Leopoldo Marechal - Adam Buenosayres

— Truth is difficult, replied Adam with reluctance.

— Apparently not that difficult, objected Lucio. A truth that generously lodges itself in the empty skull of an old woman, just because she happens to be gawking at a wooden image!

Señor Johansen, a man whose rights had been abused, now felt a wave of hilarity taking over.

— A gawking old woman, he squealed with laughter. Hee-hee-hee!

Lucio Negri was looking over at the girls, anxious to see whether his victory had been registered in that quarter.

— A gawking old woman! Oh, oh! Señor Johansen was enjoying his vindication.

Samuel Tesler studied him with analytical curiosity.

— Aristotle says that laughter is proper to the human animal, he said. You laugh; therefore, you must be a man. Good thing you’re laughing; otherwise, we might never have known.

— What do you mean by that? bristled Señor Johansen.

The philosopher looked sadly at his buddy Adam Buenosayres.

— It’s hopeless, he sighed. This gentleman is a pachyderm. The thorn of irony cannot penetrate his leathery hide.

But Lucio Negri, comforted by another smile from Solveig Amundsen, charged impetuously back into the fray.

— You fellows may talk about mystical knowledge, visions, illuminations, he admitted in perfectly good faith. But as science shows us, all that sort of thing is in the domain of nervous pathology, or maybe internal secretions.

The end of Lucio’s sentence was celebrated by Samuel Tesler’s vibrant, unstoppable, staggering guffaws. Señor Johansen was petrified. Lucio Negri turned white, as the twenty-six eyes of the tertulia were trained upon him. Even Mister Chisholm, up on the stepladder, brush in hand, paused for a moment to frown.

— Laughter isn’t an argument! protested Lucio Negri. Nowadays, only a retrograde mind can deny the mystery of internal secretions. 3

As though in a state of rapture, the philosopher threw himself at Lucio’s feet.

— Internal secretion! he prayed on bended knee. Ora pro nobis!

Flummoxed by the antics of that fearsome clown, Lucio Negri looked around the room. In one corner, the Señoras Amundsen, Ruiz, and Johansen looked perplexed. Giggles and muffled whispers bubbled up from the sky-blue divan. More adorable than ever, Solveig Amundsen gazed back at him with saddened eyes. In view of which, Lucio Negri decided to take it all as a joke; he took hold of the kneeling philosopher under the arms and hoisted him to his feet.

— Laugh if you want, he said. But believe me, one small variation in the pituitary gland of Jesus of Nazareth, and the course of world history would have been completely different.

Not believing his ears, the philosopher of Villa Crespo stared at him in astonishment. Then, with his gaze, he solicited the testimony of Adam Buenosayres. Finally, he let his head fall on the chest of Señor Johansen, where he laughed long and silently; he actually laughed against the shirt of Señor Johansen, who couldn’t believe what was happening. At length, abandoning Señor Johansen’s unwelcoming chest, he pierced Lucio Negri with irascible eyes.

— Modern science seems to run according to a diabolical plan, he complained. First, science accosts Homo Sapiens and says to him: “Look here, old boy, that business about Jehovah creating you in his image and likeness is a lie. Who is Jehovah? The bogeyman! The priests in the Middle Ages invented him to scare you and make sure you don’t hang around in dance halls. As for the immortality of your soul, it’s a lot of baloney. You blockhead, how do you expect to have a soul?”

— The soul! interrupted Lucio. Pll-ease! I’ve looked for it with a scalpel, in the dissection lab.

— And did you find it?

— Don’t make me laugh!

— No wonder, explained Samuel Tesler. The soul isn’t a tumour in the liver.

He continued:

— Once Homo Sapiens was disabused of the illusion of his divine origin, modern science had to invent a substitute. “Listen, old man, you’ve got to realize you’re an animal. An evolved animal, I’ll admit, but an animal from head to foot. Your real Adam is the first gorilla who, by dint of Swedish calisthenics, learned how to walk on two feet and turned up his nose at raw bananas. That happened back in the pre-glacial era, about a thousand centuries before you invented the flush toilet.”

— Clown! muttered Lucio between clenched teeth.

— Shhh! protested Señor Johansen, casting an uneasy glance over at the girls on the divan.

The philosopher looked at them with scientific compassion.

— Now then, he asked, as if introducing a corollary. What did Homo Sapiens do, as soon as science revealed his true origin?

Lucio Negri and Señor Johansen were silent.

— You can’t guess? insisted the philosopher. Well, Homo Sapiens, thinking about his ancestor the gorilla, listened to the voice of his instinct and started playing with himself.

— Shhh! protested Señor Johansen again. The young ladies!

— In spite of it all, added Samuel, lots of strange things persisted in Homo Sapiens: mystical enlightenment, the gift of prophecy, a whole set of free acts that escaped surgical operations in the clinic. Then science came up with a stroke of genius: they replaced the enigma of the Trinity with the enigma of the thyroid gland.

At this point Lucio Negri lost his patience.

— Now, just a minute! he shouted at Samuel, adjusting his spectacles on his polemical nose. But he didn’t have a chance to continue, for Samuel Tesler had fallen back in his easy chair and was laughing a meditative laugh, or laughingly meditating, shaking from side to side a brow as vast as a landscape.

— My beloved tormenter is laughing, chimed Haydée Amundsen, uniting the sunshine of her curls with the black night of those of Marta Ruiz. With a birdlike movement, the girls turned their faces in unison toward the metaphysical corner.

— An ugly Jew, pronounced Marta Ruiz, still studying the philosopher’s amazing physiognomy.

Haydée Amundsen let out a fine trickle of mirth, a mere thread of sound passing between sugared lips.

— He doesn’t think so! she exclaimed. You may find this hard to believe, but my beloved heartache sees himself as a mix of Rudoph Valentino, Santos Vega, 4and King Solomon, the one with the two hundred wives.

— Him? chirped Marta Ruiz, torn between disbelief, astonishment, and hilarity.

— None other.

A gale of laughter shook their springtime figures. One against the other they swayed like two lilies in the breeze, their foreheads touching and their breaths commingling, scented with tea and vanilla.

— And that pawnbroker’s nose! laughed Marta, turning now to little Solveig Amundsen, who sat quietly smiling.

Three different loves bound up in a single bundle, or three notes of a single song: thus they sat joined and distinct upon the sky-blue divan. Marta Ruiz half closed her eyelids, as though trying to hide the secret ardor, betrayed in her eyes, that was consuming her — oh, to weep! Her marvellous pallor suggested something like the serene cold of moonlit water. But careful, now! Watch out for all that ice and snow! Behind that glacial mask, there was fire. Yes, Marta Ruiz was like the live coal that hides beneath its own ashes. How different, in comparison, was Haydée Amundsen! Her coppery hair, her golden brow, eyes of turquoise, lips of pomegranate, teeth like agates, hands of brass, breasts of marble, torso of alabaster, belly of mercury, legs of onyx: Mother Nature had been pleased to pour all her finest gems into that open jewel case named Haydée Amundsen. So loaded with treasure was she that the most indifferent onlooker would be tempted to plunge his hands up to the elbow into all that mass of bright jewels, were it not for an aura of pure, jovial innocence that, like a shield, inhibited that onlooker, reined in the ignoble greed of that buccaneer. And what to say now about Solveig Amundsen? Everything and nothing. Solveig Amundsen was the primordial matter of any ideal construct, the clay from which fantasies are fashioned. She was still proof against description, like water that has not yet taken on form or colour. Silent and dense with mystery, Solveig was rolling and unrolling a Blue-Bound Notebook.