”After that I devoted myself to the pleasant work of gnawing and physically devouring the volumes in the room, the luxurious bindings, the delicious gilt, the papers from Japan, Flanders, and Italy. I chomped away and surfeited myself as before, but now I did so at a bestial pace, given over to the rudimentary laws of hunger and sleep. Springtime went by, and the ravages to Room Number Three became alarming even to me. The Librarian, however, showed no sign of concern. At first his indifference reassured me at first, but it soon caused me a dull anger. That man or devil was trying to ignore me, or was pretending to ignore me! I decided to provoke him somehow: one day I crawled furtively into Room Number Two, climbed the hat rack, and ate the Librarian’s pearl-grey Stetson, which had no doubt cost him an arm and a leg. Returning to my domain, I awaited, not without emotion, the surely inevitable reprisals. But the Librarian acted as if nothing had happened; and so, going back to my feasting, I forgot all about him.
”I gorged myself and slept, my abdominal rings grew dangerously fat, and as I lay collapsed in the friar’s armchair I sensed that my periods of sluggishness were growing longer. The day finally arrived when I could no longer get out of the chair. I fought against lethargy, managed to wake up for a moment, then soon succumbed once again to my terrible drowsiness. My ringed body began to break out in cold sweats, and the sweat immediately hardened, until finally it formed a secure crust around me, a closed cocoon, an inviolable sleeping chamber. And I slept in my cocoon for a long time. Until one day I woke up, in the grip of unfamiliar impulses and a kind of mad strength. I turned within my narrow prison and at last scratched through the hard shell encircling me. I emerged fluttering, drunk on light, avid for heights. How ridiculously tiny was Room Number Three! I beat my wings, took flight, and bumped head first into the walls, the bookshelves, the ceiling, the closed skylight, as though the room were another cocoon and I had to break out of it, too. Then appeared the Librarian Who Peered Out from Hazy Distances: distracted as ever, draped in silence, with his vegetal indifference, his terrible apathy, that man, if indeed he was such, opened wide the skylight. And out I flew to the open air, only to descend into this Inferno.
Don Ecuménico had finished telling his story. He looked at each of our faces, fixedly, anxiously, as if waiting for an objection, perhaps a question, or even a look of consolation. But Schultz and Tesler maintained their distant air, and I couldn’t find a thing to say to him. Seeing which, Don Ecuménico flapped his wings, managed to achieve lift-off, and flew away heavily, flitting among monstrous flowers.
XIII
A big, plain iron door led from the eighth to the ninth and final circle of hell. There we took our leave of Samuel Tesler who, after a rather cold handshake, turned his back on us and returned to the City of Pride. Schultz bade me enter through the open door. One after the other, we descended a spiral staircase that took us to the very edge of the Great Pit yawning at the end of Schultz’s Inferno. I peered over the edge into the maw. Deep down I saw a great shuddering mass of something like gelatin, which gave the impression of being a gigantic mollusc, though it wasn’t.
— It’s the Paleogogue, Schultz gravely informed me.
I turned again to contemplate the monster, and although I noted no particular evil, it seemed that all forms of wickedness were synthetically united in its undulating mass, and that the abominations of Schultz’s hell found both their origin and their meaning in the gelatinous beast writhing in the Great Pit.
— What do you think? Schultz asked me, pointing at the Paleogogue.
I answered:
— Nastier than a fright at midnight. Got more gills than a dorado. Serious as a monk’s codpiece. More ingratiating than a rich man’s dog. Sharp-pointed, like an old man’s knife. More puckered than an immigrant’s tobacco pouch. Shit-smeared, like the boot of a Basque dairyman. More ornery than a draw-wheel nag. Uglier than a pig’s somersault. Tougher than a vizcacha’s paw. Skittish as a washerwoman’s pony. Solemn as the fart of an Englishman.
Glossary
balín (< bala, “bullet”) — small-bore bullet; argot term for penis; by metonymy, homosexual.
bandoneón — musical instrument like a small accordion, typically used for tango music.
bombilla — a short metallic tube used as a straw to drink the mate infusion from the mate (gourd). The lower end is fitted with a sieve to prevent the mate leaves being drawn in.
café con leche — coffee with milk.
caften — pimp.
camoatí (Guarani, “wasp”) — a kind of wasp found in the river valleys of the Paraná, the Paraguay, and the Uruguay.
caña quemada — caña is liquor made from cane sugar; caña quemada is from burnt sugar.
carcelera (< cárcel, “jail”) — an old flamenco song-form whose lyrics sing the tribulations of life in Andalusian jails.
chajá — bird native to north and eastern Argentina; crested screamer.
che! — informal interjection that adds emphasis to a statement, whose meaning changes according to the context: hey!; come on!; brrr!; phew!; etc.
china (< Quechua, “female”) — in gaucho language, an affectionate term for girl or woman; in other social contexts, pejorative for girlfriend or mistress.
chiripá (< Quechua) — a kind of blanket that gauchos wore over their pants, which they passed between the legs and wrapped around the waist.
chorizo — seasoned pork sausage.
churros y chocolate — fritters and hot chocolate. Roughly, the cultural equivalent of coffee and doughnuts.
ciruja — garbage-picker; down-and-outer, tramp.
comadre — godmother; in colloquial usage, friend and neighbour.
compadre — in standard Spanish, the godfather of one’s child. On being absorbed into the city, the gauchos living on the outskirts called one another compadre in a friendly way. Later, the term came to designate a braggart and brawler, a tough-guy.
compadrito (dim. of compadre) — young man who imitates the compadres; well-dressed tough-guy, dude, dandy, pretty-boy.
confitería — originally, a cake shop; in Argentina, a tearoom or café.
conventillo — boardinghouse where poor immigrants lived, usually in overcrowded squalor.