Samuel Tesler paused again, and the workers filled the silence with another ovation. But the philosopher no longer deigned to notice them. He cupped his right ear with his hand and, breath held, mimed that he was listening long and hard.
— The clock has struck twelve! he exclaimed at last. Ah, what strange music comes to my ears this noonday! It’s the maxillary music of four million jaws joining and separating in accord with the harmonious laws of mastication. An hour from now, four million arms will return to their labour. They’ll raise the facade of the city higher and ever higher, and sink the roots of the city ever deeper. They’ll strengthen the city’s kidneys, adorn her face, place shoes on her feet. They’ll stuff her pockets using the clawed hand of commerce and the calloused hand of industry. They’ll build outward — out from the skin, out from the eyes, outwardly paying lip service — all that can be touched, tasted, heard, and smelled. Then night will fall, and two million exhausted bodies will fall to earth. Two million horizontal bodies, beneath the sleepless gaze of God, will sleep noisily, rending the conjugal sheets with their farts. And who will watch over the city of the hen? A handful of select minds who, wakeful alongside their sleeping brothers, are meditating on the City of the Owl, the city within that cannot be seen or smelled or touched.19
Samuel Tesler fell silent, his facial muscles suddenly relaxing. Through his cracked mask, however, could be glimpsed a shadow of real pity.
— How you exaggerate! said Adam, chortling.
— It’s the pure, unalloyed truth, Samuel assured him. I don’t know about your encounters with the city of the hen, but mine are absolutely hilarious.
The philosopher began to mimic the voice, the look, the gestures, and even the clothes of various individuals as he named them:
— For example, here I am, studying Hegel, and my father comes in: ABRAHAM TESLER: (Moses-like beard, furtive eyes, nose like the leap of a lion, nickel spectacles. He wears his ancient heavy frock-coat from Odessa and matching coachman’s top-hat.) My son, you vaste your time and my money on philosophies! Vy philosophies and not commerce, my dear Samoyel? You put up little stand for selling hats in Triunvirato Street. Three months later you rent a nice place with windows for display. Two years later you buy own house; five years later…
SAMUEL TESLER: (Forehead bulging with genius, dignity in his eyes, greatness in his bearing. Interrupts his father with an Olympian gesture.) That’s enough, old man! My mind is made up. (Exit Abraham Tesler, rending the lapel of his frock-coat with one sweep of his hand.)
— Other times, continued Samuel, I’m eating supper at home, and my mother…
REBECCA TESLER: (Meek, lachrymose eyes, a blond wig that’s seen better days, work-roughened hands. She bends over the sewing machine under a small electric lamp.) Samoyel, your mother vork night and day so that you should study in Faculty of Medicine. These eyes hurt me because I look so much at sewing vork. But I see great doctor in my Samoyel and your mother’s eyes don’t hurt no more. Study, Samoyel! Doctor of Medicine, great career! Later you marry rich girl, big dowry for clinic and X-rays. Then big automobile, many clients in waiting-room…
SAMUEL TESLER: (Head sinking into his soup bowl.) No, Mother! Never!20
A fit of laughter shook the philosopher right down to his feet:
— Do you get the picture? It’s two different worlds, putting the boots to each other!
His laughter, following upon the sorrow of the characters just parodied by Samuel, was so dehumanized and outrageous that the visitor would have been aghast had he not intuited all the mortification implicit in Samuel’s raillery. So Adam Buenosayres said nothing, though his silence resonated with sadness. (“Remember! Remember your first verses, hidden in the desk drawer, like a delicious sin. And your father, the blacksmith, came upon them: he leafed through them in silence, put them back in your schoolboy’s folder, and said nothing as you trembled before him. And one day, Don Aquiles read your composition and pronounced: ‘Adam Buenosayres will be a poet,’ and all eyes turned to look at you, spellbound, the way they looked at pictures in the Natural History textbook. And as an adolescent you kept your secret, feeling shame before the men who weep or laugh under the sun, and timidity before the daughters of men who beneath the sun laugh or weep.”)
But Samuel, fearing that an importunate meditation might rob him of the ideal spectator he had in his visitor, resumed his discourse:
— As you can see, my situation is awkward in the city of the hen. That’s one problem. But there’s another problem: it’s a city full of temptations.
— Hey, hey! cried Adam, his interest piqued.
— Sometimes, declared Samuel, I’m sorely tempted to give up on the bleary-eyed donkey of philosophy and boot its ass over to Pipo the Wop’s corral.
— No!
Samuel Tesler adopted an air of mysterious reserve.
— For some time now I’ve been visited by an angel of reinforced concrete.21
— Really?
The philosopher planted himself in front of his visitor. He balanced himself on one leg while raising the other behind him, piously joined his hands, and constructed a mechanical smile, his eyes mimicking ecstasy. Having struck the posture of the angel, he spoke thus:
THE CEMENT ANGEL: (Voice at once silly and unctuous.) Samuel, worthy man! You are the last scion of a once pastoral race that sang the rosy-cheeked Eclogue. Why do you insist on living in the sinful city? (Admonitory.) Do you not fear the scourges of tuberculosis and offensive newspapers? (Didactic.) Remember that Argentina has some three million square kilometres, ready to receive the seed of bread and the sweat of human labour. (Imperious.) Get thee to the prairie, O illustrious little loafer! Make the plough march before thee; let the oxen of aromatic manure march before the plough; let the earth, before the oxen, open her fertile vagina! (Between suggestive and chaste.) Let there be a woman by your side, let her conceive fourteen look-alike children who will gulp down bitter mate and intone the National Anthem without mispronouncing a single word. (Lyrical.) Out there on the pampa of sturdy loins and beneath a sun not yet grown old and grey, the smell of your feet will be your song! (Dubious.) But even if you hold to atavistic propensities and disdain Ceres in favour of money-spinning Mercury, run to the plain anyway! Has it not been compared to a billiard table? Well then, on it thou shalt lay down the three balls.22
Breaking the angel pose, Samuel let out a single guffaw so irresistible that his visitor gave in to the temptation to join him in exercising that privilege of human dignity.
— Not a word of lie! insisted Samuel Tesler. The angel and I punch each other out every night.
— Looks to me like your angel is a demon with a dangerously matrimonial bent, observed Adam Buenosayres, still laughing. Now I understand your little excursions to Saavedra! Which one of the girls is the angel’s candidate? (“Watch out!”)
— Don’t worry, it isn’t Solveig Amundsen! replied the suddenly melancholy philosopher.
He fell into an ecstatic silence, as though the cool shade of a woman had abruptly fallen over his kimono’d figure.
(Samuel Tesler, philosopher, lectured his disciples in the Agora many times on the inanity of woman, who, being a mere fragment of the Adamic rib cage, could barely hide her naked metaphysical lack. Precisely this destitute nudity — he affirmed with abundant quotations both modern and classical — explained why women were eternally obsessed with getting dressed up at any cost and did not hesitate to strip carnivorous animals of their sleek furs, birds of their sublime plumage, reptiles of their scales, trees of their fibres and bark, worms of their glistening spit, and the earth of its precious metals and gems. Samuel Tesler, philosopher, did not censure this exploitation of the three kingdoms, meant to repair an absolutely irreparable nakedness, even though a certain cosmic pity, which never brought a tear to his eye, occasionally moved him to lament the sad lot of the lowlier creatures. He would point out in passing that Jehovah had tried in vain to cover a nudity which, though decked out with the entire visible Creation, remained for all that even more naked than before. But what the philosopher would not allow — and on this point he was intransigent to the point of anger — was that woman, after adorning herself with all the graces of the natural world, should do the same with the graces of the intellect, thanks to the despicable servility of poets in love or poetic lovers, whose truly laughable erotic fantasy was capable of embellishing their false idols with the attributes of goddesses, naiads, sylphs, and nereids. To combat this temptation to subordinate the subtle order to the gross order of existence, he taught his disciples an infallible trick he’d resorted to himself, consisting in the reverse operation. For example, imagining the divine Cleopatra picking her nose and making little snotballs, or Helen of Troy sitting on the john. Such prudence won for Samuel Tesler the recognition of his contemporaries, who had the following epitaph engraved on his tomb: “Traveller who goeth to Cytherea: here lies a man who never confused the Terrestrial Venus with the Celestial Venus.”)