— Buddy, he said to Schultz, his sad eyes pleading for understanding. What would you do with a hundred and ninety a month?
— Our country, envy of the world, answered Schultz, is awaiting the new energy, the manly spirits, the vigorous muscles of her young people, ready to yield the mineral gold of her mountains, the vegetal gold of her wheat-fields, the animal gold of her flocks, the gold…
— Layin’ it on kinda thick, aren’t ya, buddy? warned Calandria.
— Buddy, intervened Barroso, you gotta be puttin’ me on. Since we were kids in school, they taught us to keep our fingernails clean, our shoes shined, our hair slicked back, and our overalls spotless. That was supposta be the ideal of every good Argentinian. And if we showed up any other way, old Sarmiento’s picture in the principal’s office was gonna get mad. Ya catchin’ my drift? Then they stuffed our noggins full of geography, history, natural science, math, civics, grammar, and I don’t know what-all. Of course, it all went in one ear and out the other. But some of it stuck, and we thought we were educated. Now, tell an educated guy with clean fingernails to get serious about any job at all! No, buddy, that’s not gonna go over real big. When we got out of school, we looked at ourselves in the mirror: our overalls spick ’n’ span, hands looked after, decent handwriting, and a few shavings of science. We were the unmistakable type known as the National Employee!
At this point Barroso went silent for a moment, and Schultz took advantage of the pause to confront me:
— You are a pedagogue. Look at your work!
— Mea culpa! I moaned through clenched teeth.
But Barroso hadn’t finished:
— The school system turned us into paper-pushers, he grumbled at last. So I said to my buddy here (pointing at Calandria): “Buddy, I says, we’re gonna be national employees.” And buddy answered me back: “You’re on, bud.” And after that I said to myself: “Look, bud, if you don’t get into politics, you might as well call’er quits.” Without a second thought I grab buddy here, we show up at the Committee, they give us a pail of paste, and we go out to put up bills.
— Remember, buddy? interrupted the bomba. Remember how we duked it out with the conservative Long-Ears?77
— We were earning merit points, observed the papagayo with severity. Where was I? Oh yeah, so we won the elections. A few days later we went to see the Senator, and I said to him: “Fellow party member, sir, buddy and me have gotta be national employees.” And he said: “Not another word, my fellow party member; as of now, you and the other party member are on for one hundred and ninety pesos a month in Public Works.” We stuck pretty close to the Senator; you might say there was a lotta poster paste between us!
The papagayo said no more. Schultz had been listening without much interest, and now he responded:
— From what I can gather, you want to get off the hook by pleading a brand of fatalism I’m not about to tolerate in this prodigious tenement house. After all, you could have taken up the cobbler’s knife and strap from your old man, now dead and gone.
— But buddy, were you born yesterday? rejoined Barroso. Take up the shoemaker’s trade, when a guy’s studied hydraulic electrolysis?
— And you, added Schultz as he turned to Calandria. You could have easily gone to work up on the scaffolding like your father.
— You got your head screwed on right, buddy? retorted the bomba. Who’s gonna go up on the scaffolding, when he knows Pythagoras’s theorem?
The two of them began shaking each other by the streamers and singing a song punctuated by hiccups of laughter:
At the end of a straight line segment
at that point in particular
construct on said line segment
a perpendicular.78
— Look at your work! Schultz told me again, saddened.
Then, taking up both kites, papagayo and bomba, he disentangled their lines and let them fly once more, paying out all the twine.
— So long, buddy! Barroso shouted from the heights.
— Hey, bud! laughed Calambria as he swerved. Don’t take yourself too seriously!
Still hanging on to the rope and struggling against violent winds, we entered the Sector of the Homoglobes or balloon-men. In that portion of atmosphere, at just about six feet above the ground, floated a multitude of rubber men inflated to bursting point. They blew around in the wind in a grotesque contredanse, heads butting together and bellies bouncing off one another, all the while keeping up their ridiculously grave demeanour, their cold and solemn expressions. Those swollen figures were apparently engaged in monotonous dialogues, for we caught snippets such as: “Yes, doctor” and “But, doctor!” and “Evidently, doctor” and “Likewise, doctor.” Not without difficulty, the astrologer and I were wending our way through that cloud of floating bodies, their rubber feet grazing our heads, when, quite without knowing how, I lost my balance and fell against a soft, spongy mass. Getting back on my feet right away, I realized I’d just run into a partially deflated homoglobe lying on the ground, showing no signs of life. With infinite care, Schultz gathered up that flaccid rubbery casing, methodically found the balloon’s beak, and untied the string strangling it shut. Then, raising the beak to his lips, he painstakingly blew into it. As the homoglobe recovered his air, I noticed he was no different from the others: the same solemn face, the same ceremonious morning coat, the same tubular top hat. Only one thing set him apart: his right hand clutched an enormous blue pencil, his left hand a red one.
As soon as Schultz finished his insufflatory task, the homoglobe, his pompousness restored, clapped an empty gaze on us:
— This is an act of disrespect, he said without a trace of emotion. Do you people know with whom…?
He seemed to remember something, because instead of concluding his sentence, he laughed slightly:
— No, he said. Pardon me! I was forgetting I am no longer a Personage.79
Meanwhile, the figure he cut — the two pencils, in particular — jogged something in my memory:
— Doctor, I said to him. Have we not met before? Your blue pencil brings back a sad feeling.
— It’s quite possible, he replied. Your face may have been among the thousand that filed through that dreary anteroom. Perhaps with this very pencil I wrote down your name and your sentence, along with those of a thousand other wretches.
— And how did you come to be in this place?
— It’s a long story, answered the homoglobe, and I’ll tell it if you wish. But it is not good that you have inflated me again. It is uselessly cruel.
He gathered himself for a moment, as if to organize the voices already surfacing in memory. Then he said:
— This tale might be titled “Invention and Death of a Personage.” I do not know if History, too, has its four seasons. What’s certain is that our country, after having flowered in the springtime of its military heroes and borne fruit in the summer of its civilian founding fathers, today languishes in the imbecilic autumn of its Personages or Poseurs. The Hero was a chieftain, a leader; the Personage is a bureaucrat. Current opinion notwithstanding, my view is that, to form a Personage, an illustrious family name does not suffice. True, the old Oligarchy produces them by the truckload, in order to give at least some “official” life to its otherwise lifeless, dessicated scions (because, if you think about it, the Personage is not a “real entity” but rather an “entity of reason” invented by someone). But what constitutes the essence of the Personage is precisely his lack of essence, an absolute void, an internal desolation enabling him to assume all shapes and imitate all attitudes. A well-concocted Personage can be the Treasury Minister today and Director of Aviation tomorrow, without becoming one thing or the other — neither man nor beast. For, strictly speaking, the Personage is “nothingness” in a plush top hat. I won’t deny that this astonishing condition is often produced congenitally; hence, the born Personage, the direst of its variants. Ordinarily, however, the Personage is constructed on the basis of methodical self-destructions. The Mystic and the Personage are alike in that both destroy what is human in themselves; but where they differ is that the former prodigiously reconstructs himself at the “hearth of divinity,” while the latter does so no less prodigiously at the “hearth of officialdom.” Under the dry shell of the Personage, then, nothing must remain that is alive, sensitive, or moist; only after denying and betraying himself does the Personage achieve the exquisite virtue of denying and betraying everything. Gentlemen, this brief Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene of the Personage may help you understand my drama.