— If you don’t know anything, why are you butting in? Samuel reprimanded him acridly.
Señor Johansen blushed red to the roots of his hair — which, truth be told, no longer amounted to much. He wanted to remind those present that he was a free man and had a right to his opinion. He cleared his throat two or three times, anxious to vindicate himself on the spot. But Samuel Tesler’s basilisk eyes bore down and seemed to hypnotize him.
— It is nonsense, Lucio Negri confirmed. How can an old woman down on her knees know more than a philospher seated in his study?
— That’s what I say! How? grumbled Señor Johansen, itching to get his own back.
Adam again felt burdened by the futility of the discussion.
— Truth is infinite, he said. It seems to me there are two ways of approaching it. One is the way of the seer; when he realizes the impotence of his own finitude before the infinite, he asks to be assimilated into the infinite through the virtue of the Other and the death of his ego. (“My Blue-Bound Notebook!”) The other is the way of the blind man; he attempts to encompass the infinite within his own finitude, which is mathematically impossible.
Lucio Negri exchanged an eloquent look with Señor Johansen.
— Bah! he scolded. Who, nowadays, can swallow that cocktail of finites and infinites?
— Truth is difficult, replied Adam with reluctance.
— Apparently not that difficult, objected Lucio. A truth that generously lodges itself in the empty skull of an old woman, just because she happens to be gawking at a wooden image!
Señor Johansen, a man whose rights had been abused, now felt a wave of hilarity taking over.
— A gawking old woman, he squealed with laughter. Hee-hee-hee!
Lucio Negri was looking over at the girls, anxious to see whether his victory had been registered in that quarter.
— A gawking old woman! Oh, oh! Señor Johansen was enjoying his vindication.
Samuel Tesler studied him with analytical curiosity.
— Aristotle says that laughter is proper to the human animal, he said. You laugh; therefore, you must be a man. Good thing you’re laughing; otherwise, we might never have known.
— What do you mean by that? bristled Señor Johansen.
The philosopher looked sadly at his buddy Adam Buenosayres.
— It’s hopeless, he sighed. This gentleman is a pachyderm. The thorn of irony cannot penetrate his leathery hide.
But Lucio Negri, comforted by another smile from Solveig Amundsen, charged impetuously back into the fray.
— You fellows may talk about mystical knowledge, visions, illuminations, he admitted in perfectly good faith. But as science shows us, all that sort of thing is in the domain of nervous pathology, or maybe internal secretions.
The end of Lucio’s sentence was celebrated by Samuel Tesler’s vibrant, unstoppable, staggering guffaws. Señor Johansen was petrified. Lucio Negri turned white, as the twenty-six eyes of the tertulia were trained upon him. Even Mister Chisholm, up on the stepladder, brush in hand, paused for a moment to frown.
— Laughter isn’t an argument! protested Lucio Negri. Nowadays, only a retrograde mind can deny the mystery of internal secretions.3
As though in a state of rapture, the philosopher threw himself at Lucio’s feet.
— Internal secretion! he prayed on bended knee. Ora pro nobis!
Flummoxed by the antics of that fearsome clown, Lucio Negri looked around the room. In one corner, the Señoras Amundsen, Ruiz, and Johansen looked perplexed. Giggles and muffled whispers bubbled up from the sky-blue divan. More adorable than ever, Solveig Amundsen gazed back at him with saddened eyes. In view of which, Lucio Negri decided to take it all as a joke; he took hold of the kneeling philosopher under the arms and hoisted him to his feet.
— Laugh if you want, he said. But believe me, one small variation in the pituitary gland of Jesus of Nazareth, and the course of world history would have been completely different.
Not believing his ears, the philosopher of Villa Crespo stared at him in astonishment. Then, with his gaze, he solicited the testimony of Adam Buenosayres. Finally, he let his head fall on the chest of Señor Johansen, where he laughed long and silently; he actually laughed against the shirt of Señor Johansen, who couldn’t believe what was happening. At length, abandoning Señor Johansen’s unwelcoming chest, he pierced Lucio Negri with irascible eyes.
— Modern science seems to run according to a diabolical plan, he complained. First, science accosts Homo Sapiens and says to him: “Look here, old boy, that business about Jehovah creating you in his image and likeness is a lie. Who is Jehovah? The bogeyman! The priests in the Middle Ages invented him to scare you and make sure you don’t hang around in dance halls. As for the immortality of your soul, it’s a lot of baloney. You blockhead, how do you expect to have a soul?”
— The soul! interrupted Lucio. Pll-ease! I’ve looked for it with a scalpel, in the dissection lab.
— And did you find it?
— Don’t make me laugh!
— No wonder, explained Samuel Tesler. The soul isn’t a tumour in the liver.
He continued:
— Once Homo Sapiens was disabused of the illusion of his divine origin, modern science had to invent a substitute. “Listen, old man, you’ve got to realize you’re an animal. An evolved animal, I’ll admit, but an animal from head to foot. Your real Adam is the first gorilla who, by dint of Swedish calisthenics, learned how to walk on two feet and turned up his nose at raw bananas. That happened back in the pre-glacial era, about a thousand centuries before you invented the flush toilet.”
— Clown! muttered Lucio between clenched teeth.
— Shhh! protested Señor Johansen, casting an uneasy glance over at the girls on the divan.
The philosopher looked at them with scientific compassion.
— Now then, he asked, as if introducing a corollary. What did Homo Sapiens do, as soon as science revealed his true origin?
Lucio Negri and Señor Johansen were silent.
— You can’t guess? insisted the philosopher. Well, Homo Sapiens, thinking about his ancestor the gorilla, listened to the voice of his instinct and started playing with himself.
— Shhh! protested Señor Johansen again. The young ladies!
— In spite of it all, added Samuel, lots of strange things persisted in Homo Sapiens: mystical enlightenment, the gift of prophecy, a whole set of free acts that escaped surgical operations in the clinic. Then science came up with a stroke of genius: they replaced the enigma of the Trinity with the enigma of the thyroid gland.
At this point Lucio Negri lost his patience.
— Now, just a minute! he shouted at Samuel, adjusting his spectacles on his polemical nose. But he didn’t have a chance to continue, for Samuel Tesler had fallen back in his easy chair and was laughing a meditative laugh, or laughingly meditating, shaking from side to side a brow as vast as a landscape.
— My beloved tormenter is laughing, chimed Haydée Amundsen, uniting the sunshine of her curls with the black night of those of Marta Ruiz. With a birdlike movement, the girls turned their faces in unison toward the metaphysical corner.
— An ugly Jew, pronounced Marta Ruiz, still studying the philosopher’s amazing physiognomy.
Haydée Amundsen let out a fine trickle of mirth, a mere thread of sound passing between sugared lips.
— He doesn’t think so! she exclaimed. You may find this hard to believe, but my beloved heartache sees himself as a mix of Rudoph Valentino, Santos Vega,4 and King Solomon, the one with the two hundred wives.
— Him? chirped Marta Ruiz, torn between disbelief, astonishment, and hilarity.