Lucio Negri could not understand the closed-mindedness, the obtuse intelligence, the stone-age mentality of those who refused to recognize the ascendent direction of Progress, a reality so obvious that only eyes blinded by outmoded obscurantism could fail to see it. How could one not cry out in admiration and laugh with joy at the marvels of the contemporary world, so full of novel surprises and so fertile in inventions, through which man, surpassing himself, now dominated the dark forces of Nature and reduced them unconditionally to his service? And what about Science, which through the effort of patient workers was cracking, one by one, the secrets of the universe we inhabit?
Señor Johansen, though silent, heartily applauded such convincing avowals. And his fatherly heart could not help picking out this wise young doctor as the ideal husband urgently needed by Ruty, in view of her twenty-eight years and a vocation to matrimony that was threatening to get out of control. Why not? Chance encounters tended to produce such miracles, and these society gatherings were organized for such praiseworthy ends… But wait a minute! The Jew was talking now.
For his part, Samuel Tesler not only recognized technical progress, but he didn’t mind admitting that certain mechanical inventions (aviation, electric refrigeration, radiotelephony) produced an instant erection in his virile member — a phenomenon, he went on to say, that left no doubt as to his enthusiasm for the cult of machinery. But when he considered that this whole conquest had come at the cost of the most formidable spiritual regression of all time, he, Samuel Tesler, trusted in the sanction of his bladder and pissed buckets on Progress and every single one of its miracles.
With a fervor not entirely unrelated to his second whisky, Adam Buenosayres approved of Tesler’s words and seconded his concluding urinary judgment. Under the influence of the heat in his entrails, a vigorous instinct to fight was awakening within him.
— What cannot be denied, he said, is that the history of man has followed and continues to follow a progressive…
— Aha! So, you finally admit it? interrupted Lucio.
— A progressive descent, concluded Adam, and not an ascent, as modernism seems to believe.
— And how do you know it’s a descent?
— A tradition common to all races, Adam argued, describes the first man as newly born from the hands of a God — a divine work, a perfect work that went quite downhill over time.
— That God really is a convenient joker, laughed Lucio. It’s the wild card that serves as the basis of all kinds of absurd explanations.
Samuel Tesler looked at Adam with eyes damp with melancholy.
— There’s nothing to be done about it, he mused. He prefers his Darwinian monkey. Another joker, but a lot uglier.
But Lucio paid the philosopher no attention and returned to the attack:
— If man once lived in a better age, why is it that it hasn’t left a single memory?
— All traditions remember a Golden Age, answered Adam.
Lucio Negri turned to Señor Johansen.
— Have you ever heard of the Golden Age? he asked him quite seriously.
— Never, said Señor Johansen. Aren’t we living it now?
— For you, yes! groaned Samuel Tesler.
— It’s like this, explained Lucio. In the Golden Age men were born wise. They had no need to work, and ate all the fruits of the earth free of charge. Springs didn’t give us water, as they do now; they were fountains of red wine or white, a piacere. Streams flowed with pasteurized milk, rivers with honey, et cetera, et cetera.
Frankly amused, Señor Johansen gave Lucio a look of solidarity. Hell of a young fellow! What a fine husband for Ruty! Then, his little eyes darting between Adam Buenosayres and Samuel Tesler, he wondered regretfully how two men with intellectual pretensions could talk such old-fashioned claptrap.
— And another thing, Lucio went on. If in fact there ever existed a Golden Age with such sublime men, how is it they haven’t left any monuments, ruins of great cities, or even the slightest trace of their grandiose civilization? Archeologists dig in the earth, and what do they find? Silica knives, arrowheads, bone harpoons, vestiges of a primitive humanity that certainly didn’t enjoy a very comfortable existence. Rivers of milk and honey! Don’t make me laugh!
Señor Johansen was all a-quiver with enthusiasm. “Let them put that in their pipe and smoke it,” he said to himself. “What have they got to say to that?”
But Samuel was boiling over:
— Don’t you make me laugh! he exclaimed, stepping aggressively toward Lucio. Man in the Golden Age was sublimely intelligent and wasn’t subject to gross necessity. His only work was to contemplate Oneness in creatures and creatures in Oneness. Why the hell would he bother about monuments, aqueducts, and flush toilets?
— Of course! said Lucio ironically. He despised action.
— He didn’t need it, the philosopher corrected him. Action would come later, in the inferior stages, until it culminated in this Iron Age we’re living now. This age of ours that pits the pure action of iron-age man against the pure contemplation of golden-age man.
The philosopher gave Adam a quick look and hissed:
— Let them choke on that bone!
Then, spreading his legs wide open in his armchair, he insisted:
— That’s not all. Let’s suppose that the original man did feel a creative urge and built colossal monuments. Do you have any idea how long ago the Golden Age would have flourished?
Lucio Negri made a vaguely dismissive gesture.
— Pile on the centuries, he grumbled. We’re adrift in pure fantasy, anyway.
— According to the Hindus, came Samuel’s lesson, the Golden Age lasted nearly two million years. Then came the Silver, Bronze, and Iron ages. Between one age and the next there were terrible cataclysms that completely changed the face of the earth. So tell me, how could there possibly be any ruins left lying around to keep the archeologists amused?
Señor Johansen, against his will, was impressed.
— Cataclysms? he asked Samuel with a worried look.
— The most recent catastrophe, the philosopher assured him, was the Universal Flood, which all traditions remember. Moses puts it at about 2,300 years before Christ, a calculation that coincides with that of most Asian peoples. The Greek Apollodorus considers that deluge to mark the passage between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, and…
“Ah, would that I had not lived in this generation of men, that I had either died before or been born after! For now we are in the Iron Age!” Adam Buenosayres mentally recited the elegy of good old Hesiod, who was already lamenting this Iron Age back in his time: “Men will waste away with toil and misery during the day and will be corrupted throughout the night. They will sack one another’s cities. There will be neither kindness nor justice nor good actions, but rather men will give their praise to the violent and evil man.” A prophecy, clearly. At the same time Adam reflected on the mystery of the earth’s having been wounded and scarred several times over, now sinking into the sea with its harvest of autumnal men, now rising up again from the waves, naked and virgin once more, to give itself joyfully to new human possibilities. As though the globe were no more than the theatre of a divine comedy, whose stage décor changed according to the libretto. And now? The end of an act, probably: “And the sky shall be rolled up like a scroll.” For some time now he’d been intuiting within himself the gravitation of four ages; it was a fatigue that grew from somewhere beyond his infancy and was assuaged by the promise of a death defined as a return to the original stillness and the blessed beginning of beginnings. And (he now realized) it was a longing to return that informed the plaintive pages of the Blue-Bound Notebook which Solveig’s hands were now torturing. Moreover, his nocturnal nostalgia sighed and brooded over the delightful images of the distant Golden Age that Samuel Tesler evoked with more erudition than sadness — the morning of humanity, when man was newborn and already dying as he contemplated his Cause! And the creatures as radiant as the letters of a book that spoke with wonderful transparency! Yes, why have I not “died before or been born after”? Above all, why is human happiness possible only in a garden in whose centre grows the tree of mortal fruit? Lucio Negri was wrong: the Golden Age had left a monument, not here on earth where things change, but in the soul of man. It was the mutilated statue of a happiness that we’ve been vainly trying to reconstruct ever since.