”Gentlemen, a useful bit of advice: never, not even as a lark, try imprinting your face with a mask. The mask ends up taking over! When the Minister finished his speech, all eyes turned to me. It was my turn to make a speech in response! Feeling trapped, I feverishly looked around for some way of escape, by any means possible. But there was no way out; I was already caught in the cogs of the mechanism. Then came my Second Dionysian Rebellion: “I’ll send them a Panic message,” I said to myself, “a gigantic Evohé! — a spine-tingling invitation to Springtime that’ll set their dead hearts a-throb beneath their fancy waistcoats!” But, alas! Raphael and José Antonio were at my side, urging me to answer. And I spoke at last. I spoke of the General Directorate Z and the fundamental problems facing it, my speech abounding in classical and modern quotations, as well as intrinsically unintelligible paradoxes and metaphors obscure to everyone, including me. The more I talked, the more I enjoyed the sound of my own voice. This came as quite a surprise. And it prompted a flash of revelation, the crystal-clear resolution of the enigma of my old tendencies: I was a born orator!
”Thanks to this late realization, and to my initial noisy triumph, the Personage of recently moulded clay gained a firmer footing. The following afternoon, my soul heavy with dark premonitions, I took up my duties as Director General. After negotiating my way past two porters who jockeyed for the signal honour of taking my top hat, I was led to my Office. The furniture in the room, beaten down by ten generations of personages, received me with the hostile air of old dogs growling at an unfamiliar face. Waiting for me there was the Secretary! Gentlemen, the memory of that sinister little man still gives me chills. Dessicated as a clod of hardened earth, he had lightless eyes in a perfectly expressionless face, and wore a dreary suit over a funereal shirt. Nevertheless, a certain subtle irony leaked from him, a fluid slyness, a demonic malevolence; it was like an invisible sweat oozing from his pores, so offensively mysterious that several times a brutal urge came over me to smash open the inscrutable carapace of his face with a hammer, as children do with their toys, just to find out what was inside. When I asked him about my duties, the wretch led me to my desk, showed me a notepad, and put two pencils in my hand, one red and the other blue. Then he had me look through a peephole into the antechamber of my office, now chock full of men and women waiting. In his sour, monotonous voice, like that of an animal trained to talk, the Secretary recited the drill for me: every one of those men and women was a “postulant” bearing a letter. My job was to receive the letter, read it, then immediately pass it on to him. He would then indicate whether I was to note the postulant’s name under the column of the Chosen in blue pencil, or under Reprobates in red. The abominable instructions made me a puppet to be manipulated by the Secretary’s nicotine-yellowed fingers; and having heard them, I glared so hard at him that the man, incredible as it may seem, actually smiled or grimaced (I was never sure which), and then muttered something about “political convenience” and “the electoral imperative.” I bowed my head. Then the tragic procession began.
“I don’t know if you have ever been in one those antechambers that some waggish politician once dubbed “cooling tanks.” Once inside, the postulant with any optimism soon cuts the throat of his illusions; the irate postulant metamorphoses into a lamb; the loquacious postulant loses the very rudiments of language. My cooling tank comprised three interconnected rooms corresponding to three different degrees of “initiation” through which the catechumen had to pass before being admitted into the Presence. In the first room, the postulant would destroy his will, confound her memory, and abandon his intelligence, gradually renouncing human nature until he had descended into the animal realm. In the second room, he adopted elements of animal behaviour, pacing back and forth like a lion, roaring like a bull, yawning like a dog, licking her paws like a cat, or scratching himself like a chimp. Then, in the third room, the postulant descended dreamily into the vegetal realm. Therein he was to experience only vague vegetative sensations, perhaps those of hunger and thirst, of fingernails growing, the circulation of lymphatic fluids. By the time he finally entered my sancta sanctorum, the postulant had been reduced to the mineral realm. A few still managed, by dint of desperate exertions, to wave their letter in the air, as did the warrior from Marathon with his laurel bough. Others, as if they’d just woken up, actually asked me who they were and what they had come there for. In short, gentlemen, throughout my long days I was the focal point of that doleful procession: names written in red pencil, names written in blue! After the last postulant, I would flee the office, the building, the downtown area. Evening found me wandering residential streets in search of some sign of life, a child, a tree, or a just a dog to pet. The next day I would be back in my role as puppet: names in red, names in blue!
”To tell the truth, my Personage mask, on the outside, had consolidated quite nicely. No need for a mirror, for I could feel it on my face: absolutely rigid facial muscles, hardened mouth, a jaw of stone. Only my eyes continued publicly to betray hints of mercy, anguish, or grief. I finally decided to hide them behind dark glasses, under the pretext of an ocular ailment. All in all, however, while the external mask was indeed hardening, the other mask, the one trying to master the muscles of my soul, was failing to gel. Among those condemned by my red pen there abounded seekers of justice, invalids, the wretched of the earth. Some of their claims were so just, my heart would suddenly rebel against the Secretary, my pent-up anger flaring. But that man, surely my demon, would quickly douse the flames of my incipient revolts. What’s more, he seemed to take special pleasure in putting his finger on one more sensitive fibre within me and then killing it with the caustic venom of his Digests, Rules and Regulations, and Customs.
”One afternoon the unexpected happened. For several days I’d noticed an old man and a young woman waiting in the hall at my office door, motionless and seemingly disoriented. The old man caught my attention; he bore an extraordinary resemblance to a ranch hand who had taught me as a kid how to lasso sheep in the corral at La Rosada. He wasn’t the same man, certainly, but he was a close enough likeness to bring the image alive for me. Guessing that his letter of “recommendation” was too insignificant to gain him access even to the first room, I had the old man shown into my office, flagrantly flouting all protocol. Timorously, he handed me his letter: former labourer at a slaughterhouse gone bankrupt; in need of work; large family to support. I re-read the letter and looked at him. He said not a word. All he did was smile beneath his grey mustache as he gave me a long look, a large tear caught in the corner of each eye. At his side, meanwhile, the young woman was silently smiling as well. Suddenly, I felt an internal warmth melting my mask. Then I turned to the Secretary and ordered: “A job as labourer, right now.” With no display of any emotion, the Secretary picked up a Digest, opened it, and read the following article: “The General Directorate shall not admit labourers aged forty years or more.” He closed the Digest, and I saw his eyes gleam in triumph. But that set off my Third Dionysian Rebellion, the last of them. I climbed up on my desk, jumped heavily to the floor, flapped my arms like wings, and let go with an ear-splitting, a divine, a morning-glorious “cock-a-doodle-doo!” Then, before the old man’s astonished eyes and the girl’s pallid face, I turned to the Secretary and said: “If that job order isn’t ready in one minute, I’ll go to the antechambers and do the rooster again there.” He flew from the room as though chased by the devil, and returned immediately, still green with panic, waving a job order aloft like a white flag. After handing it to the old man, I gently pushed him and the girl out the door. Then I collapsed on a sofa, still trembling, my forehead clammy, my heart a bewitched echo-chamber: the look I threw at the Secretary was meant to pierce him like the sword of Saint George.