”I could not have been more surprised if the raven itself had come in. Carrying an overnight bag, two hatboxes, and a fur coat, her fugitive air made me distinctly uneasy. She told all, with utter insouciance (she had my father’s strong chin, our family’s dangerous audacity!): fifteen minutes earlier, in the guest-filled salon, she had “done her duty” by telling her progenitors that she alone would be responsible for her future. The Goddess of Fate had fainted! Baron Hartz had smiled elegantly, like a gambler who knows how to lose. Consternation and scandal lay in Victoria’s wake. My first impulse was to phone José Antonio, but Victoria snatched the receiver from my hand. Panic-stricken, I quaffed a second cognac and, under my niece’s benevolent gaze, I improvised a sermon about “social conventions” that rang pathetically hollow. Seeing I was getting nowhere, I begged her to understand “my situation”: not long before, on account of another family madman, I had broken with my brother Raphael. But then I had been guided by “the incorruptible interests of literature,” whereas now… I gave up that tack, too, because Victoria, not hearing a word, had fixed her eyes on me, two calm and confident eyes seemingly awaiting a miracle. Exasperated and at the end of my tether, I burst out: “Crazy, knuckleheaded girl! What have I got to do with love? All I’m left with is cold ashes…” Great God, then the miracle came! As though I’d just invoked an old demon, I felt an invisible presence surround me: the breath of the night, coming in through my windows, revived I don’t know what taste of sweet, bygone springtimes. From their portraits hanging in my room, women both adorable and adored seemed to cry out: “Remember when!” Their calls evoked shades of freshness, resonance, and warmth I’d thought long since faded, alas! Heartstrings I’d given up for dead began to thrum. I closed my eyes, as if blinded by a light. Believing it was a dream, I had a third shot of cognac. But voices and music were saying “Remember!”, weeping “Remember!”, laughing “Remember!” All of a sudden an enormous idea flashed through my brain: I shook my head, as though bedazzled, then laughed in my soul, after knocking back my fourth cognac. “Bring on the agronomist!” I told Victoria as laconically as a general. Calm and smiling, as if it had been written for all eternity in God’s good book, Victoria dialled a telephone number. When the brush-head arrived, I dictated my Agenda to them, confirmed it with one last drink from the bottle of Napoleon, and the two of them had to put me to bed.
”The next morning I went to my notary and signed over the title deed to La Rosada. The civil marriage took place at noon, the nuptial blessing late in the afternoon. That night, having got them aboard their train, I told my niece: “La Rosada is growing old, but she’ll liven up when more children come along and restore the freshness she lost with us.” I turned to the engineer and warned him: “Careful with the mineral fertilizer and the Shorthorn sperm in vacuum flasks!” And to both of them: “I’ll send you the furniture and the military trophies I brought here from La Rosada. I was going to send them to the museum, but things have changed now. It’s good for children to grow up in the shadow of weaponry.” They left, and I was left alone on the platform. I was displeased with myself only because of that last speech I’d foisted upon them, which now struck me as melodramatic.
Again the Personage was quiet for an interval during which he shed the dreamy expression he’d been showing us while recounting the idyll. Then he took up his tale once again:
— The following days were grey and soulless. The wind that had shaken me was a borrowed one; as soon as it stopped blowing, I relapsed into inertia, into solitude compounded, and into that “lucid death” consisting, gentlemen, in knowing oneself to be finished, as one endlessly reviews the text of hours dead and gone. I used to be sober; the rural sobriety of my family was my inheritance. But now I gave in to alcohol and solitary bouts of drinking. Then, sick and tired of seeing my own ghost in each and every one of my reflexions, I started going out at night to the dance halls on Maipú Street, where vacant beings like me, females for rent, and tangos grubby with sadness attempted to construct an impossible architecture of jubilation. There, recalling my glory days in the cabarets parisiens (where I’d rivalled Russian princes with my feats of bottle-brandishing and mirror-smashing), I stirred up a few donnybrooks that soon earned me a certain scandalous notoriety. One afternoon (the day after a brawl landed me in jail), my two brothers paid me a visit. Now, watch carefully, gentlemen! Because right in front of your astonished eyes the Invention of the Personage is about to take place! Far from displaying any ill-feeling toward me, José Antonio and Raphael were suspiciously cordial, behaviour that should have put me on alert. But there I was with an icepack on my head, a bitter taste in my mouth, and troubling memories of the night before. My brothers’ speech was a classic, complete with beginning, middle, and end. The beginning, designed to censure my shameful conduct and assess the dishonour it threw upon our lineage, was a model of tact, seasoned by a pinch of the gay salt of indulgence. The middle, which developed the theme of my natural talents and how they’d been wasted up until now, had the rare virtue of making me blush beneath my bag of ice. The end was as sudden as it was unforeseen: in order to give my pathetic existence a purpose, José Antonio and Raphael offered me, in the name of Minister X, the General Directorate Z, an enviable position for which many men would have sold their soul. I stared at them in terror. What did I know about the workings of Z? But Raphael and José Antonio tried to put me at ease by saying that one’s suitability for the post, according to custom, came with one’s being appointed to it, much like a gift of grace gratis data by the Minister. While telling me this, they were observing me attentively, registering my every move and gesture, as a sculptor studies his clay before giving it form! In the eyes of both, there burned a malignant creative fire! Those two demons talked so long and persuasively that in the end — out of curiosity or desperation? — I accepted, not imagining the future consequences of that singular moment.
”Well, gentlemen, the Personage already brewing inside me made its first appearance a few days later at the General Directorate Z. The Minister himself had deigned to anoint me personally with the oil of official liturgy; that is, with a speech I listened to reverently, for it was a veritable graveyard of clichés. I listened, yes, but without hearing, as I stared in a daze around the room where a multitude of abstract personages were listening as well, or seemed to be. I soon noticed that the personages in the room were arranged according to a rigorously calibrated astronomical regime: around the Minister revolved the greater and lesser planets, each of whom had his retinue of subdued satellites, who in turn dragged in their orbits a host of modest asteroids, grains of stardust in that remarkable Astronomy. Taking a look around me, I was appalled: ah, gentlemen, I too was the centre of a circle of anxious faces who were soon turning to me, vacant satellites attracted to my orbit and exposed to the administrative light no doubt already beaming from me! I shuddered, gentlemen, for I had the impression of attending a ritual without mystery, a ghostly pantomime, a ballet of soundless puppets. That’s when something exploded within me — I’ll call it my First Dionysian Rebellion. Everything human about me suddenly gelled in an urgent desire to let fly, right there and then, a thunderous, formidable guffaw of Homeric proportions. But José Antonio and Raphael were sending studious and worried glances my way. I managed to contain myself, hardening my facial muscles by main force, a physically painful feat I’ll call the First Imprint of the Mask.90