”My victory so excited me that I mysteriously disappeared from the General Directorate. Three days later they found me in a tavern on the Paseo Colón, happily drunk, playing truco with three sailors I’d just met. They were with the Genoveva, a barge that plied the Upper Paraná River. Theoretically, I had joined the the barge’s crew twenty-four hours earlier. Since then, my card-playing companions had been filling me with visions of tobacco-hued women beneath flowering orange trees, in a land of paradisal bliss, where red and blue pencils were unheard of. It was all a dream! Once I was sobered up, it was back to work at the General Directorate. Adiós, tobacco-hued women! Adiós, Genoveva! Back to work at the General Directorate: names in red pencil! Back to work: names in blue pencil!…
At this point the Personage fell to rambling, humming an improvised “Ditty of the Pencils” over and over again — “like a broken record,” as Schultz later declared; “monotonous as an old prison song,” I thought at the time. With a few friendly slaps, we brought him round, and he concluded his tale thus:
— Well, gentlemen, I later called that episode the Swan Song of My Sensibility. From then on, I no longer lived in human time but in Personage Time, a nebulous chronology I’d be hard put to account for here. Let me just recall that I gradually surrendered to the mechanism of the Directorate; its fascinating regularity subjugated me little by little until I was definitively hypnotized. If at first I read in the face of each postulant a vital problem, an unfolding destiny, a suffering microcosm, I was later able to jettison all sentimental ballast, to the point where every postulant was reduced to a mere face. Later, no longer interested even in faces, I saw each postulant as an arm outstretched and bearing a letter. Finally, I didn’t even see the arm but the letter alone, independent of its phantasmagorical messenger. In a parallel process, the upper echelons to whom I was beholden gradually granted me their trust, and I was allowed to do without the Secretary — free at last! — and to administer on my own the blue pencil’s benevolence and the red pencil’s despair.
“Then, and only then — alas! — did I notice the incredible metamorphosis the Secretary was undergoing. The man of iron was being humanized in inverse proportion as I was being dehumanized! As my Personage carapace hardened, his shell was cracking up and falling to pieces, revealing a raw flesh that bled at the slightest touch. While my clothes were becoming darker and darker, his were actually taking on tones suggestive of springtime. By virtue of a monstrous inversion, we arrived at an absurd juncture: he was rebelling against me for the sake of mercy, and I was bringing him to heel with his old weapons! And to complete this situational reversal, the man had his own crisis. One day, as though unable to hold it in any longer, he put his hands on my shoulders and, teary-eyed, accused himself of having methodically destroyed all that was human in me. And so saying, he displayed a contrition painful enough to melt a heart of stone. I listened to him as if to the ravings of a madman, then turned my back and walked away, leaving him to sob in silence with his arms around a typewriter.
”Now, gentlemen, you may think the Invention of the Personage would have been complete by now. Not so, unfortunately; one final turn of the screw was yet to come. Despite my transformation, I still retained a certain animal dynamism that made me hold my head high, walk tall, and speak in full voice — motes of imperfection which certainly did not escape the expert eye of my inventors. Jose Antonio and Raphael warned me about it one day: we were in a country where no man was allowed to exercise government who did not have one foot already in the grave. Their advice, therefore, was that I should simulate an attack of gout when walking, an asthma attack when breathing, and a worrisome hoarseness of voice when talking. Once again I obeyed, and with astounding results: my visible decrepitude and my oratorical triumphs allowed me, step by step, to scale the Olympian heights of officialdom. Henceforth, the Personage was a masterpiece. One time I tried smiling in front of the mirror; like Lautréamont’s hero,91 I understood it was impossible, even if I were to take a penknife to my face and carve it. My inner dessication was so complete that, when Victoria later came from La Rosada to show me her firstborn son, I didn’t even raise my eyes from the Record of Parliamentary Proceedings. A copy of Germán’s book arrived one day: Song in the Blood had just been published to great acclaim. I fell asleep on the second page. Finally, in an attempt at physical exertion, I discovered the gout and asthma had become real and taken me in their grip.
”I’ve forgotten the rest; everything gets hazy and confused when I try to recall the nebulous chronology of my Personage Time — everything, that is, except the circumstances of my final demise. Pay attention now, gentlemen, because the Death of the Personage is drawing nigh! One night, while I was waiting at home for some guests who were going with me to an official ceremony, I fell sound asleep in an armchair. I was dressed in tails and, inadvertently, I’d pulled my top hat down over my face before nodding off; and so, from the vantage point of the doorway, all that could be seen were my shoulders and hat. When the Secretary came in, heading up the delegation, he assumed I was asleep. Creeping up to me on tiptoe, he touched my shoulder. Then, before his startled eyes, tuxedo and top hat collapsed into the armchair — empty, completely empty! At the end of the long process of obliteration, the Personage had crossed the frontier between being and non-being, disappearing into the void. Slowly picking up my clothes, the Secretary turned to the delegation and announced in a cold voice: “The Personage has died.” On his way out the door, he paused, angrily pushed away a few wayward tears, and repeated: “The Personage has died.”
With these words, the Personage fell into a silence that seemed final, as though he considered his tale concluded.
— And then? I asked, not hiding from him my sympathy.