Samuel Tesler, philosopher, did not die of indigestion caused by smoked herring; this calumnious rumour was circulated throughout Villa Crespo by a rival sect. Equally apocryphal is the legend that has him die, like Pythagoras, in a bean field. This story was invented by Samuel’s heterodox disciple Kerbikian, an Armenian dishwasher at the Café Izmir on Gurruchaga Street, of whom it is said that, being gifted with a singularly obtuse intelligence, he never understood the first thing about the philosopher’s teaching. What really happened — and it might even be true — is that Samuel Tesler, ripe now for grand revelations thanks to his judicious practice of the heroic virtues, simply climbed down from this world as one gets off a Lacroze streetcar.29 Surrounded on his deathbed by the innermost circle of his disciples, he implored them not to weep for him, nor to cover their brows with ashes, nor, in their anguish, to rend their clothes (being mindful of the exorbitant price of English woollens30); he exhorted them rather to forget the ephemeral gifts of natura naturata and to seek instead the invisible, yet intelligible, traces of natura naturans.31 Already in his death throes, Samuel Tesler first gave vent to a burst of laughter, then to a fit of sobbing. When asked about the reason for his hilarity, he replied that before him he beheld the true image of Death in a surpassingly beautiful virgin who was calling him now to a sleep induced by the opium poppies wreathing his brow; so it made him laugh, he said, to recall the skeleton armed with scythe and other lugubrious props attributed to Death by the brooding imagination of versifiers. As for his weeping, it was provoked by the sad thought that centuries would pass before Buenos Aires might be blessed again with a thinker of his calibre. At the moment his soul flew free, they say, a strong odour of benzoin, myrrh, and cinnamon wafted from his body and spread throughout the entire neighbourhood. So strong it was, that the good people of Villa Crespo wondered if Abdullah the Turk’s perfume shop wasn’t getting looted over on Warnes Street.
Historico-critical attempts to pigeonhole Samuel Tesler as a Cynic, an Epicurean, or a Stoic philosopher have been laughable, for the metaphysician of Villa Crespo was an Eclectic of the finest kind, and those who cannot understand this will wrack their brains until Judgment Day. Samuel Tesler had two reasons for detesting Diogenes, the one in the barrel. First, he claimed, Diogenes was the paradigm of vanity; he had only to step before a mirror to find “the man” he so eagerly sought. Secondly, Samuel found the business of the barrel grossly absurd, for he maintained that a philosopher could neither be the content of a barrel nor a barrel the vessel of a philosopher, since both philosopher and barrel were the natural vessels of the sacred liquor that Noah invented after the Flood, no doubt to recover from so great an excess of water. Samuel Tesler was no less judicious about the weeping Heraclitus and the laughing Democritus. In his view, Heraclitus was a sentimental calf and Democritus a gleeful magpie. The two of them were equally dehumanized, since neither had discovered that the true law of the human condition is the useful and prudent alternation of laughter and weeping. To laugh dramatically at one’s fellows and weep for them comically, these are two equal aspects of compassion. This aphorism was taught by Samuel Tesler, philosopher. Similar sentences testify to his eclecticism in diverse matters. They used to ask him about the surest method for achieving sofrosyne;32 cognizant of the duality of human nature, he replied: Go number two in body and in soul every day. Once he chanced to be among a circle of rubberneckers watching a Calabrian fruit-seller methodically thrashing his concubine, and the philosopher inquired into whether it was meet to punish a woman. His conclusion: In general, no; in particular, yes. To those too fond of frolicking with Venus, he said: Thou shalt sleep with women, but dream of goddesses. His optimism about the human species is manifest in a maxim worthy of Terence: I love children because they are not yet men, and the elderly because they no longer are so. Unfortunately, save for a few fragments collected by Asinus Paleologos33 in his Latin edition, nothing remains of his treatises. Rumour has it that his landlady (a certain Doña Francisca, a hairy-chested woman sometimes compared to Socrates’s wife, Xanthippe) sold off his books to collect a paltry debt and even hawked his manuscripts as used paper at three cents a kilo — a literary catastrophe, according to some admirers, equalled only by the tragic fire that destroyed the library of Alexandria.
BOOK TWO
Chapter 1
Her broomstick tapping rhythmically, Old Lady Chacharola made her way down Hidalgo Street toward Monte Egmont, slowly, all right, but erect and straight as a spindle. Her mouth cruelly clenched, eyes stony, brow stormy, the whole of her exuded bile and vinegar as she shuffled along the sunlit sidewalk in her faded, floppy shoes. In her Sicilian heart, as in a chemist’s retort, hatred simmered on the slow fire of memory, the memory of a daughter whose name she never uttered if not to curse it countless times — as countless as the drops of milk she’d fed her, she thought, then struck her wizened breasts, self-castigation for the sin of suckling a serpent. It wasn’t so much her daughter’s life in the milongas, her insults and wickedness and gossiping. No, what she could never forgive — here she kissed her thumb-crossed-over-index-finger, shrivelled crucifix — was that she’d run off with that young punk of a bandoneón player. On top of it all, they’d made off with four linen sheets she’d brought over from Italy, her chunky wedding ring, plus the fifteen pesos she’d kept in a wool stocking in the trunk. At the memory of the sheets, Old Lady Chacharola stopped and ground her teeth, a sour belch rising to her mouth. Then she moved on, a walking vessel of rage, acrimony mounted on two aimless legs.
The sparring match with Samuel Tesler behind him, Adam Buenosayres bounded down the stairs three at a time to Monte Egmont Street. Hard to describe the exultation propelling him: a hundred different thoughts buzzed in his mind, now interlocking in fatal oppositions, now harmonizing in jubilant syntheses, according to the various interpretions he placed upon the message that Solveig Amundsen had so imprudently confided to the philosopher, who in turn had so slyly kept it under his hat. Despite doubts and his fear of disappointment, a vision of Solveig persisted, undeniably real. In it she was calling him from afar, unfurling a new horizon of hope, exciting the mad loom of his imagination: “Within the hour, he’d be at her house, his hand on the bronze knocker, and Solveig Amundsen would rush to the door (not so much in response to the strike of metal, as borne on the wings of a vague presentiment), wearing the clear robes of adolescence Adam had seen at the first revelation in Saavedra. They would stand face to face like two universes that had drifted apart and come back together. Without a doubt, they would gaze at each other in a long silence more eloquent than any language — he, in pain (without letting it show too much!), apparently in utter sadness and reserve; she, trembling like a leaf, whether in ripe contrition or perhaps in newly awakened fervour, he would not be able to say. In his wan face, his broken body, his forsaken soul, she would read all the pain of a love denied access to any bridge, and the floodgates of her tears would open irresistibly, making her shudder from head to toe. Then, in a voice breaking with tenderness, he would say…” But just what the hell would he say? Adam Buenosayres tried to quash his absurd daydream, even though his pain and rancour were genuine. “Maybe he should emulate Grampa Sebastián’s heroic simplicity, throw himself at Solveig’s feet, offer her the Blue-Bound Notebook with a bloodied hand that had long been stanching a mortal wound…”