Leopoldo Marechal - Adam Buenosayres

— Are you trying to tell me you hear the music of the spheres?

— Every last note of it, answered Schultz.

The man with the pole started to bite his nails furiously.

— He’s a second-hand Scipio, 115he warned his companion. If I were you, I’d knock him arse first into the lagoon.

Paying no attention to the man with the pole, Schultz tried to win over the one with the oar:

— So what? he said. Buenos Aires and the entire nation are under the sign of Libra. Here, every intellectual audacity is possible and desirable, even if this filthy pigsty seems to demonstrate the opposite.

— A megalomaniac! insisted the one with the pole. If I was you, I’d knock him arse over teakettle into the lilypads.

But the man with the oar, who no doubt had his responsibilities, adopted a prudent tone with Schultz:

— Look, around here you can’t just assume a highfalutin’ name and expect to bully your way across the lagoon. There’s lotsa guys showed up here claiming to be Tom, Dick, or Harry, with more moxie ’n you can shake a stick at, tryin’ to sneak in and see our sensational show for free. The ladies swimmin’ around in this marsh are wearin’ swimsuits not meant for pryin’ eyes — on account of the synthetic design, you understand. After all, this ain’t no fancy nightclub; it’s an Inferno with all the trappings. Some credential, sir, some sign: that’s all we’re askin’ for.

Schultz was not a man to turn a deaf ear to the voice of reason, when reason was speaking with courtesy. His response to the man with the oar was a paragon of urbanity and concision:

— I could be recognized as a scion of the Sun and the Moon, he said, were it not that my excessive modesty prevents me from wearing on my brow the horns of the inititate. The Prince of Oriental Efflorescence would bear me out if I were to say that I’ve eaten the purple mushroom, tamed the tiger-woman and the dragon-man, that I’ve mounted the red-crested stork and performed the dance of the yellow stork, that I know the garden of Leang, the turquoise pool, the ten islands, and the three promontories. But my true credential is otherwise: the twenty-eight signs of Apis the Ox, tatooed on this body that must one day return to dust.

Without another word, the astrologer began to unbutton his vest and shirt. And he would have stripped down to his underwear if the man with the oar, his mistrust now vanquished, had not, with almost adulatory solicitude, invited us to embark. So it was that Schultz and I hopped aboard, almost capsizing the craft with the weight of our mortal flesh. As soon as we had recovered our balance, the man in the stern gave a forceful shove with his pole and sent the boat gliding over the lagoon, while the man in the bow, his oar held high, scanned the environs in search of uppity heads. The infernal boat cut swiftly through the water, propelled by the energetic thrusts of the man in the stern who, without taking his burning eyes off us for an instant, performed wonders with his bamboo pole in his quite evident desire to get the crossing over with as quickly as possible and be rid of us. Not wanting to look at his hatchet face, his rheum-encrusted eyelids, his belligerent mien, I looked curiously around at the surrounding area. The water’s surface was a-boil with naked humans, of whom I glimpsed only surly fragments, smartly dodging our bow. For the second time the Helicoid was offering me the sight of humanity in the nude; and yet, this nudity did not have the perturbed and confused air I’d seen in the naked bodies of the second infernal residence, but rather a certain zoological candour, a certain innocent brutality that was expressed in the heavy euphoria of their cavorting and games. Clearly, the lagoon, for them, was the best possible world! Another aspect of the marsh came into view when the boat passed among the islets. There, among the black-green reeds, lay equally naked bodies, above water level or half-sunk in the mire of the shoreline. They sucked on the bombillas of their mates , tended their little barbecues, or dozed away in long batrachian copulations; elemental conversations, guitars of mud, earthen bandoneones, the buzz and croak of swamp creatures were all weaving a bestial concert, much like the soundscape I used to hear back in my childhood Maipú — what chthonic dread was it that had me sleepless and sobbing in the dead of night? what immense postdiluvian desolation? I still don’t know. The degradation of those people then became even more loathsome to me; the way they were vegetating in the lagoon, deaf and blind to the call from above, made me want to lie down in the bottom of the boat just to escape the sight of them, but my impulse was stayed by the sting of the poleman’s eyes on the back of my neck. Fortunately, it wasn’t long until we left the islets and emerged again in open water. Now we were crossing paths with other boats, their crews grunting in the grim pursuit of heads to clobber. Although no head had yet come within reach of the oar, it was beyond doubt that the lagoon abounded in rebels. I was just about to give up hope of seeing one, when the water to starboard started churning and the effervescence drew our gaze. A head emerged from the black liquid; dripping-wet, it shouted at us:

— Dwarves-from-around-here, beware the plain!

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the man in the bow brought his oar whistling down onto the talking head, which ducked back under the surface. Gaseous bubbles surfaced from the depths, and the man with the pole either laughed or croaked, I couldn’t tell which. But the head re-emerged spiritedly, this time beyond our reach. The head spit out a great mouthful of black water, shook its wet hair in the air, and rubbed its eyes with a pair of mittens dripping slime:

— Beware the plain! insisted the head. The plain is the egalitarian horizontal, the line that abhors holy unevenness and differences of level, tries to bring everything down, draw everything to itself, and convert it all to its terrible plane surface. The plain is resentment; it must be overcome. Dwarves-from-around-here, hear me and put aside your malice! The vertical is not disdain for the plain: it is the plain itself getting to its feet.

The aquatic orator flailed his arms to stay afloat and avoid the manoeuvres of the man with the pole, who, sweating like a poisonous fruit, was trying his utmost to get closer to him.

— Woe to him who heeds the drowsy voice of the plain! continued the orator. His destiny will be shameful mediocrity, shameful conformity, then idiotic complacency in shameful mediocrity, and finally a prideful resentment for all that tends toward the heights. Because the horizontal, too, has its pride: the demonic pride of the lowly. “This is an insult,” said the mouse when he regarded the magnitude of the elephant. Thus speaks a dwarf-from-around-here! I prefer the megalomania of the frog who tried to equal the ox by swelling up till he exploded. And it isn’t the frog’s explosion that plunges me into a metaphysical ecstasy; the act of blowing himself up seems to me a lack of moderation on the frog’s part, and an affront against the innocence of the ox. But there’s a certain heroic grandeur in the envious gesture of the frog, a tension toward greatness which, though ridiculous, deserves the praise of the Muses. A dwarf-from-around-here would demand that the ox shrink to the size of the frog. That’s the spirit of the plain, the spite of the horizontal!

Carried away by his eloquence, the orator had again come within striking range.

— How’s this for some vertical! cried the man in the bow, with a downward swing of his oar.

He missed his mark, for the orator, anticipating the blow, had ducked underwater and was now talking to us from a prudent distance: