Nevertheless, no sooner had I received this news than a deep chord detonated in my being and something vital was left forever wounded. I’ll never forget the nocturnal hour when, crossing the threshold of Saavedra and wending my way among the throng of astonished faces filling the vestibule, I came, as in a dream, upon the narrow box containing the remains of The One; yes, the coffin of walnut wood whose edges marked for her an unbreachable limit. She was swathed in the brightest of linens. Her sisters had combed her flaxen hair, crowned her brow with a ring of little white flowers, and placed between her stiff hands an ivory rosary and the book of her first communion, just as they would have adorned her for her wedding. Yet the whole of her spoke of such appalling distance that, when I looked at her, my being became unhinged and its inner voices began their woeful lament, to the point of nearly bursting out loud, finally finding an outlet in sweet avenues of tears. Afterward, I remember an all-night wake whose infinity seemed to deny any new dawn; and a whirlwind of bare faces sobbing in the candlelight, unsightly yet beautiful in the terrible shamelessness of their grief; and the house full of weeping or — what amounted to the same thing — fraught silences; and then a lassitude of limbs, a hunkering down of lights and a drowsiness of tired animal; and at last the break of day, insisted upon by imbecile roosters, but indecisive and apathetic, as though fearing that not enough pain remained in humankind to fill another day on earth. And I’ll not speak now of the stupor experienced by eyes before the dawn light no one had summoned; nor of the brilliance of the funeral procession of lacquered coaches and horses’ hooves; nor of that unbearably slow journey through Buenos Aires whose indifference stung like an insult; nor of the cradle of red clay which lovelessly received that vanquished body of a girl; nor of the return trip without her, from solitude, amid solitude, unto solitude.
XIV
Listless days ensued, filing by like automatons in front of my being, every morning bringing their tired old collection of pawed-over junk, every evening taking it away. Indifferent to the play of exterior images, my mind empty and my will paralyzed, I recall how stupid and rigid seemed the chill mechanics of time, the obligatory waking-up and the useless return to sleep, each time the earth emerged from or re-entered its cone of shadow. Night-time, however, brought with sleep the sweet parody of death, and the dark delight of reviving in a subtle world made of images that arose in another space and came into being in another time, witnessed by another awareness in my being. But in my dreamspace The One’s death, too, was reconstructed according to other laws; and it attained a fine-tuned intensity so painful that I would wake up suddenly, still filled with fragments of images and voices. Then, opening my ears and holding my breath, I would listen to the furniture creak, the wind sigh in the paradise trees on Monte Egmont Street, and someone else moaning in dreams in the other room, sounds and whispers of sounds that overwhelmed me with anguish, as if my nerves extended beyond my skin and branched out through the house to pick up its most intimate vibrations.
But on the last of those nights I had an extraordinary dream whose meaning, impressed upon my defeated mind, opened up a path from which my mind will surely not henceforth swerve. I seemed to be in rickety boat, standing on its poorly fitted planks, and paddling ceaselessly over the waters of a lagoon. The devastated body of The One lay across the bow of the boat, wearing the same clothes and accoutrements as in her final night in Saavedra. Still paddling, I contemplated her womanly form, my soul racked by a tearless pity whose sweetness I cannot now depict, while the paddle, cutting through the dead waters, stirred up terrible odours and sliced into phosphorescent chunks of dead meat that swirled and sank into the depths. Next it seemed the boat came to rest at a jetty as dark as ink. I took up the woman’s body in my arms and went up some sort of stairs until I came to a door that opened soundlessly before me. Then, it seemed, Someone behind the door held his arms outstretched toward me and I deposited in them the dead body, which was soon borne away into the interior gloom. When I tried to follow, it seemed, an invincible force pinned my heels at the threshold, and the door slowly closed, separating my heart from those remains I’d brought over the waters. Wounded to the point of deep distress, I seemed to shout out terrible words and beat my fists against the closed door; since there was no echo of a response, my blows and shouts became more violent, until I seemed to feel behind me the presence of someone staring at me fixedly. I turned around then and made out the shape of an old and ragged man whose face seemed not unfamiliar. Looking at me mercifully, he said: “Let death take its own.”12 And since I asked him who he was, the old man answered: “I am he who has moved, moves, and will move your steps.” Then I seemed to recognize the same voice that had spoken to me, both when awake and asleep, so many times before; and, as if the sense of all my actions in this world were owing to that voice, when I heard it issue from the man’s mouth, my eyes shed convulsive tears. Seeing which, he told me: “Pay no more mind to multitudinous images, and seek the single, true face of The One.” Not understanding the meaning of his obscure words, I seemed to hear others from the man’s lips coming into my mind, words ordering me to pursue the work of the heavenly woman, whose praises the man sang so passionately that, caught up in a rare exultation, I suddenly awoke, the flavour of that music in the ears of my soul.13
Ever since then my life has had a well-defined direction, a well-placed hope in the vision of The One who, redeemed by the work of my loving mind, breathes in my mind and is nourished by my substance,14 rose that eludes death. She not only triumphs in her now immutable springtime, but she continues to transform and grow, according to the dimensions of my soul’s own desire: rose that eludes death, flower without autumn, mirror mine, whose perfect form and unique name I shall know some day, if, as I hope, there is a day when man’s thirst finds the right water and its true spring.15
BOOK SEVEN
(Journey to the Dark City of Cacodelphia)
I
On Saturday April 30, 192–, in the lowlands of Saavedra, at midnight, the astrologer Schultz and I set out on the memorable journey I now propose to recount. Our itinerary was to include, according to the astrologer’s nomenclature, a descent into Cacodelphia, city of torment, and an ascent to Calidelphia, city of glory.1 Needless to say, the mere announcement of that journey had plunged me into doubt, hesitation, and not a few reservations, aware as I was that for some time Schultz had been pondering a trip to hell in order to explore its sinister realms, a descent undertaken by precious few heroes even in antiquity, and by not a one, as far as I know, in the vulgar, prosaic age we live in now. Just a couple of hours earlier, I recall, we were sitting in Schultz’s studio, where I was still grumbling and making last-ditch objections. The astrologer listened in silence, moving with absolute calm amid handwritten manuscripts and volumes lying open, celestial spheres and zodiacs, astrological tables, and other paraphernalia that stuffed his studio.