— Don’t hold back a single detail, Campanelli implored with bated breath.
— At first I suspected you were all walking around in steel-toed boots. Especially you. Three times a day, before meals, you used to clomp around the table, trotting as anxiously as a famished animal.
— That’s right, that’s right! said Campanelli, rubbing his hands together.
— Then I noticed how roughly you treated your household goods — always banging on the furniture, slamming doors and windows. And the way you brutalized the toilet: after three days it broke on you, remember? Pretty soon I’d drop my books and pen, obsessed by the pandemonium raining down on my head. Sir, by listening attentively, I came to know every detail of your daily life.
— For example?
— Your taste in the arts. You used to tune in to the most vulgar radio stations and choose music that mimed noise, preferably of the gastric variety. Or else top-forty ditties: you’d listen to them a hundred times, and the females in your house would pick them out with one finger on the grand piano another hundred times. The radio plays were for the evenings; you chose melodramas filled with anguished screams, hysterical sobs, gunshots and stabbings, all of which was no doubt necessary to touch a chord in your impervious sensibility.
Campanelli clapped his hands in a fit of sincere enthusiasm.
— Bravo! he exclaimed. Give me your best shot! There is, however, a small error in your last round of observations. My wife was the one who listened to the melodramas. I, personally, couldn’t stand them; I’ve always detested everything dramatic and heroic, whether in real life or in fiction. I was one of those fellows in the movie theatre who always laugh at the most heartrending scenes. And it wasn’t out of bloody-mindedness; I just didn’t get drama — a total lack of comprehension. Besides, you must be aware that tragic scenes can affect the peristaltic movement of the intestine. Being a man of slow digestion, I preferred to sit in a padded seat at the popular theatres. I used to laugh my head off there, laugh in stitches, to the point of losing my breath and feeling my sphincter go dangerously slack. And those fat women who used to sit beside me, laughing: there were nights they’d go home with their underwear quite damp. But please continue, sir. I am very interested in what you have to say, you have no idea how much.
Campanelli’s exultation had left me pensive.
— I don’t have much to add, I said. There were your evening habits. You used to yawn like a lion, pull off your boots, and let them thump on the floor. And then, something unmentionable…
— Eh? What? Campanelli interrupted me, all excited.
He quickly turned to the woman doing calisthenics:
— Turn that radio down! he shouted.
— O.K., Rudy, she panted.
— And that piano too! Campanelli scolded the girl.
— O.K., Daddy, she squeaked like a parrot.
— Wretches! he observed. They pick up that language watching American movies. But you were talking about something unmentionable…
— Sir, I began, looking at him severely now. Why did you have to choose stormy nights to perform your matrimonial duties? Time and again I would hear you, amid thunderclaps and flashes of lightning, going at it upstairs and shouting: “Charge!” and “Fire!” and other bellicose expressions in the worst taste.
A bitter ecstasy came over Campanelli’s face.
— How truly you have spoken! he sighed with tears in his eyes. Was that, by any chance, the last straw?
— When?
— When you complained to the concierge.
— Did he tell you?
— He used arguments on me that could have convinced a stone, whimpered Campanelli. He was a Spaniard from Castille who talked tough but had a soft heart. He told me you were no ordinary man, that you were very sensitive and your nerves were a mess. He concluded by calling upon my sense of charity.
— And you?
— You can’t imagine what a tremendous rage I got into, listening to the concierge’s spiel. Sir, I had my values: for me, one’s monthly income was the foundation of the human hierarchy. And I knew that all you had was your measly teacher’s salary, supplemented by the odd poorly remunerated poetic collaboration. Besides, I had an eight-cylinder automobile, whereas they said you had to get around by streetcar. So it’s no surprise I took your complaint as a slap and an insult: it was a slap at my cheque book and an insult to each and every one of my eight cylinders. But what really exasperated me was the reverential way the Castillian concierge would talk about you — you, who probably wished him a good evening as your only tip!
— We also talked about Castille, the goatherds, the clay soils, I corrected him.
— I know, retorted Campanelli. I know everything now. But after the concierge’s sermon, I took such a scunner to you, it was ridiculous. From then on, I deliberately threw noisy shindigs in my apartment, just to get back at you and make you suffer more.
— Yes, I said, there were times when I thought the roof was coming down on my head.
— And the truly abominable thing was, I didn’t even participate in those orgies; I just pricked up my ears and waited with bated breath for your complaints to come up from below, or even an insult. Sir, I heard you sobbing at midnight and beating the walls with your fist!
The man at the window buried his face in hands and wept bitterly. I cast about for some consoling phrase, and all I could come up with was a few pats on the shoulder. Schultz, who’d been listening to the conversation with absolute impassiveness, kept looking at his watch as though demanding my return to the famous umbrella.
So we left the shack and waded back into the sea of mud, under the never-ending rain, still bumping into the burghers of Mudtown, among whom I looked for other familiar faces. Campanelli’s story had got me thinking:
— What amazes me, I said at last, is the contrition of the man. I knew him as quite heartless.
The astrologer looked at me without kindness.
— And who are you, he grumbled, to poke your nose into someone’s conscience, trying to fathom its twists and turns?
— The lowest of the low, I answered. Still, in my view, his contrition should earn Campanelli a promotion in this Helicoid.
Schultz laughed, albeit without enthusiasm.
— You may have a point there, he said. But, if you think about it, this is a private Inferno, clandestine even, with no license plate or any other official validation.
— Another amazing thing, I insisted. That animal Campanelli spoke with disconcerting elegance.
A chorus of laughter and exclamations distracted us at this point and drew us toward a group of very excited burghers who had formed a circle around two gesticulating figures. We elbowed our way up to the front row, where we could see a woman and a man standing in the middle of the ring and glaring at each other furiously, like two cocks in the pit.
— Señora Ruiz, Schultz announced like a circus impresario.
— And I know that man! I said. I’ll be damned if it isn’t Professor Berreta!26
A spectator at my side stuck out his elongated, tapir-like head and glared at us with visible annoyance:
— Shhh! he muttered. It’s the man’s turn to speak.
Professor Berreta, overdressed in a funereal greatcoat, black gloves, and dismal gaiters, had levelled a menacing index finger at Señora Ruiz.
— Listen! he said. I accuse this mummy of possessing seven different nightshirts, one for every colour of the rainbow, which she puts on to receive, not without spasms of pleasure, the seven physicians who periodically root around in her guts.
A round of applause burst forth from the circle, and Professor Berreta gravely saluted the spectators. But Señora Ruiz, skinny and tough as a stick, stared at the professor through her lorgnette: