— That’s about all there is to see here, said the astrologer then, leading me away by the hand.
Like a man who leaves one nightmare to embark upon another, I followed Schultz to the sixth infernal sector. The new scene looked a lot like the “mazes” one finds in amusement parks, with their twists and turns, their distorting mirrors, and the way their design, no matter how childish, insinuates a promise of getting inevitably lost. Although Schultz had let me know we were now in the Labyrinth of Solitary Souls, no human presence could be seen in the corridors. Two or three times I thought I saw either a furtive shadow slipping through some narrow passage or a heel disappearing round a corner of the maze. But I didn’t see a single complete image — not so much as a profile fleetingly glimpsed in some mirror. Later, when recapitulating the whole adventure, the astrologer confessed to me that the circulation system of this labyrinthine sector, whose discreet orderliness I couldn’t get over, had been entirely inspired by a certain establishment non sancta, located on the rue de Provence in Paris, which in his youth he had frequented no less studiously than passionately.
I was wondering if any inhabitants at all were to be seen in the sixth sector when, rounding a bend, we came face to face with the Grand Solitary. He was a man of indeterminate age, greenish face, furtive and feverish eyes, and lyrical mane of hair, dressed in a dark suit.
— Have you seen Valeria around here? he asked without looking at us.
I said nothing. But the astrologer, quite without curiosity, asked him in turn:
— Who is Valeria?
The Grand Solitary looked at us then with a hint of agitation and declaimed:
— It is she who has looked down upon me from her magnanimity, as the rose bends down to the worm!
— Nonsense, muttered Schultz. Normally, it’s the worm that climbs up to the rose.
— I did not rise to the rose! protested the Grand Solitary. The rose came down to me. Besides, who dares suggest that Valeria does not exist?
He looked at us challengingly, but Schultz stood up to his gaze:
— If you’d just calm down and forget about those delirious metaphors…
— Look, interrupted the Grand Solitary, those metaphors are now dead to the world, tucked away in the haberdashery El Porvenir,44 necktie section, eighth shelf on the right. I no longer write. What for? Valeria is a reality, and she has leaned down to me as the stem of the hyacinth does to the…
— Enough! the astrologer silenced him. Either you express yourself in plain language, or we won’t listen to you.
— But Valeria does exist! cried the Solitary. In my long hours at the haberdashery, I myself came to doubt her reality. But then, like the dawn light that treads beatific…
— Sure, sure, Schultz soothed him. You wouldn’t have dreamed it, would you?
— Sir, said the Solitary, our kisses, that night, could have forced open the lock of jubilation. Do you want details? Valeria is the last, sublime descendant of a ranching family. “New aristocracy,” you’ll say. Bah! The alembics of Argentina distill rapidly. True, her grandfather was an old cowboy from the south, accustomed to spending nights on horseback out on the range — never got used to sleeping in a regular bed; still sleeps on a saddlery horse installed in his luxurious bedroom decorated with prairie landscapes. There the old man dozes on his wooden sorrel horse, his satin pyjama swathing him like a chiripá, while a simulated pampero blows over him from strategically placed fans, and the lowing of cattle comes from hidden phonographs to lull him.
Concerned, I looked to Schultz. But the astrologer was cold as an iceberg.
— And Valeria? he asked.
— Her bedchamber, explained the Grand Solitary, is neither that of Cleopatra nor Aspasia nor Phryne, but the quintessence of them all. I shan’t enter into intimate details at the moment, for discretion flowers like a carnation within the breast of every lover. But you must know that her bathroom is of porcelain, with illustrations from Ovid, Boccaccio, and other great masters of universal literature.
— Let’s go, I said to Schultz when I heard those words. He’s quite mad.
Making our getaway, we continued our journey through the Labyrinth. But the Grand Solitary was following us:
— Valeria exists! he declaimed fanatically. The wind that sways the lilies of her garden wears slippers of water and whistles the preludes of Debussy.
Our pace became a frenzied trot.
— Valeria’s nightshirts, he insisted as he trotted at our side, were woven on the murmuring looms of aurora…
We covered our ears and ran full speed out of the Labyrinth.
Still running, we entered the seventh and final setting in the Spiral of Lust, of which I got only a sketchy notion, since we flew through it as though running over burning coals. It was a dense cane field, with bundles of very high stalks, hard and sharp as spears. On each of the spears, two or three men were skewered through the sphincter. Adolescents, young and middle-aged men, they flapped their arms as if trying to take flight; their agitation made the cane stalks bump together with a metallic clicking noise. A kind of vague language could be heard in that scenario: anxiety-inducing rumours and whispers and murmurs, which suddenly became louder when the skewerees noticed our presence.
— Shhh! Shhh! they called to us then, swinging eagerly back and forth up there.
But the astrologer and I ran like the wind until we reached the end of the spiral.
VII
A double door of monumental proportions stopped us. After a short rest to catch our breath, Schultz said:
— Take a look at the door before us.
I looked. Besides its gigantic size, its solid bronze construction, and that hint of mystery suggested by closed doors, I admired for a moment the profusion of bas-reliefs covering it from top to bottom.
— Uh-huh, I said at last. A door with ornamental motifs.
— Those aren’t ornamental motifs! protested Schultz, visibly wounded. Those designs contain an occult allegorical meaning which you must decipher if you want the door to open for you.
I looked again. The bas-reliefs on the left leaf seemed to represent (with admirable success) a paradisal orchard where myriad trees bowed gracefully beneath the weight of flowers and fruit, and where numerous birds, tigers, deer, monkeys, and serpents lived together in the most wonderful friendship. Above, and to the right, as though in the domain of heaven, could be seen a winepress where wingèd numina crushed large bunches of grapes underfoot; the juice pouring from them ramified into a hundred streams and channels irrigating the orchard. In the upper-left portion, other genies were milking a powerful celestial cow, and from its udders descended a river of milk that girded paradise. And man could be seen anywhere and everywhere: lord and master of the garden was he, lying in the shade of trees and stretched out by running streams, eating without travail the easily available fruit or drinking without care the free-flowing juice, motionless in ecstatic contemplation or aflame in a whirling dance.
The right leaf of the door vividly rendered a cheerless humanity toiling away. Here, calloused labourers could be seen working hard land, ploughing, seeding, and harvesting. There, tossed and turned by an angry sea, fishermen of bitter aspect were pulling up nets pregnant with seafood. On plateaux and plains, rain or shine, hardened shepherds watched over flocks and droves. Deep in the jungle, amid clawed beasts and thorny vegetation, ferocious hunters hurled spears at the wild boar, set traps for deer, released falcons against the pheasant or greyhounds against the hare. The most extraordinary thing was that all those fruits torn painfully from earth, water, and air (corncobs and grains, tubers and fruit, fish and shellfish, flocks and herds, birds and reptiles, frogs and insects) were being conveyed into a huge human mouth by means of carts, boats, pack-horses, mule trains, camel caravans, and elephants.