Leopoldo Marechal - Adam Buenosayres

Schultz’s story left his listeners in the vestibule incredulous, a condition the astrologer did his best to overcome with a few wise reflections on love and death. He tried, but did not succeed, because Franky Amundsen was burning with desire to add his two cents’ worth to the literary contest. Pondering the matter deeply, Franky hesitated between the Water Drop torture, which the ferocious Culquelubi inflicted on the ex-Knight Templar in Salgari’s The Philtre of the Caliphs , and the Quail Feather torture suffered by Tickner, Sexton Blake’s young assistant, in the terrifying story of The Blue Fear . Finally he decided on the latter: now the Prisoner is trussed up inside the torture chamber; his tormentor, a grinning Chinese, has just removed his shoes and socks (here, the audience began to smile). What does the Chinese torturer do next? He takes a quail feather and starts tickling the soles of the Prisoner’s feet (the audience’s smile widened). The Prisoner is laughing his head off, he weeps with laughter (frank hilarity among the audience), until finally the joke becomes intolerable. His ears are buzzing, his nerves exploding, and his laughter degenerates into howls and sobs. As a result of the torment, the Prisoner goes mad.

If Schultz’s depiction had provoked resistance, Franky’s unleashed a veritable deluge of objections. The pros and cons of laughter as a means of torture were carefully weighed, until Doña Venus, as comatose as ever, stirred atop her stool and emitted a verdict with no right of appeal:

— Three bullshit artists, she said. That’s what they are: three bullshit artists.

The severity of the judgment flummoxed the three polemicists. Adam Buenosayres and Luis Pereda started laughing. Meanwhile, something began to stir beneath the rock-hard shell within which hunkered the Galician Conductor:

— Torture! he snorted. If you want torture, go to the police. That’s what they know best: how to torture the folks they arrest, trying to force them to confess. And confess they do, whether they’re guilty or not

— Can you swear to that? Franky asked him in an agressive tone.

— Forget wasps and feathers, continued the Conductor, oblivious to Franky. The interrogations go on day and night; they don’t even let them sleep. They twist their victims’ big toe or (pardon my language) their testicles. They feed them anchovies and smoked herring, to get them thirsty, and then they deny them water.

— Barbarians! Doña Venus squawked peacefully.

But the Gasfitter smiled, beaming all over with benevolence.

— Whaddya want! he said. If they don’t lean on ’em, they won’t cough up the goods!

— What about the albas corpus appeal? 5objected the Conductor, his voice pure poison.

Franky started.

— What appeal? he cried, not believing his ears.

— Albas corpus , said the Conductor. That’s the legal way.

Franky turned to the group with consternation.

— Did I hear right? he wondered.

— It’s true what they say, commented Pereda. Every gallego is born with a copy of the Criminal Code in his hand.

Doña Venus turned her sleeping head from side to side:

— Yes, she said. They’re stupid brutes.

Everyone burst out laughing, and the Galician Conductor glowered menacingly. Fortunately, the pipsqueak Bernini, already famous for his powers of observation, explained that Doña Venus, drifting in and out of lethargy, had merely got her timing wrong, and that obviously her insult had not been for the conscientious natives of Galicia, 6but for the police torturers just alluded to by the Conductor himself; and that, crude though her language may have been, it testified to her incommensurable thirst for justice. That elementary interpretation of the facts restored peace to the vestibule, a peace all sensed had been under threat. The Galician Conductor put aside his remaining aggressiveness, and the rest of the party sighed with relief. Just then, the door handle turned again: yes, the door to the anteroom was opening to release the Taciturn Young Man, now rather wilted. No doubt about it, the den of love was heaving him, vomiting him out. The Taciturn Young Man tarried at the threshold and blinked once or twice, as if dazzled by the bloody light in the vestibule. His hat was pulled down over his eyes, and with an unsteady hand he was trying to straighten his dishevelled clothes.

— His nuptial suit, murmured Schultz in a desolate tone.

But the Young Man’s bedazzlement lasted only a moment. Without further delay, like the Anonymous Lover shortly before him, he bolted for the main door held open by Doña Venus and took off for the street, mistrustful and urgent.

— He’s fleeing, Schultz said to his companion Adam Buenosayres.

He was indeed going back into the same night whence he had arrived astride his magic broom. His was a return from a witches’ sabbath, skulking and precipitate, before the cock’s trumpet announced the day.

— An erotic collapse, groaned Adam (and he had told Irma her eyes were like two mornings together…).

The chain-lock once again in place, Doña Venus was standing (if such may be said of a sphere) and looking around among the men for someone to replace the ghost who’d just exited through the hallway. Her doubtful eyes fluctuated between the Italian Gasfitter and the Galician Conductor, as though studiously feeling out the maturity of each. She still hadn’t come to a decision when the anteroom door half-opened and Jova’s head appeared, smiling urbi et orbi .

— Boys! clucked the most naked among the bedizened.

Even the Mature Gentleman set eyes on that unexpected puppet’s head. Then Jova, responding to all gazes and none, stuck a mocking tongue out at everyone and no one (a sort of red mollusc between the two valves of her lips), and disappeared instantly, closing the solemn door behind her.

— What a girl is Jova! grumbled Doña Venus between sighs.

When she turned back to the men in the vestibule, her choice had been made. With a slight gesture she got the Galician Conductor to his feet and, with another motion, she pointed him toward the door of the anteroom. The Conductor, more distracted than ever, entered the lair in turn, taking with him the secret of his impenetrable soul. Afterward, Doña Venus walked across the vestibule to the patio and looked out at the sky.

— It’s clouding over, she said. Lousy weather.

She rotated heavily, like a sphere on its polar axis. She saw the Mature Gentleman getting to his feet and she watched as he methodically smoothed out the wrinkles in his suit, folded with great care the pages of his newspaper, tucked it under his arm, and drew back the chain on the door.

— Are you leaving? Doña Venus asked in a honeyed voice.

— It’s getting late, responded the Mature Gentleman.

He opened the main door familiarly, slipped into the hallway, and closed the door behind him. Doña Venus hadn’t taken her eyes off him. All graciousness, she explained:

— An old franelero , the peep-and-go-home type.

Lulu the lapdog growled as though voicing disapproval of the franelero ’s desertion. Doña Venus, with difficulty, crouched down and stroked Lulu’s pink belly. Then she got settled again on her stool and, before closing her eyes, murmured:

— A bloody old franelero .

With that laconic epitaph, the story of the Mature Gentleman came to a close. The characters still waiting in the vestibule became aware of their increasing solitude. Indeed, of the brilliant conversationalists gathered round the stool, only the Gasfitter was still there, or at least half there, since for a while now his face had been expressing absence. Moreover, as soon as the woman and her dog closed their eyes, a disturbing silence descended upon the vestibule, broken only by the occasional neighbourhood rooster or the odd earlybird streetcar careening down Canning Street. A silence pregnant with sounds which, though still proper to the realm of night, announced dawn’s imminence: sounds that acquire a recriminatory accent in the ears of those who have abused the night. The new circumstances helped improve the tone among the men remaining there under the bloody light. And Samuel Tesler had the honour of steering the conversation in a nobler, altruistic direction. The philosopher was emerging from his abundantly fluvial drunkenness, not yet with a specific thought in mind, but moved rather by a kind of vague desperation that found an outlet in eloquent gesticulations and ominous groans.