Something about Sr Tamerlán’s appearance, barely perceptible at first, had changed. His eyes had turned inwards, as if they’d find more pleasing images there than in the world outside. His jaw had slackened slightly, his fleshy tortoise tongue protruded from between his horny lips, a constant ripple ran through his limbs. With a dreamy tremor in his voice, he said:
‘If you want to talk to him I can call him. There he is.’
My eyes followed the line of his pointing finger. In the adjacent office was a young man, clearly unable to see us, standing staring in our direction, the way blind men do when they sense someone’s presence. I nodded, knowing it was what was expected of me.
‘César, I want you to come in here right away.’
Sr Tamerlán had taken a folded piece of silver foil out of his drawer and, opening it, tipped its contents out onto the glass desk-top. I hoped I’d have better luck than with the cigars, but no. With a single swipe of his Zen rake he combed the gram of gleaming, crystalline, snow-white cocaine into four perfect lines and hoovered them up through a gold tube into his greedy membranes, which were practically hanging out of his nostrils in their haste. A loudspeaker spoke.
‘Leave me alone, I’m busy,’ was all it said, too late to halt the careering Sr Tamerlán, who, riding-crop in hand, charged at the wall, which slid aside a split second before he went through it. He’d divested himself of his lovely opaline silk shirt, which had slid from his shoulders to the floor like a waterfall; I wondered if I should pick it up. I decided to stay where I was and mop up any stray crumbs left on the desk with a moistened fingertip. The intercom was still on, so, invisible in my front-row seat, I settled down to enjoy the show.
Sr Tamerlán’s son had climbed up onto his desk and, jumping up and down like a spooked chimpanzee, was doing his best to dodge the lashes his father was aiming at his shins.
‘That is the limit,’ he screamed, climbing the peaks of his snow-capped frenzy. ‘Here I am trying to save your eight-lane arse and this is how you thank me!’ he bellowed as he flogged César’s buttocks. ‘Get those pants down, boy!’
César leaped off the desk and made a headlong dash for the door, but his father was too quick for him and locked it with a few taps of the keys. Panting and smiling, he advanced upon his son. They sized each other up, circling each other — a choreography of duelling gauchos.
‘Daddy, please,’ murmured the son. ‘Not here,’ he begged, but this only intensified his father’s agitation.
‘On your knees!’ he yelled in a strangled voice. ‘I’ll teach you to bring perverts into my office! You’re going to be riddled with AIDS before you give me a healthy grandson! You know you’ve got a year! Otherwise I’ll milk you myself and inseminate some bitch, and you can sing for your inheritance! You’d like that, wouldn’t you!’
‘Daddy, I don’t deserve …’
‘Shut up! Your brother was the one who deserved things here! You …’ He made as if to spit. Then he pointed straight at me and I jumped in fright. ‘You’d like to be in there one day, wouldn’t you. You know what you have to do then.’
Biting his lips and fighting back the tears, the son went down on all fours and undid his belt buckle with uncontrollably trembling hands. With one tug his father impatiently pulled his trousers down to his knees.
‘You’ — thwack — ‘play silly buggers’ — thwack — ‘and then’ — thwack — ‘Daddy has to come and save your arse, doesn’t he. Tell me what happened! Tell me what you were doing in there, you and that pervert! You always have been a big nancy!’
Unable to contain himself, he unfastened his own trousers and, grasping his son by the hips to adjust his position slightly, mounted him as if he were a bitch on heat.
‘Stop clenching, damn you, stop clenching!’ His breathing was laboured and he began each sentence with a pant, his tongue protruding between his teeth, making him lisp faintly. ‘It isn’t enough, is it. It isn’t enough!’ he screamed in his ear, and his son replied by gritting his teeth and shaking his head from side to side the way a female tortoise does when penetrated by the male. ‘As if shoving it into that sewer of your mother’s every night wasn’t enough, drugged to the eyeballs so I could bear it, only for you to pop out! As if squeezing my testicles into that bottomless barrel till they looked like two raisins wasn’t enough! You’re still you! God damn you, you’re still you!’ Possessed with a ferocity, he clutched his son’s flowing locks and began to advance on his knees, forcing his mount to crawl, foaming at the mouth, across the glass floor. ‘You never go where I tell you to, you’re always pulling against the reins, subtly deviating! What a humiliating joke! Genetics! Genetics isn’t enough! There’s a lot more to cram in here! A lot more! Who, for fuck’s sake, is content with smiles and eye colours! And sometimes not even that comes out right! You stupid cook,’ — heave — ‘learn to mix’ — heave — ‘the ingredients’ — heave — ‘properly!’
His son tried to unsaddle him by crawling under the desk, perhaps in the hope that the edge would catch him in the forehead like a cowboy on horseback in a western. He caracoled and his father, a hero on an equestrian statue, raised one hand in the air and roared, ‘I’ll refound you as often as it takes! I don’t give a damn what the doctors say, they’ve already failed me once! I’m going to conceive you again and again until I get you right!’
Something strange had begun to happen to my eyes. Perhaps they’d been under too much strain since I’d taken my first step into this mirror-world, and had relinquished their grip on reality, which was now melting and dissolving before them. Sr Tamerlán’s fingers grew like roots and sank into his son’s flesh; black bubbles gurgled and burst forth from the wounds, popping in the swampy air; his son’s clawed at the carpet in paroxysm, gouging out furrows down to the glass, and through it they could see their shared empire glittering like a cut diamond with more facets than the sky has stars. The window panes all around me had begun to ooze and drip like molten glass; the computers and other appliances melted like vanilla ice cream into pools of bubbling plastic; the landscapes in the pictures poured out of their frames like water from a broken fish tank; the very beams that supported the thirty floors I was standing on bowed and buckled like the legs of a reeling drunk. Sailing over the general viscousness, the two bodies had lost their original human shape and were now expanding and contracting like exposed organs in a vivisection, swelling transparent to bursting point one moment and collapsing into voided, crumpled bags the next, and, like decomposition in time-lapse, they quickly mingled and merged. And no sooner had they melted than they began to boil, shuddering like thickening stew, spouting furious geysers of steam, which gradually invaded the whole room, making the events inside quite invisible. The lights went out as at the end of a performance. I closed my eyes for a few seconds and felt a terrible itching, as if all my eyelashes had turned inwards.
When I opened them, the gun-toting psychoanalyst was at my side, smiling like a dog trainer on a field day whose pets have just made him look good.
‘Nice trick, but I still think you can’t beat pulling rabbits out of hats,’ I remarked.
‘You’ve had a rare privilege. An Annunciation.’
‘Oh. They don’t go through all that for all their visitors?’
‘If you knew how to look, you’d have seen a great comet passing through the firmament, heralding the dawn of a new age.’
‘Do you think it’s wise?’ I asked. ‘A lot of people are going to find it hard to stomach.’