The “name under reserve” had been pronounced, and Adam Buenosayres understood the battle was imminent. How painful that the name had passed the impure lips of the dragon! The name he himself hadn’t dared utter, not even in his Blue-Bound Notebook. But what to do? Tackle the dragon and tear from his mouth the sweet name he’d profaned? He thought about it a moment, then decided that if he attacked, he wouldn’t find out what the dragon could and must reveal to him.
— That’s ridiculous! he protested at last. A mere girl! Anyway, I haven’t been to the Amundsens’ for many a Thursday now.16
On the offensive, he added:
— Speaking of the Amundsens, I hear you’ve been skulking around that house full of girls at all hours. They say you haven’t missed a single tea in Saavedra, and that for some time now — I can scarcely credit it! — you’ve had a manic attack of personal hygiene.
Samuel Tesler smiled, disdainful and bored, but something vital stirred beneath his armour.
— Yes, he confessed, I like the landscape in Saavedra, that broken terrain where the city comes to an end.
He obviously wanted to change the subject, for he added right away:
— And speaking of Saavedra, I haven’t seen any of those fat-assed angels that your friend Schultz says hatch new neighbourhoods.
With those words, the philosopher swung his legs over the edge of the bed, anxiously looked for his slippers, and stood up, thus offering a new perspective of his mutable nature: his gigantic torso was now perched atop two dwarfish legs, short, thick, and bandy. At the same time, his Chinese kimono was displayed in all its splendour.
At long last, the moment has arrived to describe this remarkable robe, with all its inscriptions, allegories, and figures. For if Hesiod sang of laborious Hercules’s escutcheon, and Homer of the deserting shield of Achilles, how could I not describe the never-yet-seen, never-evenimagined kimono of Samuel Tesler? If someone were to object that an escutcheon is not a dressing gown, I would reply that a dressing gown can nevertheless be an escutcheon, as in the case of Samuel Tesler — that unsung paladin who for lack of a steed rode a double bed and whose sole act of chivalry was a dream-state he sustained in dogged self-defence against the world and its rigours.
The kimono, egg-yellow in colour, presented two faces: front and back, ventral and dorsal, diurnal and nocturnal. On the right flank of the ventral face were depicted rampant neocriollo dragons furiously biting their own tails. On the left flank, a field of ripe wheat seemed to billow beneath the dragons’ panting breath. In the wheatfield, a farmer with a kind face sat cross-legged, smoking. His Chinese-style mustachios hung in two long shoots down to his feet. The right-hand strand was tied around the big toe of his left foot, and the left-hand strand around the big toe of his right foot. On the farmer’s forehead was emblazoned the following heraldic device: “Man’s first care is to save his own skin.”17 The pectoral area of the kimono showed a citizen blissfully placing his vote in a gleaming rosewood ballot-box, while a grey angel whispered in his ear. The voter’s breast boasted the legend: Superhomo sum! In the abdominal region of the kimono, the figure of Dame Republic was embroidered with threads of a thousand colours; she wore a Phrygian bonnet and blue peplum; her breasts were bounteous, her cheeks rosy, and she poured gifts from a great cornucopia over a delirious multitude. At the level of her mons pubis could be seen the four Cardinal Virtues lying dead in as many funeral coaches on their way to the Chacarita Cemetery; the funeral procession was formed by the seven Capital Sins, who wore monocles and smoked triumphal cigars, banker-style. Also on the front of the kimono appeared the preamble of the Argentine Constitution written in uncial characters from the sixth century; the twelve signs of the Zodiac, represented by the country’s flora and fauna; a table for multiplication and another for subtraction, both identical; the ninety-eight amorous positions from the Kama Sutra, very vividly rendered, along with an advertisement for Doctor X, a specialist in venereal disease; a horse-racing schedule, a cookbook, and an eloquent prospectus for “MotoGut,” a popular laxative.
When Samuel Tesler turned around, the dorsal or nocturnal face of the kimono was exhibited. It was graced with the design of a tree, its branches extending outward in the four cardinal directions, then turning back so that their extremities joined in the leafy treetop. Two serpents wound themselves around the trunk of the tree. One serpent spiralled downward, its head reaching the roots, while the other ascended and hid its head in the treetop, where twelve resplendent suns hung like fruit. Four rivers gushed forth from from a spring at the foot of the tree, flowing north, south, east, and west; Narcissus leaned over this spring, contemplating the water and slowly turning into a flower.
But as I was saying, Samuel Tesler had just stood up. He put out his cigarette in an ashtray, crushing it with his thumbnail, then went to the blackboard and carefully wiped it clean of the notes for the twenty-seventh. Finally he went to the window. His eyes looked out over the city as it laughed naked under the sun’s harpoon. As though in the grip of an idée fixe, he raised an eloquent arm, taking in zinc rooftops, brick terraces, distant bell-towers, and the tall stacks smoking in the wind:
— There you have Buenos Aires! The bitch that devours her pups in order to grow.
Shouts and laughter from outside cut his speech short.
— Who’s shouting out there? asked the philosopher with knitted brow.
Adam pointed to a building under construction, opposite them:
— The Italian construction workers.
— And what’s the Italic beast laughing about?
— Your kimono.
And so they were. Up there on their scaffolding in the sky, the workmen had left off munching their lunch of raw onions and were excitedly gesticulating in celebration of the kimono and its bizarre designs. Samuel Tesler, enigmatic, stared at them and made the following Masonic sign: placing his left forearm inside the elbow joint of his right arm and jolting it upright, he then emphatically shook the vertical appendage two or three times and anxiously waited for a reaction. The Italians immediately responded in kind, and the philosopher, satisfied, burst out laughing: they had understood one another. Then, addressing his guest, the construction workers, the city and the world, Samuel Tesler spoke thus:
— There lies Buenos Aires, the city whose symbol is the chicken, not so much for its ineffable grease as for the elevation of its spiritual flight, comparable only to that of the ample bird. I wonder now, and I put the question to you, my happy fellow citizens: What can a philosopher do in the city of the early-rising hen?
Samuel Tesler paused a moment, and the construction workers applauded, though their adulation came ominously supplemented by a chorus of raspberries. Samuel Tesler nevertheless gestured his profound gratitude. Then, raising his hand to his face as if to adjust an actor’s mask, he continued in a tone of darkest melancholy:
— It is twelve noon, and at this solemn hour two million greedy stomachs are receiving the chewed foodstuffs sent them by their fortunate owners. Food which, as you know, will be transformed into blood and faecal material. The latter will in turn pass through an ingenious plumbing system and go on to enrich the waters of the “eponymous river,” as Ricardo Rojas18 would say; while the blood, conveniently oxygenated in the lungs, will run through the generous arteries of my fellow citizens. And two million brains will think that life is just amazingly hunky-dory. And so, what will the philosopher do in the city of the hen?