— What’s your reading? Schultz interrogated me as soon as I had finished studying the door.
— Bah! I answered. There’s an allegorical meaning, but it’s pathetically simple.
— How so? said he, visibly disconcerted.
— The two leaves of the door tell two stories in contrast and opposition. Any nincompoop can understand that the left leaf depicts the Golden Age, when earth and sky spontaneously gave us their fruits, animals were meek, and man lollygagged in perpetual delight. So, necessarily, the leaf on the right symbolizes the Iron Age we live in now, as evidenced by all those tiny human figures knocking themselves out to bring home the bacon. Even more important, the leaf on the left refers to the perfect man, newly sprung from his Artificer’s hands, and who needed nothing more than fruit to sustain a body meant to be a transient support for his soul, which was continually slipping away on the roads of ecstacy. On the other hand, the right-hand leaf depicts the joyless humanity we belong to, one that devours all of creation in order to fatten up an anatomy that nowadays we doubt is even inhabited by a soul.
— Conclusion? Schultz asked me.
— I notice that both panels harp too much on the edible. It makes me uneasy.
— Why?
— Because I’m sure that behind that door you’re going to show me something like the Hell of Gluttony.
No sooner had I pronounced these last words than the door solemnly opened; apparently, I’d found the key. I immediately strode forward, followed by a sourly silent Schultz (obviously he wasn’t pleased by how easily I’d solved the riddle). The door closed behind us, and we found ourselves in the murky hall, with no apparent exit.
— To heck with all the gutbuckets in Buenos Aires! exclaimed the ill-humoured astrologer. I know very well they’re of no interest whatsoever. But those abominable gobblers, those lustful omnivores, those greasy kitchen heroes demanded their place in my Helicoid. Seriously, they turn my stomach! Look at the walls in the city, its subway stations, newspapers, and magazines, all full of posters and ads exalting the virtues of a hundred laxatives, a thousand pills, and the ten thousand medicos devoted to restoring a million broken-down digestive tracts in our burgh.
— If I were you, I wouldn’t talk too loud on this subject, I told him.
— And why not?
— Rumour has it that by dint of some strange experiments you’ve infinitely enlarged the repertoire of the edible.
— For example?
— Isn’t it true that, at a meeting of the Friends of Art,45 you ate a bouquet of blue sweet peas decorating the conference table? And at the Teatro Colón, during the second act of Lohengrin, didn’t you do the same thing to an expensive orchid you spied languishing on the breast of a young Fräulein? Then, at a luncheon in the Spanish Embassy, weren’t you caught using blasts from the soda siphon to alter the traditional structure of Codfish à la Biscay? And haven’t you been seen a hundred times at Gildo’s, revolutionizing the innocent laws of the parrillada criolla with outlandish barbecued combinations?
The astrologer smiled modestly.
— Physiology of Taste, he said. Getting stuffed is not to be confused with getting fat!46
Then, avoiding the subject and resuming his look of disgust, he added:
— Let’s go over there. We’ll only take a look.
He led me through some grimy serge curtains onto a platform. From there, the Third Inferno was suddenly revealed in all its amplitude to my eyes, ears, and nose. Actually, I’ve just reversed the order in which my senses were offended. My sense of smell was hit first, and by a stench so nauseating that it made me wonder if Schultz hadn’t gathered all the eateries in Buenos Aries into that hole — inns in Carabelas Alley, cantinas in the Boca, grills in Mataderos, dairies in Paternal, plus every last pizzeria on the Paseo de Julio. At almost the same moment my ears were beleaguered by a din that was nearly music but not quite; only afterward did I find out what it really was. Seconds later, my eyes had adjusted to the semi-darkness of the dive and could make out something like a monstrous Banquet. The table, in the form of a gigantic spiral, took up the central area of this circle of hell. Sitting around the table in their thousands were what looked like commensals in rigorously formal attire, apparently being served by what looked like scurrying, outsized waiters.
— The kitchens are on the right, Schultz whispered to me. The vomitoria are on the left.
We went down a little iron staircase like the ones you see in engine rooms. When we got to the floor level of the banquet, Schultz dragged me over to an area terribly overheated by great ovens and braziers, where a hundred gigantic figures in scullions’ caps were apparently dedicated to practising an infernal chemistry. By the light of flames flickering from ovens and stoves, I recognized, with a shiver, the chefs’ lineage: they were Cyclopes. I clearly saw their heat-flushed faces pouring sweat, their single eyes in mid-forehead watering copiously from the smoke and onions! Darting and feinting among huge legs like stalking tree-trunks, the astrologer and I made our way through the Cyclopean kitchen.
Some chefs were turning monstrous spits on which whole animals were impaled and roasting golden brown: there were steers fat from winter pasture, greasy heifers with the skin on, and fillies that provide the juicy flank steak so dear to the Ranquel Indians, devourers of horsemeat. Other chefs were basting the suckling pigs and lambs roasting on vertical spits with copious brine, or pouring it over immense grills where thousands of chitterlings, large intestines, kidneys, udders, and testicles, as well as other internal and external mammalian organs were sizzling, alongside their brothers in fire, the sausages: chorizos criollos, Cantabrian blood sausage, Italian cotechini, long Andalusian sausages, and Teutonic frankfurters. Over here, busy kitchen boys were oven-roasting a universe of chickens, tinamous, turkeys, geese, pheasants, ducks, quails, and owls, turning them over and basting them in metal serving dishes. Over there, they stirred enormous cauldrons a-simmer with all the fauna of lake, sea, and river, from the gigantic pejerrey of the Paraná River, pride of its species, to the aristocratic Chilean lobster, and including the spider crab of Tierra del Fuego, salmon from the pisciferous Lake Nahuel Huapí, fish and shellfish from Mar del Plata, carp and catfish from the Argentine Delta, and scaly creatures from the Chascomús lagoon; as well as octopuses from foggy Galicia, cod from chilly Norway, Pacific-plying tuna, and crabs from industrious Japan. In fathomless pots, pasta was boiling alla italiana — tangled tagliatelle, deliciously stuffed capelletti, pregnant ravioli, sinuous spaghetti, and democratic macaroni. Then there was the difficult alchemy of making sauces in earthen casseroles or copper saucepans, through the slow cooking of hares marinated in wine, partridges boiled in milk or steeped in cognac, cockles and oysters in whisky, to all of which were added obscene tomatoes and weepiferous onions, proverbial oregano, fragrant basil, and glorious laurel, along with treacherous garlic and never-forgotten parsley, arcades ambo.47
By this point in our tour through the kitchen, we were spattered in grease up to the neck, red-eyed from the smoke, and sneezing from the spice, when along came a Cyclops disguised as a maître d’hôtel (livery trimmed with braid, short trousers, white stockings and gloves), barking impatient orders at the scullions: