The door closed behind him; Adam Buenosayres ventured a step into the blackness. He’d have gone further if he hadn’t at that moment recalled the wisdom of famous travellers in the night — Montecristo, Rocambole, and other paladins of our childhood — who always allowed their senses to adapt to the darkness. Heeding this useful lesson, Adam Buenosayres did not rashly continue forward, but stood stock-still and sent his five senses on ahead. The first to be assaulted was his olfactory sense: the thick stench of an environment corrupted by its relations with animal life, either through the exchange of gases between animal and atmosphere, or the fermentation of rancid sweat, or the biodegradation of urine imperfectly controlled during expulsion or too long stagnant in those receptacles that human dignity, always jealous of its prerogatives, has seen fit to call “chamber pots.” A moment later his keen sense of hearing picked up the rhythm of deep and laborious breathing in the depths of the lair; its alternate movement, in musical notation, went like this: inhalation in crescendo and sharp snore, exhalation in diminuendo and bass snore.
Anyone else might have trembled upon hearing the dragon breathe, but not Adam Buenosayres. Listening to the bellows wheezing in the dark, he reflected on the innocent vulnerability of sleeping persons and felt tenderness at his foe’s defencelessness. He might even have fallen down the slippery slope of tears but for a sudden break in the concert of respirational music. The dragon, still invisible, had abruptly turned over in bed and unleashed a gigantic explosion of flatulence.
“Koriskos salutes me,” thought Adam, “with salvos from the artillery!”
Now used to the dark, his eyes discerned the layout of room number five. In front of him, a rectangular window was protected by a heavy curtain against the assault of light. To his right, the baleful face of a mirror. On his left, what looked like written characters traced in white chalk against a background of absolute black. He began to register shreds of an unknown perfect whiteness, then the spectrum of greys, and later the corpulence of furniture lurking in the corners of the room like domestic beasts. Sure, now, of the terrain he was invading, the visitor headed for the window and yanked open the curtain, opening the floodgates to the light. Turning his eyes back to the cave’s interior, he saw Samuel Tesler on his bed in a laterally recumbent position and intelligently oriented toward the earth’s magnetic pole. Samuel’s eyelids flapped against the sudden sunlight, strong as acid, and an enormous sigh seemed to deflate his entire body. He frowned. He smacked his lips as if tasting a drop of vinegar. Then, with a heave of his mountainous hip beneath the dismal covers, he rolled over and continued snoring, backside to the day.
(Although none of the philosopher’s written doctrine confirms this, the oral tradition preserved by his disciples maintains that Samuel Tesler lived in the world as if in a deplorable hotel where — he sadly alleged — he was taking a total-rest cure in an attempt to recover from the fatigue of having been born. When queried as to the origin of this evidently intractable fatigue, the philosopher put it down to the cumulative effect of his numerous reincarnations, beginning with the partition of the original Hermaphrodite. He solemnly declared he’d been a fakir in Calcutta, a eunuch in Babylon, a dog-shearer in Tyre, a flautist in Carthage, a priest of Isis in Memphis, a whore in Corinth, a moneylender in Rome, and an alchemist in medieval Paris. He was once asked, in a Villa Crespo café called Las Rosas, if a job wouldn’t assuage the tedium of so many different transmigrations. Samuel Tesler answered that work was not an “essential” virtue of human nature; the almighty Elohim had created man only for otium poeticum,4 he maintained, and work was an “accidental” impairment to our nature brought about by the wilful “separated rib”; and seeing as how he, Samuel Tesler, was a man who kept his conduct grounded in the essential, he was not about to lower himself to a chance accident that reminded him of that unpleasant episode in Paradise. Another time, it is told, on the terrace of Ciro Rossini’s restaurant, a bedspread salesman engaged Samuel Tesler in the tired old debate of the Cricket versus the Ant. The philosopher, not without first expressing his disdain for both invertebrate animals and bedspread salesmen, heroically defended the Cricket, to whose health he drank three glasses of Sicilian wine. And since the salesman insisted on knowing what he thought to be the ideal economy, Samuel Tesler replied that it was the economy of the bird, the only terrestrial animal that can convert ten grains of bird-seed into three hours of music and a milligram of manure.)
Adam Buenosayres couldn’t bring himself to wake up the sleeping man. Instead, he looked at the clutter surrounding him. On the table lay a large book, wide open like a mouth. In front of the austere mirror, four chairs faced one another in a bizarre arrangement, as though a conclave of ghosts had been sitting in them the night before. A notebook lying open on the floor exhibited the dragon’s vigorous handwriting. Over here, a couple of discarded socks still held the form of the human foot; over there, a faded rag blindfolded the lone eye of the bedside lamp. And books were everywhere, in piles on the floor, stacked up against walls. Monographs strewn as if by a lion’s paw. Tomes whose rent bindings bled knowledge. Folio-sized volumes groaning like beasts of burden. A blackboard set up by the window seemed to redeem the decorum of the lair; on its surface Adam Buenosayres could now read the characters that had looked mysterious in the dark:
APRIL 27
1 p.m. — A brilliant idea about catharsis in ancient tragedy. The aestheticizers at Ciro’s will shit bricks.
2:20 p.m. — The laundry woman brings me a paltry bill ($1.75). I perform a dialectical miracle and revive her wilted hopes that she’ll collect. She’s Galician Spanish,5 a race given to lyricism: she’s dreaming if she thinks she’ll get the better of me!