“Ridiculous!” he reproached himself, then carefully erased all traces of the scene from his imagination.
The three funeral coachmen set their empty glasses in a line along the bar at La Nuova Stella de Posilipo before the dead eyes of Don Nicola, who mechanically wiped the tin countertop with his grubby apron.
— Yep, growled the Skinny Coachman as he licked his wet mustache. Folks’s gettin’ hard as flint, not even death softens ’em up. Heartless bastards! It’s gettin’ so this job ain’t worth a fart in a windstorm.
The Ancient Coachman took off his beat-up slouch-hat and studied it morosely.
— Used to be, he averred, death meant somethin’, and people in funeral parties shelled out real sweet. I seen days where I made eight bucks in tips in just two burials! But people nowadays…
— Buncha heartless bastards! thundered the Skinny Coachman. They can’t hardly wait for the last clod of earth to fall in the grave, the gravediggers haven’t got the cross up yet, and they’re off like a shot. Can’t get away fast enough, back to business like pigs to the trough! Cripes!
The Fat Coachman rubbed the buttons of his frock coat with a shiny sleeve and laughed, revealing two spotty rows of greenish teeth.
— Listen to this! he said. I’m comin’ back today from the Chacarita Cemetery with this real uppity big-shot. I take him all the way to his house, and lemme tell ya, it’s away to hell and gone. So we finally get there and I hop down real quick, take my hat off nice as you please, and open the door for him. Well, if the bastard doesn’t climb down and toss me a lousy dime!
— Can’t get far with the women on that, muttered the Ancient Coachman without a speck of cheer.
An opaque drunken silence set in.
— Sad business, the Skinny Coachman growled again.
— Real sad, agreed the Ancient Coachman. Another round?
— Another round, Boss. This one’s on me! the Skinny Coachman called to Don Nicola, whose eyes lit up.
On Monte Egmont Street, Adam Buenosayres took a couple of hesitant steps like a prisoner in flight. Still not moving, his prisoner’s eyes avidly searched the open space, then closed abruptly, dazzled by the autumn sun that delineated forms, made colours laugh, and swept everything up into its tremendous joy. Turning his face up to the sphere of light, Adam felt it all melt away: old cares, new hopes, metaphysical terrors, failures to understand, memory’s voices — in a word, all the intimate details constituting the inalienable, painful, everlasting face of his soul were washed away by the happy warmth beaming down upon him. And this, too, was to live in Another, through the life of the other and the death of oneself! The more he abandoned himself to the glory of the sun, the more his chest swelled with incoming breath, whose precise correlate was the subtler inspiration of his soul. He reached the peak of the respiratory curve, felt his eyes grow moist, and knew his ecstasy was over. But from the summit he brought back a trophy: an irresistible urge to sing, to give praise. And this was the entire mechanism of poetry!
— Right eye of Heaven, Hallelujah!
As soon as he began to walk again, two new worries assaulted his mind. The first had to do with his renewed condition as a traveller, for he had broken with immobility and was diving back into the crazy uncertainty of human motion. Wrenching himself away from his contemplation of that unifying centre called Solveig Amundsen, he was re-entering the hazardous river of multiplicity. True, Monte Egmont Street looked perfectly peaceful, at least in the sector he was traversing, as bedazzled as a man brought back to life. However, he knew that upon crossing Warnes Street he’d enter a universe of agitated creatures. In that other sector of Monte Egmont, peoples from all over the world mixed languages in barbarous dissonance, fought with gestures and fists, and set up beneath the sun the elemental stage of their tragedies and farces, turning all into sound, nostalgias, joys, loves, and hates.
— One hell of a street, or a street from hell! The melting pot of races. Argentine epic?1
He balked just thinking about those who, tempting or hostile, would hook him with their gaze or voice, or even their silence. Nevertheless, now outside the abstract world of his room, he began to feel, as usual, a strong appetite for the concrete and solid, the expectancy of an angel ripe for the fall.
— To look again at forms in their thick carnality, their luscious colours, their weighty volume! To get back down in the dust and roll in it, like the sparrows and horses in Maipú. Feel like Antaeus,2 feet on the ground, Mother Earth. What about the heaven-bound horse? He’s not on this shift.
The second worry had to do with his erotic nature. He had resolved to take his Blue-Bound Notebook to Solveig, and this decision was now making him anxious. When she read it, would Solveig Amundsen recognize herself in the ideal painting he had wrought with such subtle materials? Bah! This wasn’t his main concern. The important thing was that Solveig, through these pages, would get to know an Adam Buenosayres who until now had remained prodigiously unknown to her. “When she learned of his strange love, maybe she would go to him on amorous feet, as matter flows in search of its form. They would be in the garden, in the conservatory, among the roses, autumnal, dying. But it wouldn’t matter because…”
— Yikes! That’s enough.
Sliding down the same old slope of his imagination, Adam hit a final doubt concerning himself both as lover and artist. After so much distance, after having transubstantiated the girl with his poetry, would he recognize the ideal Solveig of his notebook when he saw the flesh-and-blood Solveig? It frightened him to think about the two creatures in confrontation.
— Chacharola, Chacharola!
A chorus of harsh voices brutally cut short his speculations. Adam took his bearings: Hidalgo Street.
— Chacharola! cried a boy’s voice, hard and rough as gravel. What about the four linen sheets you brought over from Italy?
The chorus echoed in spiteful chorus:
— What about the four linen sheets from Italy?
Instantly the old woman croaked hoarsely:
— Brigante!
— Chacharola! What about the gold ring? crowed another childish voice that had never known innocence.
— What about the gold ring? repeated the chorus.
Adam quickened his pace.
— Bandito! cawed the voice of the old woman from over on Hidalgo Street.
— Chacharola! Remember the fifteen pesos in the old sock?
At the corner of Monte Egmont and Hidalgo, a troop of boys charged past Adam Buenosayres, spinning him like a top, then scattered off down the street amid whoops and shrieks. At the same moment Chacharola’s broomstick came sailing into view, describing an arc in the air. Arms a-tremble, she hurled a final insult at her cowardly enemies: