Fortunately, the sixth spiral quite calmed me down, for it amounted only to a simple panoramic vision. True, my ears still ring with the disagreeable thud of oars knocking the skulls of those who dared raise their heads. But, for the rest, we crossed the melancholy water without incident, notwithstanding “the voice that let itself be heard between two muddy slurps.” Schultz and I were passing through a gallery, he in silence and I deep in bitter rumination, when suddenly, just as we rounded a bend, the sixth circle hove into view. The passage to the Hell of Envy was blocked neither by door nor wall nor hieroglyph nor guardian, perhaps in order to indicate how easily that passion can slip into one’s soul; or maybe (and most likely) as a result of Schultz’s innate aversion to symmetry and reiteration. The whole infernal area seemed to suggest a contrast between sky and earth, between organization and chaos. Above, in the darkness of a very good imitation of night, celestial spheres were spinning on their axes as they orbited around green, blue, and pink suns. But they were racing and whirling with the artificial speed of a Planetarium, each of them producing as it rotated its own musical buzz, which joined the tones of the other spheres in a furious chord that sounded like a swarm of irritated wasps. Below, completely covering the ground, there extended a marshy lagoon similar to those I’d seen in the prairies of the south, between Segurola and the sea, where I had often gone hunting otters and fishing for sharp-toothed dientudos. It was a patchwork of clearings of open water, here shimmering mirror-like, there ferruginous with algae, thickets of reeds, and islands of lilypads. The navigable surface of the marsh was being plied by flat-bottomed boats, whose crews seemed busy with some task I couldn’t make out right away.
Only when Schultz led me down to a wooden wharf did I catch a glimpse of what was going on. The light of the rotating spheres, waxing and waning as in the lunar cycle, alternately revealed and hid fragments of the lake’s quite agitated world. Then I saw the entire lagoon was a seething hatchery of men and women: they swam in the muddy water like otters, their noses cutting the surface of the water at the vertices of triangular wakes flairing out behind them. They were groaning with dissatifaction or cavorting in amphibious somersaults, revealing flashes of buttocks, thighs, and breasts, all a-glint with slime. At the same time the job of the crews manning the boats became clear to me: as soon as a head popped up over the water’s surface, whether inadvertently or deliberately, the nearest boat shot over like an arrow, and the crew brought their oars down on the rebellious head with a thud of broken bone, making it disappear beneath the surface. “Keep your head down!” was no doubt the watchword in that hell.
As I was stringing together these observations, the astrologer Schultz had been exchanging a series of shouts and signs with the two crewmen of a boat moored not far from the shore. Schultz, evidently, was commanding or beckoning them over to the wharf we were standing on. But the boatmen showed no sign of obeying. Seeing this, the astrologer started to insult them violently, unleashing a string of esoteric epithets that concluded with the wingèd and very musical putifilios.114 That word must have had some magical meaning, for when the oarsmen heard it, they overcame their natural resistance and headed our way. Once the boat was tied up at the wharf, one of the men rudely demanded:
— So what’s eating you?
— Nothing, answered Schultz. We want to cross the lagoon.
The two boatmen guffawed sarcastically, as if they found the astrologer’s request hilariously outrageous. The one in the stern held a long pole, the boat’s means of locomation; the one in the bow raised a dripping oar whose sole purpose, as we already know, was to bonk rebellious craniums. Both of them, clad only in loincloths, were unspeakably thin; their liverish faces were drawn, their foreheads bitter, their eyes searing within dark hollows dug out by resentment.
— Cross the lagoon! said the man with the oar, still snickering, as though answering a child who had just asked for the moon.
— Sure, added the man with the pole. And Daddy’s gonna bring you home a nice pony, too.
— Listen, you sons of a beehive! thundered Schultz. Do you know who you’re talking to? Has egalitarian pride so blinded you that you can’t even recognize the Neogogue?
Although the man with the pole kept on laughing, the one with the oar seemed to waver for a moment. He turned to the astrologer and pointed at the planetarium:
— Are you trying to tell me you hear the music of the spheres?
— Every last note of it, answered Schultz.
The man with the pole started to bite his nails furiously.
— He’s a second-hand Scipio,115 he warned his companion. If I were you, I’d knock him arse first into the lagoon.
Paying no attention to the man with the pole, Schultz tried to win over the one with the oar:
— So what? he said. Buenos Aires and the entire nation are under the sign of Libra. Here, every intellectual audacity is possible and desirable, even if this filthy pigsty seems to demonstrate the opposite.
— A megalomaniac! insisted the one with the pole. If I was you, I’d knock him arse over teakettle into the lilypads.
But the man with the oar, who no doubt had his responsibilities, adopted a prudent tone with Schultz:
— Look, around here you can’t just assume a highfalutin’ name and expect to bully your way across the lagoon. There’s lotsa guys showed up here claiming to be Tom, Dick, or Harry, with more moxie ’n you can shake a stick at, tryin’ to sneak in and see our sensational show for free. The ladies swimmin’ around in this marsh are wearin’ swimsuits not meant for pryin’ eyes — on account of the synthetic design, you understand. After all, this ain’t no fancy nightclub; it’s an Inferno with all the trappings. Some credential, sir, some sign: that’s all we’re askin’ for.
Schultz was not a man to turn a deaf ear to the voice of reason, when reason was speaking with courtesy. His response to the man with the oar was a paragon of urbanity and concision: