As I watched those wretches at their arithmetical games, I tried to recognize some familiar face. But their physiognomies were all amazingly alike, wearing the same grimace in identical madness. And though I was able to pick out Polyphemous, the crafty beggar of San Bernardo, from among the harvesters, it was only because he was still clutching his unstrung guitar in his descent into hell, even as the multitude knocked him and spun him about like a top. Amid all the caterwauling, I thought I could hear him proferring his usual blessings as he lined the bottomless soundbox of his vihuela with paper bills.
— Curious! I said to Schultz, pointing to the buffeted figure cut by Polyphemous. Seeing that beggar here among the filthy rich…
The astrologer didn’t answer, for at that moment he was accosted by a voice declaiming from somewhere nearby:
— Citizens! Hey, citizens!
I turned in the direction of the voice, and only then noticed that beside us, half-hidden by the dust cloud, there rose a very high chair, similar to the ones used by the judges of tennis matches. A personage swollen with solemnity was sprawled in the chair. Looking at his face, I recognized the collector Zanetti, but in his Sunday best, wearing a red tie and a wide-brimmed hat à la Alfredo Palacios. Through a set of opera glasses held in his right hand, he gazed insistently upon the circus plutocrats. His left hand brandished a tightly folded copy of La Brecha, red with libertarian ink. Trousers rolled up to his knees, the collector Zanetti was soaking his martyred feet in a porcelain basin, the vulgarity of this operation in no way diminishing, however, his solemnly haughty demeanour.
— I know this man, I told Schultz. And, unless I’m mistaken, we’re in for an earful of literature.
Seated upon his high perch, the collector Zanetti was getting impatient:
— Citizens and workers! he again bellowed. If you use your intelligence and study the precise meaning of the operation these bourgeois are applying themselves to, you will quickly realize how abysmally stupid they are. Let me explain why. These bourgeois pigs, with all their money, can no longer add a single exquisite dish to their feasts, nor another link to the very long chain of their fornications, nor one more luxury to their motley mansions, nor another tint to the already baroque fabric of their concupiscence. And yet, they keep piling up gold that can’t buy them anything more. Their gold is reduced to abstract figures. It can only take the fleshless form of an ascending arithmetic progression, recorded in monumentally forlorn bankbooks. Comrades, are we not in the presence of a ridiculous madness? Doesn’t it make you want to laugh hysterically?
We did not respond at all, and the collector then threatened us with his copy of La Brecha:
— Answer me, or I’m coming down there! he called to us, his heels wiggling in the basin.
Schultz frowned with incipient indignation. But he hadn’t forgotten the ugly behaviour of the Cyclopes, and he answered prudently:
— Yes, sir. We feel like laughing like crazy.
— So go ahead and laugh! Zanetti ordered us from on high.
Schultz forced a loud and theatrical guffaw, which in spite of its falseness did not entirely displease Zanetti.
— Now you! said the collector, training his opera glasses on me.
I laughed in turn, without mirth. But Zanetti must have been satisfied, because he went on to shout:
— Have you laughed, comrades?
— We have laughed, Schultz and I answered as one.
— And you’ve laughed like perfect idiots! he scolded, throwing his copy of La Brecha in our faces. Because the abstract numbers those bourgeois pigs are accumulating to no purpose are, at bottom, nothing more than the hidden bread of those who go hungry, and the invisible roof of those who suffer the elements, and the stolen overcoat of the destitute, and their elemental pleasure being snatched from the wretched. And this being the case, comrades, don’t you feel you should be weeping and wailing like heifers?
— Precisely, Schultz admitted, that’s just what we’re feeling now.
— So, weep! Zanetti now in a rage enjoined us.
But neither the astrologer nor I was about to shed the required tears. Slipping away under cover of the dust cloud, and deaf to the sublime insults Zanetti threw after us condemning our flight, we ran at a trot until we reached the ruined buildings which, as I said, bordered the circus of the plutocrats. There we had to slow down to a tortuous walk, for we had just entered a gigantic shed, where rusty old iron was piled up everywhere in a veritable slag heap: abandoned locomotives, blown-out boilers, rust-eaten rails and cogs, all impeded our passage and forced us to make irksome detours. We might have wandered infinitely through that sad labyrinth of wornout materials, had the astrologer Schultz not found the way out. On his right, he saw a high pile of horizontal trunks and he began to climb it. Hopping from trunk to trunk, and ignoring the rats that scurried off squealing almost between my legs, I followed him all the way to the top of the pile. From there I could view a scene whose general features looked familiar. It was a vast lumberyard full of stacks of logs, rounds, and rough-hewn timber; above them, a black crane extended its gallows arm. At the back of the yard rose an industrial building; its walls were cracked and split, its skylights broken, its windows blind, its roof caving in. Ten paces ahead, a crumbling smokestack seemed to totter on its brick footings. Silence, cold, and a sense of abandon seemed to ooze from the ruins like sweat from a dead man.
We went down into the yard. Approaching the front gate, we saw a man leaning against the base of the smokestack. He was sweating and panting as if he had been running, and as he stood there his eyes darted left and right like those of a hunted animal. I recognized him instantly, for countless times in Villa Crespo I had chanced upon that industrialist of exuberant backside, narrow shoulders, spherical belly, short legs, drooping mustache, and cascading double-chin. Seeing how agitated he was now, I called to him mildly: