The announcer stopped talking. Three strokes on the xylophone pierced the silence. And right away, as if cued by those notes, the homoplumes struck up the most abominable concert ever heard by human ears: tango orchestras bleating, strident riffs of jazz, crooners bawling, flowery cabaret songs, radio-drama clichés such as “Kill her!” and “Ah, I’m dying!”, newscasters foaming at the mouth, play-by-play commentary of soccer games and boxing matches, commercials insistent as horseflies and mindless as an idiot’s refrain. All these voices and many more erupted at once and mingled in such a dreadful din that Schultz and I took off at a desperate run, knocking aside homoplumes as they strummed or shouted like maniacs.
Thus, at full speed, we left that sector. Still running, we crossed the zone of silent homofolias; for a few minutes they rained down on us like dead leaves torn from trees by autumn winds. The urgent desire to reach open space and our furious speed in flight prevented me from getting a sense of the homofolias’ character. However, the lethargy of those infernal entities, their indolent gliding fall, and above all their absolute muteness led me to guess that they were of that well-known species of criollo — “those born tired.”
We stopped at the edge of an area in the middle of which was a merry-go-round (or calesita, as we call it in Argentina). Fitted with something like sails, the carousel span either slowly or vertiginously, according to the fluctuations of the wind. As it turned, it produced a kind of hurdy-gurdy music, its rhythm frantically speeding up or slowing to a crawl in tandem with the speed of rotation. Listening to the nasal strains, I was quite surprised to recognize the Gregorian Dies Irae.97 A concourse of grave men — their solemnity striking me as rather at odds with the infantile pastime — had filled the merry-go-round and were rotating with it. In groups of two or three, they rode ugly animals made of painted wood; among them, I picked out the Dragon of the Apocalypse, the Seven-Headed Beast, the Two-Horned Beast, the Great Whore, and the kings of Gog and Magog.98 These solemn men, castigating the flanks of their monstrous mounts with their brass spurs, did so with a will that seemed quite meritorious, I must say; and so did the way they eagerly strove to grasp a glittering ring nailed to a stick, which a demonic operator disguised as an angel was offering and denying to their outstretched hands.99 I was taking a good look at the calesita, still not guessing what meaning it carried in the hell of Sloth, when one of the solemn men, on the point of seizing the ring, lost his balance and fell off the revolving machine.100 Schultz and I ran over, helped him up to his feet, and with the best intentions began brushing the sand off his clothes. But, with dignity, the man broke free of our hands:
— Noli me tangere,101 he warned in an utterly passionless voice.
I felt confused. But the astrologer Schultz laughed benevolently:
— Of course! he said. This is the Grand Orisonist!
Difficult indeed to depict the rage that possessed the man when he heard those words. He stammered for a moment, spit out the sand still in his mouth, and shouted:
— The Vice-Pope is a clown! To Gehenna with him! If he’s blasphemed once, he’s done it a thousand times!
— No doubt about it, Schultz reaffirmed. We have before us the Grand Orisonist.
Then the astrologer turned and spoke to me in particular:
— You should know that a few years ago a new heresy began to spread its deleterious miasma in the very Catholic city of Buenos Aires. A handful of men, prey to a fanaticism not entirely devoid of grace, fell into the pious folly of clinging tooth-and-nail to prayer (which is praiseworthy) and refusing all forms of action to the point of becoming terrestrially immobile. This condition of stasis, however, did not stop them from consuming tea and biscuits in alarming quantities, or prodigiously climbing the ranks in their public service careers, or satirizing those foolish mortals who squandered their time on useless philosophical speculation, vain artistic efforts, and prosaic attempts to reorganize the earthly city.102 And this came to pass in the year of the Great Flood, when the last white herons appeared in the south.
— I deny the bit about the biscuits! interrupted the grave man at this point. The Vice-Pope’s pointed ears are clearly sticking out from behind this malignant tale!
Paying him no attention, Schultz continued:
— That’s how things stood when there appeared a man in whom the prudence of the serpent was wed to the candour of the dove. He saw that doctrinal folly as a final offshoot of the old and apparently exhausted heresy known as Quietism.103 Then he gave it the name of Orisonism, and those who yielded to such a dangerous tendency came be known as Orisonists. That strange apostle (who surely came straight out of the desert, having subsisted there on locusts and wild honey) claimed for himself the title of Vice-Pope — “the Vice” for short, obviously.104
When he heard that fearful name, the Grand Orisonist was bodily shaken from head to toe:
— Harrow him! he roared. To the outer darkness with him! Locusts and wild honey, my foot! The waiters at the Adam Bar might tell a different story!
— Once the heresy had been denounced and his nom de guerre adopted, continued Schultz, the Vice didn’t hesitate to go into battle to succour the Holy Church. He donned the helmet of patience, the breastplate of fervour, the backplate of good sense, the paunch-piece of benignancy, the gauntlets of justice, the knee-pieces of daydream, the sollerets of soldierly love. Then he called for the shield of the philosophia perennis, the mace of Sir Syllogism, and the pike of Lady Scholastic.105 Thus armed to the teeth, the Vice’s lights shone so brightly that his astounded cardinals were emboldened to compare him to the star Aldebaran on a moonless night.
At this point, the Grand Orisonist laughed as broadly as his gravity permitted:
— His cardinals! he scoffed. A crew of late-night revellers that drank like Knights Templar! Frivolity on legs, they were regularly hot on the pink heels of the pagan whore!
— A rock of inebriety in a sea of sobriety, Schultz reminded him judiciously.
And resuming the thread of his story, the astrologer turned once again to me:
— Before I go on, I must ask for your undivided attention. For the first time ever you are hearing about a mystery that some day will be divulged at large: it will be confirmed that Buenos Aires, having been the theatre of a battle of such great love, is the mystical centre of the continent. But I return to my tale. Having left the Vice armed like Saint George before the dragon, a description of the dragon’s nature is now in order, so as to understand something of the battle very soon to be joined between the dragon and the Vice. Orisonism, undifferentiated in its early hours, soon developed two distinct facets, namely, Aquilism and Vermism. The aquiline type of Orisonist was characterized by an alarming disposition; lord of the heights, pedestrian on the Way of Light and, of course, a citizen of the Celestial Jerusalem, he had all the surliness, solitary pride, and quick irritability of the eagle who leaves his mountain peaks behind. Whenever he descended to this planet, he would display the amazement of an angel, as if suddenly finding himself in a strange world. There were times when his disciples, weeping with piety, had to remind him what a streetcar was for, or how to hold a fork. Be that as it may, once down on earth, the Orisonist of the aquiline type clapped irate eyes on humanity, seeking strips of Promethean liver on which to exercise the heavenly wrath of his beak. And to this line of Orisonism — concluded Schultz — belongs, or once belonged, the man we have before us.