the Directorate; its fascinating regularity subjugated me little by little until I was definitively hypnotized. If at first I read in the face of each postulant a vital problem, an unfolding destiny, a suffering microcosm, I was later able to jettison all sentimental ballast, to the point where every postulant was reduced to a mere face. Later, no longer interested even in faces, I saw each postulant as an arm outstretched and bearing a letter. Finally, I didn’t even see the arm but the letter alone, independent of its phantasmagorical messenger. In a parallel process, the upper echelons to whom I was beholden gradually granted me their trust, and I was allowed to do without the Secretary — free at last! — and to administer on my own the blue pencil’s benevolence and the red pencil’s despair.

“Then, and only then — alas! — did I notice the incredible metamorphosis the Secretary was undergoing. The man of iron was being humanized in inverse proportion as I was being dehumanized! As my Personage carapace hardened, his shell was cracking up and falling to pieces, revealing a raw flesh that bled at the slightest touch. While my clothes were becoming darker and darker, his were actually taking on tones suggestive of springtime. By virtue of a monstrous inversion, we arrived at an absurd juncture: he was rebelling against me for the sake of mercy, and I was bringing him to heel with his old weapons! And to complete this situational reversal, the man had his own crisis. One day, as though unable to hold it in any longer, he put his hands on my shoulders and, teary-eyed, accused himself of having methodically destroyed all that was human in me. And so saying, he displayed a contrition painful enough to melt a heart of stone. I listened to him as if to the ravings of a madman, then turned my back and walked away, leaving him to sob in silence with his arms around a typewriter.