— Then, he answered, I felt my pneuma coming down into this circle of hell and heading irresistibly for the Sector of the Personages. Here I am. How long it’s been, I don’t know. Lately, an accidental leak gave me hope for a second death. Ah, gentlemen, I give you no thanks for inflating me a third time!
He stood staring at us, his eyes sad and reproachful. Visibly hesitant, Schultz consulted me with a look. And sensing in my return look some strange form of pity, he performed an act that would later earn him a good deal of praise: he untied the string around the homoglobe’s nozzle and let the air escape from his balloon. As the Personage deflated once and for all, a beatific smile stole across his face.
— Let his divine pneuma have its freedom back! grumbled Schultz. He bored us long enough with his shaggy-dog story, going over the top, in my opinion, with his “freshnesses” and “flavours.” But he defended his soul, and didn’t go down without a fight. A real son of a gun! Why did he have to go all the way back to his great-grandfather?
The astrologer dropped the empty husk of the Personage. Then he invited me to follow him through the cloud of homoglobes who, at the mercy of the wind’s caprices, pitched back and forth in the air, tussled with one another, or angrily surged against us. It was an annoying passage. In a few places we had to punch our way through, our fists hitting the spongy bellies, top-hatted heads, or tuxedoed rear-ends of the Personages. And, though we made it out of the homoglobe sector at last, it was only to fall into the no less hostile sector of the homoplumes.
The new loafers were gliding around at various levels in this other block of atmosphere. Essentially, they were schematic sketches: a human head attached to a large undulating feather — variously of an ostrich, rooster, partridge, swan, or peacock. They had long beards hanging down and away from their necks like pseudopods, amid which some of the wretches displayed the organ of their perdition. Pushed this way and that by gusts of wind, the homoplumes began darting around us, sinuous and slippery as fish in an aquarium. Their quick movements and the tickle of their feathers brushing our faces prevented our recognizing them, until finally one of them, more insistent or less cautious, landed on me, brought his lips close to my ear, and shouted mockingly:
— Hey, hoser, whatcha up to? Who’s the other suit?
His words were immediately followed by a wheezing guffaw. When he tried to take flight again, I grabbed hold of his rippling tail and, with Schultz’s help, pulled down the homoplume, who by this time was regaling us with the most colourful expletives known to the lexicon of Villa Crespo. Having wrestled him to the ground, we could see his face, the most bonafide malevo’s mug ever seen either side of the Maldonado: a dull, narrow forehead, eyes glittering beneath the single, solid line of his eyebrows, lips pursed as though around a bag of insults, but an indecisive nose and a jaw without audacity. A little tan-coloured derby was stuffed over his swinish thatch of hair, though without containing its unruly flow, and a white kerchief was classically knotted around his neck at the point where it joined his plume, which in his case was a rooster feather, grey with white stripes. His pseudopods were clutching a faded, patched-up bandoneón, survivor of a hundred milongas that had ended in fisticuffs.
— It’s the mack from Monte Egmont and Olaya! I exclaimed in recognition.
— Hosers! yelled the pimp, still struggling to get free. Two against one! If ya wanna go for it, come on over to Rancagua Park and have it out mano a mano, mack-style.
— Stop playing the taita! I told him. Remember when the sergeant from Precinct 21 sawed off your heels and gave you a brush cut?
— That wanker! the mack snarled like a dog at the memory.
— What about the time the gallego from the dairy gave you a black eye?
— Yeah, but with a sucker punch!
— And that’s not all, I insisted. What did you do to Catita? La Chacharola, poor old woman, wanders around looking for you, dying to wring your neck with her cold witch’s fingers. She’s a blister of hatred on the skin of the barrio. Where are her four fine linen sheets from Italy? What did you do with the sock full of money?
The malevo’s mug momentarily clouded over, whether from anger or remorse, I never found out.
— Catita? he sighed after a pause. Ah, one night, under the lamp-post, a tango…
— That’s it! I said. You’ve spent your life trying to be a theme for a tango. While your poor mother supported you, washing clothes day in day out, you — oh, infinite idler! — never got out of the famous sack. Except to go drink mate on the patio and maul the keys of your bandoneón, a martyred virgin. From whose offended breast, by the way, you never managed to squeeze more than a couple of bars from the waltz “El aeroplano.”92
— More than that! the mack thundered wrathfully. And how ’bout the two bars from “Don Esteban”?93
— Fine, I conceded grudgingly. Then there’s that way you’d shuffle along the sunny side of the street, dragging your feet, all slow and stiff lest you bust some spring in your precious anatomy — oh, mack! — all the way down to the corner of Monte Egmont and Olaya, where you’d loiter for so long, you looked like a tree taking root, a sorry-looking tree, leafless and fruitless, every now and then deigning to flower in a meagre whistle.
— Whadda lotta malarkey! the mack interrupted me. Cut it out with the fancy jivin’.
— Or, I continued implacably, how about your grey nights in Don Nicola’s cantina (his famous one-hundred-percent plonk!), where you used to spend your idle hours (and such were all your hours) conniving with other loutish birds of a feather, or spinning lies about your martial feats, or boring them with false yarns about equally false amorous conquests.
— False? protested the mack in a clumsy boast.
I grabbed him by the kerchief and shook him a few times.
— But one thing’s for sure, I said. Arriving at the milonga, you’d hit the dance floor and your incommensurable inertia would vanish in a thousand cuts and figure-eights and zigzags of the tango. What Dionysian force possessed you then? What Panic wind, what Orphic dementia was it — oh, mack! — that could so shake you up and sublimate your ignoble clay, your indolent architecture?
— Lemme go! roared the mack, finding himself tugged by the kerchief.
— What gust of earthy…?
— Lemme go, ya pair o’ swells! You want trouble, come on over to Rancagua Park. I’ll take you both on with one hand tied behind my back!
Just then a blast of wind pulled us backward. Suddenly free, the mack let the same gust carry him off; quickly corkscrewing upward, he gained altitude and made the atmosphere ring with his threats, protests, and challenges. The astrologer and I got up off the ground, took hold of the forgotten rope, and set off walking again. The mack’s vociferations, however, must have roused the whole barrio, because the homoplumes, patently aggressive, started swooping down, coiling their prehensile tails around us, shouting confused diatribes into our ears.
— Place Pigalle,94 whispered a guitarist, coming face to face with the astrologer. You were a young guy who liked to play the intellectual, like the man says, who…
— Silence! Schultz enjoined him. What kind of history did you have, guitar-picker! From the Mercado de Abasto all the way to El Garrón cabaret in Paris!95
— Now I’m playing on the radio, announced the guitarist, deeply sad. Place Pigalle in Paree!… Yeah, you used to talk egghead with those three bearded Germans. Chemists or alkeymists, I think they were called. Looking to make gold, or something like that…