Leopoldo Marechal - Adam Buenosayres

The eleven characters stopped talking. One by one, she examined them all and none, she smiled at everybody and nobody, as she slowly pulled up her long indigo stockings. She smiled and spoke to everyone, the beast of a thousand forms and none.

— How ’bout it, boys? How ’bout it?

Doña Venus swayed atop her stool.

— You won’t find another girl like Jova, she purred between sighs.

— How ’bout it, boys? invited Jova.

Samuel Tesler was about to pounce on her like a lion, but Franky held him back.

— Settle down, he told him. Your number hasn’t come up yet.

Jova laughed. A hot and neutral laugh. Then she insisted, her eyes motioning toward the room partially visible behind her.

— So? How ’bout it, boys?

A deep unease settled among the eleven men in the vestibule. The Galician Conductor had a bleak expression on his face, the Syrian Merchant a cruel gleam in his eye. The Gasfitter hung his head like a recently beaten animal. The Mature Gentleman, indifferent, had gone back to his newspaper. Adam and Schultz, Pereda and Bernini, Samuel and Franky, conversed or pretended to, anxious to elude the circular gaze of Jova. In the midst of the ambient tension, the Taciturn Young Man got to his feet and walked stiltedly like a mechanical doll toward Jova. Still smiling at everyone and no one, Jova wrapped a bare arm around his neck and softly pulled him into the room. Behind them, the door began discreetly to close. But before disappearing completely, Jova turned her laughing head to look back at everybody and nobody, to smile for each man and no man — nothingness tricked out as Iris, the shadow of a mystery!

– “May woman be a passing season in your life,” declared Schultz sententiously in Adam’s ear. (The astrologer’s voice was thick and his head swimming but, as he noted with pride, the excitement in his coarse flesh and bones was not affecting the decorum of his astral body.)

— Amen! groaned Adam Buenosayres. (And he had told Irma her eyes were like two mornings together; maybe he’d even kissed her. Then he’d seemed to lose this world, only to recover it later, but colder, sadder, as though his soul in its descent had lost the gift of sight, the illuminating grace of things.)

Meanwhile, with the eclipse of Jova, the men in the vestibule were behaving normally again, except for the Syrian Merchant, apparently absorbed in some dream of sun-bronzed women. But a hard silence had been left in the room that no one dared interrupt. The only sounds were the occasional glug-glug of draining water inside the hermetic chamber, or minute insects tapping against the glass lamp, or Doña Venus’s breathing in her beatific sleep. That’s how matters stood, when out of the blue Samuel Tesler started hooting with laughter, shaking his expressive face back and forth:

– “How ’bout it, boys,” he laughed. Cripes, as old Ciro would say! This lenocinium is abstract. 3Compared to this joint, Pythagoras’s theorem is an orgy.

The Gasfitter, who was trying to light an uncooperative half-cigar, stopped in mid-gesture, indifferent to the match burning between thumb and index finger. The Mature Gentleman lowered his newspaper. The Galician Conductor raised his eyebrows. The Merchant, jolted out of his ecstasy, clapped two tiger’s eyes on the philosopher. Then Franky Amundsen looked benevolently around at the men in the vestibule, pleading their indulgence.

— A great mind! he said, caressing Samuel’s back as though trying to calm down a vexed animal. But he’s the unfortunate victim of alcohol, ataxia of the motor functions, and a case of the clap his grandparents picked up back in the time of the Pharoahs.

— Too bad! commiserated the Mature Gentleman. And so young!

— Young? protested Franky. He’s two thousand years old, if he’s a day!

He turned toward the philosopher and took his head in his heads with the intention of kissing him on the forehead, but pushed him away immediately, as if startled.

— Brrr! he exclaimed. He’s uglier than ever!

Truth be told, Samuel’s laughing face was a spectacle in itself. Looking at it, Adam Buenosayres was put in mind of those demons that in cathedrals smirk gleefully beneath the stone heel of a saint. But the philosopher’s laughter was short-lived. Unexpectedly, Samuel adopted a grave demeanour, stood up, and brought his index finger to his lips.

— Shhh! he said, pointing at the closed door. Silence!

He staggered over to the door. But Adam and Franky smartly caught up with him and practically dragged him back to his seat.

— I know her names! yelled Samuel, furiously squirming in Franky’s arms. She’s the whore of the Apocalypse, the most naked among the clothed. In my tribe she was called Lilith.

— You wouldn’t be confusing her with someone else, would you? Franky asked, without letting go of him.

At that point, the dormant Doña Venus began muttering a complaint seeming to come from afar.

— No rough-housing, she whispered. This is a proper establishment.

The characters in the vestibule exchanged glances, once again amazed by that prodigy of the talking head.

— Okay! growled Bernini. Is the woman sleeping or not?

— She sleeps in the saddle, like a cowboy, Pereda answered very calmly. She sleeps mounted on her stool.

So she did, in fact. Her words having restored order and reconstructed the broken silence, Doña Venus had fallen back into her purring torpor. But all of a sudden, at the sound of steps from inside the room, she blinked eyelids as wrinkled as walnut shells. The door of the room, which no one had yet seen open, swung on its hinges, and out came the Anonymous Lover. Not even looking at him, Doña Venus dropped from her pedestal with gelatinous fluidity, slid over to the main door, drew back the stealthy chain, and opened the frosted-glass street door. The Anonymous Lover, not bothering to pretend he wasn’t in full flight, made his discreetly phantasmal exit. Doña Venus closed the door behind him, secured the chain, planted herself in front of the men, and critically took stock of the situation.

When standing, Doña Venus displayed an almost perfectly spherical shape, the overflow of her flabby flesh raining down from breasts, abdomen, and buttocks. Her head, in contrast, had a certain refined quality of a rampant animal, embellished by the wonder of her half-white, half-black coiffure. As for her eyes, their long experience was obvious in the way she now studied each of those men who sat slowly ripening under the shrill light between blood-coloured walls. Even more obvious was that Doña Venus’s intelligent eyes had just chosen the Syrian Merchant. Sensing this, he feigned a yawn of indifference and got to his feet. Doña Venus smiled enigmatically and gestured toward the door left open by the Anonymous Lover. The Merchant obeyed the silent order and slipped into the room, closing the door behind him. From the vestibule, they could hear the key turn in the lock. Satisfied, Doña Venus bent over to stroke the belly of her little dog before climbing back aboard her stool to recover her equilibrium, beatitude, and slumber.

Franky Amundsen hadn’t missed a single detail of the scene. He turned to the philosopher of Villa Crespo:

— Most satisfying to observe how much the Terrestrial Venus has modernized her operation. Son of a gun! One on the scaffold and another waiting in the chapel. Now that’s production!

— Hmm! Samuel responded vaguely.

— The assembly line, Bernini said with a cynical air. The latest thing from míster Ford.

Franky nodded, serious and scientific, and solicited the audience’s attention with a gesture:

— Gentlemen! he began. Who would dare suggest that we are not progressing? Consider this prodigy of technique and be amazed! Mechanical love, in three movements. Speed, comfort, hygiene! Nota bene : at no point in the production process does the hand of man intervene.