Leopoldo Marechal - Adam Buenosayres

— Comrade Bomb is right! shouted one.

— Throw him out! insisted another.

— You can read the phoniness in his face like it’s an open book, growled a third voice.

The astrologer, soaked in sweat, fended off the bomb-men already coming at him.

— Watch your fuses! he reminded them.

When he saw that the bomb-men, panic-stricken, were resuming a prudent distance among themselves, Schultz confessed to me:

— It’s true. For a time I hung around with these people, but just for a while, like a tourist.

— What a whopping-big Tartuffe! claimed the man with the cigarette-holder. He wants to deny he was inititated into the first rites!

Several voices piped up to confirm his assertion:

— He planned an operation to blow up a gasometer!

— He whistled contemptuously in a security guard’s face!

— He slept with our women!

Schultz’s eyes turned to me, as if pleading for indulgence:

— I was young! he alleged. Perverse readings had led me to the cult of destruction symbolized in Kali, the Dark Goddess, who dances on the rubble of the world, her heifer teats shimmying beautifully.

— Hah! laughed the bomb-man. There he goes again with his whoring orientalisms.

The astrologer looked at him sadly.

— In these men, I thought I’d found adepts of Kali, he told me. Didn’t I hear them endlessly conjugating the verb “destroy”?

— So what? cried the man with the cigarette-holder.

— Pure hot air! Schultz confessed to me. Their initiation ceremonies? Bah! Want me to describe them for you? They forced me sleep on the floor, eat their vegetarian stews, and do yogic breathing practices. Before we could have the revolution, you see, we had to become as strong as Zarathustra and renounce all bourgeois prejudice. I still blush when I recall the incident of the chamber pot…

Schultz hesitated a moment here, but the man with the cigarette-holder acridly challenged him:

— Go on, out with it, if you ain’t a wimp!

— Fine, conceded the astrologer. That night, while we were debating in assembly, I felt an intestinal plenitude urgently clamouring for evacuation (in those days I was a neophyte and, as such, a martyr of vegetarianism). I asked the assembly for permission to go to the toilet, and they got into a Homeric debate about whether or not it was a bourgeois prejudice to move one’s bowels in private. The matter was put to a vote, the “yes” side won overwhelmingly, and so they brought in an enormous enamelled chamber pot with blue trim, in which I was to satisfy coram populo 123 the urgency of my viscera.

— It was a profoundly liberating gesture! said the bomb-man in ecstacy.

— Quite so, affirmed Schultz. And what about the white tunics?

— The tunic of Anarkos! intoned the man with the bone cigarette-holder. One afternoon we put them on and ventured outside. But the neighbourhood kids pelted us with rocks.

— Make no mistake; common sense speaks most eloquently through kids, scolded the astrologer. The stones rained on us down to beat the band! And now I wonder: why all those fantasies and dreams of violence, when in the end we were just a bunch of poor devils incapable of hurting a fly?

When the bomb-men heard those words, they began showing signs of indignation. But Schultz gave them a paternal look, then turned to me, full of benevolence:

— Ignore them, he told me. They’re unfortunate wretches, good as gold. They could barely spell their own names, and yet they’d sit up nights trying to decipher Nietzsche’s Zarathustra or the Apocalypse of John of Patmos, not realizing they were getting their heads into one god-awful muddle. Later they’d repair to their cubicles and snore till noon, while their heroic wives broke their backs doing laundry at other people’s homes to support them.

Irate voices interrupted him here:

— Get out!

— Sold out to Yankee gold!

— Two-faced liar!

The astrologer smiled at me, as if begging a mite of charity for them.

— These excellent brothers! he said. God’s little lambs! I’d shower them with tears of tenderness if I weren’t afraid of getting their powder wet. True, they used to waste their time making paper plans for innocuous train-derailments and explosions, or mixing up batches of quite harmless chemicals. But it was heart-warming to see them at their Sunday picnics, chomping on chicken drumsticks like peaceable burghers. 124

— A paid infiltrator! shouted a voice choked with rage.

— Clown! shrieked other voices. Get outta here!

And with that, as if responding to a signal, the bomb-men charged us, coming dangerously close and shoving us with their explosive bellies.

— Watch the fuses! Schultz warned them.

But the men came on relentlessly, and we had to back away in the face of the onslaught until we reached the exit from the laboratory.

There was now an interlude in the suite of sectors making up the seventh circle of hell. A parenthetical place of repose, as I understood it, or a chamber of silence. Schultz paused there a moment to recover the Virgilian decorum he’d lost during his altercation with the dynamiters. Having wiped the sweat from his brow, he quickly led me across the chamber to an open balcony affording a view of the sector of violence in its entirety. From there, I looked out over the central area crammed with a multitude hard at work in brutish exercise; truth be told, all the eye could see was a tangled mess of legs, arms, and heads aggressively flailing at each other with mechanical ferocity, in a silence so unreal that the whole tableau was reduced to a flitting succession of phantasmal gestures as in a silent movie.

— There are violent types and violent types, Schultz informed me. The ones you see down there knocking each other about are lunatics in potentia who seek release in spectacles of wrath. They’re the ones who, although weak in muscle or in spirit themselves, would nevertheless sit comfortably in ringside seats at Luna Park screaming for blood, brandishing mosquito-sized fists, and roaring their indignation or triumph at the honourable boxers who were fighting for real. They’re the narrow-lunged, feeble cripples who flock to soccer fields to insult players of the enemy team, or to throw empty bottles at the long-suffering referees. There you have them now! A little exercise is just what the doctor ordered!

I seemed to detect a certain anger in the astrologer’s words, and I was tempted to bring up a theory espoused by the pipsqueak Bernini about the cathartic virtue of demonstrations of brutality. But after taking into consideration how long we had already spent in the famous Helicoid, how much further we might still have to go, and my keen desire to avoid any word or attitude that might prolong the journey, I held my tongue. So it was that, with Schultz deep in his own thoughts and I in mine, we left the chamber of repose and entered the adjoining sector.

We found ourselves in a kind of gigantic workshop where machines were clattering. At first, I couldn’t make out what sort of machines they were because of the smoke filling the place. And yet, the odours saturating the atmosphere — fresh ink, turpentine, and lead — were strangely familiar. Only when I recognized the dark bulk of a rotary press did I realize where we were. And then, as so many times before, I gave Schultz an enquiring look, curious to know what new evil was brewing in these premises. But the astrologer, without a word, merely gestured toward the gigantic rotary press; toward one end of it, I now saw a mob of men in shirtsleeves, greenish in complexion, grimy, agitated, vociferating. Joining the mob, I walked along the entire length of the machine. When I got to the end, I saw how the men were rushing pell-mell up the steps of the press and then diving head first between heavy rollers, which sucked them in, crushed them flat, and transformed each one into a long ribbon of paper. Then I saw how the ribbon slid between the impression cylinders and came out as newsprint, complete with screaming eight-column headlines and lurid illustrations. The ribbon was then folded and cut up into an infinite number of copies of an infernal daily newspaper. Finally I saw that each copy of the tabloid daily, once off the press, recovered its human form and ran back up the steps to be flattened and imprinted all over again.