— Very good! someone shouted.
— When he speaks, he becomes a giant!
— Silence! Silence!
The orator made a sign, and some hidden projector bathed him in a cone of yellow light.
— In today’s society, the pipsqueak resumed, this perennial problem has taken on catastrophic proportions. As you are all no doubt aware, an imbalance between supply and demand drives up the price of articles of prime necessity, precisely when the demand for them outstrips their supply. Well, gentlemen, that is just what’s happening in the case of women in our city of Buenos Aires.
Deep sighs were heaved in the hall, and the beam of light falling on Bernini turned from yellow to red.
— Do you sigh, my brave listeners? exclaimed the pipsqueak. Yes, it is your sighs, and not some noisome wind, that come to pluck at the strings of my lyre! I’ll not weary your legitimate attention with statistics. But tell me this: who among you has not found himself in a café of an evening, in the company of a hundred-odd members of our sex, gazing avidly, silently, hungrily at three or four feminine divinities inaccessibly ensconced in a stage box where they struggle with their rebellious musical instruments?32 Who among you, I say, has not been at a family dance in Villa Ortúzar, wasting your breath and patience trying, in vain, to get a dance with one of those disdainful beauties who plays hard-to-get? Disdainful, I call them, and with good reason. For, as if it weren’t bad enough that the adorable creatures are so few, we must also suffer the way they treat us with haughty superiority. A superiority, it must be said in all fairness, that’s due only to their advantageous situation in the marketplace.
— That’s right! That’s right! shouted several voices above the dull roar of the rest of the audience.
— You’re becoming indignant, my brethren! thundered Bernini. A just anger fills your breasts and darts fiercely from your eyes. And what about Florida Street? Women pass by in twos and threes, dressed and coiffed like goddesses, with an absent air as of mythological beasts, with the insulting arrogance of all that is costly. You see them and get a lump in your throats. You’d do anything for them: stoop to clear the sidewalk of old streetcar tickets lest they trip on them; or unscrew their belly-buttons and polish them up with the useless silk of your ties.
— He’s as good as Castelar!33 cried a Galician Spaniard in ecstasy.
— Not even the great Alfredo Palacios34 at the top of his game had this man’s silver tongue, declared an electrician, with tears in his eyes.
— Alas, gentlemen! the pipsqueak added. In vain you shave your homely mugs daily. In vain you exhaust the imagination of your tailors. In vain you resort to massages, hair removal, and aesthetic surgery in hopes of achieving the charm that Nature, cruel Stepmother, has denied you. The beauties ignore you, or pretend to ignore you. And now, bring on the bearded philosophers from the North! I dare them to expound, in front of me, their bearded theories about the sadness of Buenos Aires!35 I’ll show them the sole cause and origin of our famous melancholy: it’s that the opposite sex condemns us to solitude! Ah, gentlemen, admit it! At one time or another, some lonely Buenos Aires midnight had you feeling the urge to weep bitterly against the worthy jacket of some night watchman!
The hall exploded into irrepressible sobs. Sodden eyes were covered by multicoloured handkerchiefs. The beam of reddish light falling on the orator turned a lugubrious purple.
— But I haven’t yet come to the most serious issue, announced Bernini. I wouldn’t be standing here before you if our cause were not also of concern to the nation, whose interest far surpasses the sum of our individual interests. For I wonder now: what will become of our homeland if this oppressive separation of the sexes continues? Ah, gentlemen, I seem to hear even now the bones of our forefathers turning in their graves! Toothless mouths open and cry out to us: “The Fatherland is in danger!”
Universal was the consternation among the audience. Men were collapsing in a faint in the orchestra seats, and five portraits of national heroes — part of the stage decor — came clattering down from their place on high. In the midst of the pandemonium and the bustle of the stretcher bearers, the pipsqueak Bernini raised a stentorian voice and restored calm:
— Well then, brethren! he cried. Lift up your hearts! For the hour has come to solve the problem!
Cheers and applause greeted his words, and the orator took a bow, smiling beneath the rain of flowers falling from everywhere, as the lighting turned from darkest purple to the rosiest of pinks.
— And you will ask me, how will it be solved? Here is my answer: either by limiting the production of males (a viable option only if the National Congress resolves to correct Nature’s injustice). Or by taking the pedagogical route and passing a law to make women take courses and learn all about the hapless male sex, not only in terms of our topography but also of our history, sentiment, finances, and hedonism. This instruction would involve the use of photographs, colour illustrations, famous anecdotes, plaster replicas, vertical and longitudinal cross-sections, and even live specimens.
Gleeful laughter and roars of joy resounded in the hall. Thousands of canes and hats were thrown up onto the stage. One respectable burgher, in a gesture of liberality, released a dozen doves he’d brought in a cage. Then the audience surged toward the dais, intending, I suppose, to take possesion of the pipsqueak and hoist him aloft in triumph. I never found out if they actually did so, because Schultz tugged me out of the human deluge and led me through a deserted corridor to the exit.
As I mentioned earlier, there was no linkage between the sets, no intermediary passage from one to another. And so the exit was in fact the entrance to the second infernal scenario. I’ll now attempt to describe it, though holding back certain crude details ill-suited to the decorum I wish for my story; indeed, the reader will often find me teetering on the edge of indecency. Now, on the threshold of the second scene, the astrologer Schultz solemnly warned me:
— Look, but say nothing: that’s the watchword in the Pond. You may recognize many faces in this place, but charity demands our discretion and silence.
Once we were inside, the warm, foggy, clammy atmosphere gave me the impression of a Turkish bath — the more so when, between jets of steam, I glimpsed Moorish architectural motifs. Equally dense was the prevalent silence. But suddenly there was a splash, and the most mournful of voices demanded:
— Don’t disturb the water!
Then, through the steam that was now thinning out, I saw an immense pond. Standing in water up to their knees, thousands of naked men and women were vegetating. I say “vegetating” because such was the idea suggested by those torsos locked in motionless embraces, united to the point of agony in every form of love imaginable, encrusted in and clinging to one another like the myriad branches of a leafy glade. Artificial suns, strategically distributed, rained fire down upon the multitude, wringing from them dense goat-like odours and rivers of sweat which flowed over necks, gleaming backs, bellies pressed against one another, hairy tufts, and thighs. The pond water seemed dead beneath a scum of reddish mildew and vegetal putrefaction. Here and there, amid the welter of nude bodies, grew plants with fleshy flowers of frightful beauty, evil-coloured mushrooms, and reeds as sharp as awls covered in pink snails’ eggs. Crazed by the human stench, swarms of glossy Spanish flies and horseflies furiously bombarded the multitude, stinging them repeatedly. Once in a while, one of the bodies would try to shake free of the embrace holding it locked to the rest; the whole human tree would then shake, releasing dreadful emanations from the pond, and pitiful voices stammered: