At this point the three personages of the privy all piped up at the same time:
— A phone call to Macoco Funes! threatened the old fop, wriggling in one of Chrysantus’s armpits.
— Gentle souls! implored the priest from the other.
— Good afternoon, Schultz, young man! rumbled Don Celso, who had been nodding and dozing in the monster’s fist and was awakened by the uproar. How’s your precious health? Heads up, eh! Your bronchial tubes get congested, heart failure, and salute!
But the astrologer stood his ground. Looking at both Cyclopes at once, he said with some bitterness:
— Despicable wretches! I did you the favour of rescuing you from the junk bin of Mythology, where you languished like old bits of bric-à-brac, and gave you a destiny much better than you deserve. And what do the arrogant little pups do in return? That’s the Devil’s gratitude for you!
— You lie, varmint! Seleucus boiled over.
— Let’m have it, Seleucus! Chrysantus egged him on. Blacken his eye for him!
Without further ado, the heartless Seleucus grabbed us by the lapels, hoisted us up, and crushed us against his giant thorax. We resisted in vain; the monster scarcely noticed our punching and kicking. He had turned on his heels and was carrying us God knows where. That was when we started shouting for help:
— Ciro! cried Schultz in Italian. A noi!
— Aiuto, Ciro! I yelled at the top of my lungs.
Before long we heard the wrathful voice of Ciro Rossini, begging, suggesting, and threatening:
— Santa Madonna! Leave them alone, they’re from the barrio! A little party in famiglia!
Unfortunately, Seleucus wasn’t getting the message. He accelerated to a lively trot and squeezed us even harder against his agitated thorax, which was rising and falling like the sea. Now, the Cyclops trots rather like a camel, and the rider who by consent or constraint mounts such an unusual beast suffers oscillations and changes of level that he feels with particular sensitivity in the diaphragm. Frightened out of our wits, almost suffocating, and subject to the infernal rhythm of that gait, Schultz and I were suffering even more discomforts. The monster was panting up a windstorm that lashed us and blew a nasty smell of garlic up our noses; and his armpits reeked of old sweat, goatish emanations, and exhalations from a lion’s lair. I can hardly say, therefore, how long our trip aboard the Cyclops lasted. All I remember is that suddenly Seleucus snatched us away from his teats and landed us beside what looked to me like the head of the banquet table. There, seated in a very high-backed chair, a lady was presiding over the feast.
The woman’s repugnant obesity was amplified by a sequin-covered evening gown bursting at every seam. She had a full-moon face, on one of whose two round cheeks thrived a very protuberant black mole. Her pug-nose, like a dog’s wet muzzle, was incessantly rising and sniffing; it was planted between two beady eyes that had trouble opening and seeing their way clear through the fat. Above her narrow, concave forehead rose a monumental hairdo adorned with mussels and prawns, pejerreyes and tinamous, sausages and blood puddings, asparagus, and bananas. A double chin joined her jaw to a non-existent neck; from there the contour-line soon took flight again to trace the formidable expansion of two bovine boobs, then dipped slightly where the umbilical region may have been, continued with increased brio to rise over the curve of an almost spherical belly, and finally plummeted, beneath the table, toward unknown though suspected depths. Massive and shapeless, the arms of that lady ended in two chubby little hands with short fingers sporting a gaudy ring on every last one of their phalanges.
Contemplating the woman, I understood that Schultz wanted to show me a personification of Gluttony. And I wondered if the astrologer was going to try to personify each and every one of the capital sins in his Inferno, though I doubted it (and with time my doubt was confirmed), taking into account his capricious genius, which rebelled against all symmetry. Meanwhile, the woman observed us for a moment and then turned to ask Seleucus:
— Officer, what are these young men doing here?
— Intruderth, answered the Cyclops. They rethithted a reprethentative of authority, and their paperth aren’t in order.
— Anything more?
— By your leave, I would thuggetht they’re involved with the counterethpionage of our wily enemy. Black market and New York gold…
The woman let slip a greasy guffaw.
— Officer, she interrupted him, I think you read too many detective novels.
Next she turned to Schultz and smiled at him with grotesque coquetry, holding out her hand for him to kiss.
— Never, Madame! the astrologer refused. I am the Demiurge of this inferno, and wisdom tells us: “Thou shalt not adore the work of thy hands.”56 As you know full well, with these thumbs of mine I modelled your jugs, your belly, your double chin, all of which I see have filled you with reprehensible pride.
— Insolence! screeched the woman, piercing Schultz with basilisk eyes. Officer!
— At your service! answered the Cyclops.
— Grab the Demiurge and boot him out of here!
Again Seleucus picked us up, and again we suffered the nausea of his trot. At last we seemed to emerge through an exit, and the Cyclops threw us outside like a couple of sacks. Sitting on the desolate ground, out of breath and dismayed, the astrologer and I looked back at the portal that had just ejected us: circular in shape, it was now closing in a centripetal movement like a gigantic sphincter.
VIII
We picked ourselves up off the ground. Schultz’s indignation over the offense suffered at the hands of his own creatures got translated into foul language hardly appropriate on the lips of a Demiurge. Swearing like a trooper, the astrologer went so far as to curse the hour he’d got the bright idea of taking me for a visit to that filthy eatery. Once his anger had subsided, and while we fraternally straightened each other’s neckties, he and I engaged in the following colloquy:
— Schultz, my friend, said I. How is it possible that your very own creatures do not recognize you as their creator?
— Not only is it possible, it’s common, he replied. Take the example of the immortal gods. What theological negation have they not received from men? What rebellion have they not put up with? What impiety have they not suffered? If you think about it, all of that is flattering to a Demiurge with any pride.
— Flattering? I protested, my kidneys still feeling the touch of the Cyclops.
— Let’s suppose you endow a creature with being, and you do so with so much plenitude that the creature, far from recognizing you as its first cause, imagines it exists for its own sake, free of all cause-and-effect relationships. Let’s suppose that Don Quixote, for example, denied the existence of Cervantes. Would not that exuberance of being, which Cervantes had given to his hero and by virtue of which the author finds himself denied, constitute the most pleasant incense a creator could receive from his creature?57
— Hmm! I observed. Theoreticians less dangerous than you ended up burnt at the stake, when the world was more prudent.
— Don’t confuse things, he rejoined. The Demiurge uses two hands: one of wool, which is the hand of Mercy, and another of iron, the hand of Rigour. If on the one hand he can look without anger upon the iniquity of his creature, he cannot on the other hand ignore the imbalance such iniquity introduces into the created order. Because justice is a necessity not even the gods themselves can escape. The Demiurge needs to re-establish the equilibrium broken by his creature, and he does so either with the hand of Rigour or with the hand of Mercy.