— Let’s suppose for a moment the two mythological cities might actually exist, I joked. Even if we were crazy enough to follow in the footsteps of Ulysses, Aeneas,2 Alighieri, and other infernal tourists, what merit do we have that would make us worthy of such an adventure?
— I have the merit of my science, and you the merit of your penitence, Schultz answered with much gravity.
I fell silent in surprise and confusion for, although I didn’t exactly know what Schultz’s science entailed, I was well aware of the lugubrious state I’d been floundering in for some time, its chief symptom an indefinable aridity, and I thought I’d kept this a jealously guarded secret. Recovering from my astonishment, I turned to Schultz with a question on my lips; but at that instant the astrologer was examining a ball of twine held between his fingers.
— What do you reckon is the diameter of an ombú? he asked doubtfully.
— Listen, I answered laughing, what the heck have ombú trees got to do with anything?
— You’ll find out, he said. I’m talking about the one we discovered the other night in the outback of Saavedra.
Then, recalling the scene with the magus and the ombú and the bonfire burning amongst the tree’s black spurs, I mentally assessed the thickness of its trunk.
— Five feet or so, I said at last. Maybe a bit more.
Schultz nodded. Scratching with a pencil, he figured out how long a circumference would correspond to that diameter. Then, unravelling a portion of twine, he measured out a length equal to the circumference he’d calculated, marked the spot with a knot, added to the measured-out length three units from who knows what bizarre metrical system, cut it off with his famous black-handled penknife, and finally put both knife and string in his pocket, all with the air of someone performing a liturgical ceremony. The job finished, he let himself fall back into an antediluvian armchair.
— I’m going to set you straight on two points, he announced, as if during his manoeuvres with the string he’d been considering my final arguments. First of all, we won’t be undertaking a voyage to Tartarus, as metaphysicians understand the term. Pshaw! That would be too ambitious, at least for you.
— Thanks! I interrupted, feeling a prick of resentment.
— Which means, Schultz concluded, that if you imagine you’re going to play a pathetic, dime-store Orpheus at my expense, you’d best renounce that illusion right now.
I couldn’t help laughing out loud.
— Gladly! I answered. So, what’s the second point?
In his antediluvian armchair, with legs crossed and arms hanging loose, the astrologer was the very image of indolence.
— Cacodelphia and Calidelphia, he said, are not mythological cities. They really exist.
— Sure, I grumbled, just like your blessèd broody angels.
— What’s more, insisted Schultz, the two cities conjoined form a single city. Or better yet, they are two aspects of the same city. And that Urb, visible only to the eyes of the intellect, is the counterfigure of the visible Buenos Aires.3 Is that clear?
— Clear as mud.
I report our colloquium in so much detail, giblets and all, so readers may get an exact impression of the spirit in which Schultz and I tackled that singular adventure; and above all, because such a frivolous beginning was to contrast seriously with the extraordinary nature of the episodes to follow. But before recounting them, I should perhaps sketch a profile of the astrologer Schultz, the journey’s instigator and guide.
Standing nearly six-foot-six, the astrologer had a long, skinny body, a wide brow, and silvery hair. His severe face was afflicted with a sort of earthy pallor, approaching the colour of tubers, and was animated by the light of grey eyes whose gaze would suddenly fall upon you like a fistful of ashes. It was just about as impossible to calculate his age as to square the circle, for while some thought he was fast approaching the third childhood, others didn’t hesitate to give him all the years of Methuselah; and still others, refraining from laborious speculation, credited him with the simple, straightforward immortality of the crab. One thing I can say is that Schultz sometimes showed traces of an infinite decrepitude, no doubt the result of certain astral oppositions. At other moments, under more favourable signs, he was capable of fits of mad glee, and he would dance the entire night away at the Tabarís Cabaret;4 or he would hang out in neighbourhood general stores, singing lewd songs that even the prudent tough-guys from Villa Ortúzar couldn’t hear without blushing. And here I must put special emphasis on his moral nature, equally contradictory: it was true that the general orientation of his conduct lent him a certain ascetic tone with regard to the vulgar appetites (many people swore, for example, that Schultz’s sole nourishment was the nectar of flowers, and that his relations with women bordered on the ineffable, consisting in an exchange of more or less vagarious fluids). But it was no less certain that Gildo’s Grill (corner of Rivadavia and Azcuénaga) had more than once witnessed him voluptuously attack a heap of steaming entrails, cow’s kidneys, and bull’s testicles, and that he was wont to fall into ecstatic perorations before certain feminine thighs, whose perfection he attributed to Jupiter’s classical munificence. As for the astrologer’s wisdom, popular opinion was equally divided. Some imagined he was at the ultimate stage of Vedic initiation. Others thought he must be afloat in the sublime realms of theosophical fiddle-faddle. And then there were those who, too suspicious by half, revered him as the most doleful humourist ever to have drawn breath by the shores of the River Plate.
II
It was with this strange Virgil5 that I hit the road for Saavedra one more time, on the aforementioned day and year, not long before midnight. By his allusions to the ombú I understood what place the astrologer had in mind, and I was afraid we’d have to cross for a second time the rugged region we had braved forty-eight hours earlier. But Schultz, always foresighted, took me on a long detour around that solitary plain, so that our second incursion began at the exact spot where the first had ended.
It was one of those nights in the Province of Buenos Aires when the calm, humid air creates a dense and static atmosphere, like a womb pulsing with the seeds of future upheavals. The sky was as motionless as the earth below: the high, slate-dark cloud cover was gashed by the horn of a mangy moon on the wane. Beneath the uncertain light bleeding down from above, Schultz and I crossed the first uneven stretch of fallow land, both of us wordless and panting, our eyes peeled. As we made headway, my initially blasé attitude gave way to interest and excitement, perhaps because of my penchant for things supernatural, which, though with me since childhood, had been flaring up of late; or, who knows, it may have been the magic of the terrain we were penetrating, where space and time apparently took on other dimensions.
In any case, when a slope in the plateau took us down to the very foot of the ombú, I had the strange notion that we’d walked an infinite distance over terra incognita. I recall that, sitting down at once on one of the ombú roots, I wanted to linger over my inner impressions and savour the calm silence, so wondrously suggestive at that hour, in that place. But Schultz snapped me out of my introspection:
— We haven’t come here to mooch around! he muttered between his teeth.
Then he took out his famous string, tied one end to the ombú’s trunk and the other end to his venerable penknife. Pulling the string taut, he used it as a radial spoke to trace out a large circle on the ground around the ombú.