— We grow old, Ana, said Señora Amundsen.
Turning to Señora Ruiz, she added, amused and tender:
— The moment we let our guard down, the little imps suddenly grow up and rob us of our illusions.
Señora Ruiz, yellow and dry, her clothes hanging from her stick-like frame, clapped her mousy little eyes on Señora Amundsen.
— Illusions? she croaked lugubriously. Then, correcting herself:
— Oh yes, illusions, quite so. (Silly old fool! she muttered in her soul. She hasn’t lost her illusions, and she’s well into her third youth, after raising Cain for years on end!)
Señora Johansen, however, was not about to give in to such melancholy thoughts.
— It’s not like that, she retorted. Our daughters are like mirrors: we look at them now and see ourselves as we once were; we remember and feel young again.
— Yes, yes, of course, approved Señora Ruiz, critically studying Señora Johansen’s double chin, her torrential udder, her fat haunches. She glanced at Ruty and, in spite of herself, admired her fine figure. “Mirrors,” she mentally grumbled. “Thank God it doesn’t work the other way around. Lord help the girl if her potential suitors saw her in the mirror of her mother!”
Whether because of the music, the emotion of the subject, or the second double whisky she was finishing off, Señora Amundsen, her eyes on the portrait of the captain, felt a knot forming in her throat. Then she looked at her three daughters reclining on the sky-blue divan and whimpered:
— If only the Captain could see them now!
— The captain was a great man! Señora Johansen affirmed solemnly.
— A man with backbone, seconded Señora Ruiz. Going down with his ship, when he could have saved himself. That’s what I call backbone. (Drunken old bag! she said to herself, looking furtively at Señora Amundsen. It’s that skinful of bad whisky makes her weepy. If only Doctor Aguilera would show her what that cursèd drink does to her liver!)
— The law of the sea! explained Señora Johansen in a fateful tone.
With a dainty handkerchief, Señora Amundsen dried her eyes and then proceeded to blow her freckled nose.
— You have no idea, she sobbed, what it’s like to be widowed at such a young age, with three small children and another on the way! I don’t know what would have become of me if it weren’t for poor Mister Chisholm.
— Mister Chisholm is such a good man! Señora Johansen clucked, glaring at Señora Ruiz.
— I’d say he was a God-send, asserted Señora Ruiz. (The incredible cheek of that Englishman, taking over the widow, her children, and the Captain’s pension. I suppose that’s what they call “British phlegm.” Poor Captain!)
A burble of dark laughter stirred in her body and tickled her throat. But she snuffed it out immediately, remembering that laughter too is excitement, and Doctor Aguilera had forbidden excitement. So she arranged her bones in the armchair and took a look around the room, sharp as slander, poisonous as envy.
Insular in body and soul, far from the tertulia, Mister Chisholm was working alone, re-papering the vestibule. He’d just finished the front wall and was perched on top of a small step-ladder, pipe in his right hand and drink in his left, listening with utter indifference to the hubbub from the parlour. His grey eyes, as if entranced, were passing over the brand new wallpaper design: a flurry of green birds in flight across a blood-red sky. Strident voices from the parlour snapped him out of his reverie.
“The natives are arguing again,” Mister Chisholm said to himself. “Shouting and arguing is all they know how to do. About their so-called problems. Poppycock! They think they move of their own free will, but who pulls the strings? Rule, Britannia!”
And he thought:
“Only England knows how to colonize. A unique style. Let the natives fantasize all they want: Britannia makes the wheels turn, the Empire’s solid. All right! But what about…”
Here Mister Chisholm felt a pang of anxiety, though only a very slight one, as behooves an Englishman:
“What about our cousins to the West?”
Two or three lines creased Mister Chisholm’s forehead, then quickly faded away.
“Bah!” he reflected. “Yankee-land! They’ve got no style, they’ve only just learned to walk on their hind legs. Barbarians! They make a mess of everything, starting with the English language.”
Calm now, Mister Chisholm climbed down the steps of the ladder, sucked back the rest of his double whisky, and stirred the bucket of paste, still smoking his pipe newly replenished with tobacco and optimism.
Who was responsible for spoiling Mister Chisholm’s imperial cogitations? In one corner of the parlour — to the right and down-stage for the reader — a singular polemic had just broken out between Samuel Tesler, metaphysician, and Lucio Negri, doctor of medicine. Lord and master of an easy chair, Samuel Tesler had positioned himself at the very corner of the room. To his left sat the melancholy effigy of Adam Buenosayres, troubadour. To Samuel’s right stood the statuesque figure of Lucio Negri, who with amorous strategy offered his finest profile to the girls seated upon the sky-blue divan, without for a moment losing sight of the philosopher who was attacking him ruthlessly. Near Adam Buenosayres, Señor Johansen — fat, pink, neat and tidy — looked on gravely. His tame little eyes went back and forth as each contestant spoke, and Señor Johansen seemed to be wrestling deeply with doubt, as if weighing the words of the two on an untrustworthy scale.
— What in the world has Genesis got to do with anything? protested Lucio, sneaking a glance at the girls. Are you going to tell me the little tales told in Genesis contain even a speck of scientific knowledge?
Samuel Tesler smiled indulgently.
— According to my grandfather Maimonides,2 he answered, Genesis is a treatise on physics. Naturally, my granddad Maimonides, who also happened to be a sawbones, was versed in the language of symbols.
— Hegel dismisses the Scriptures for their lack of verisimilitude, retorted Lucio.
At this point, the philosopher leapt up as if a German trumpet had just blasted him in the ear.
— Hegel? he exclaimed. A strutting peacock! He rejects everything that can’t comfortably fit into his German professor’s skull. A cranium uninhabitable by Metaphysics!
— Of course, said Lucio, you know more than Hegel does.
— Much more! agreed the philosopher, enfolding himself in the flowing tunic of his dignity.
Unruffled, Lucio Negri turned to the melancholy effigy of Adam Buenosayres.
— A flake! he exclaimed, pointing at Tesler and exchanging a smile with Solveig Amundsen, who was watching him from a distance.
Adam Buenosayres hadn’t missed that little exchange, a look for a smile. He would have liked to stay out of the futile argument and given himself over to his melancholy thoughts, especially now that he had to reckon with a new disappointment in love. However, he could see Lucio Negri looking at him, inviting him to intervene in the debate. “Careful,” he warned himself, “don’t say anything inappropriate.”
— In Villa Crespo, he began reluctantly, there’s an old Italian woman I’ve dubbed Clotho. Sometimes I see her in the San Bernardo Church, kneeling at the high altar. And looking at her, I wonder if Clotho doesn’t know more than all the philosophy in the world.
— Don’t worry, confirmed Tesler, she does know more.
Señor Johansen, who was following closely, did not look happy at this.
— Sounds like nonsense to me, he proffered timidly. Although I don’t know anything about philosophy.