— Listen! he exclaimed, ecstatic. Up there, way up high! What do you hear?
Six noses turned upward, tracing a forty-five-degree arc in the shadow, and twelve ears listened attentively.
— Nothing! Bernini said after a few moments. You can’t hear a thing.
— Poor earthly ears! Samuel mumbled testily. You need more than ears to hear the Battle of the Angels.
Although not entirely unexpected, the philosopher’s obscure revelation nonetheless provoked irresistible curiosity in some, skepticism among others, and shock in most of them. Franky Amundsen worried out loud that he must be going deaf, since a while ago the voice of the River Plate had escaped him and now the angels’ fisticuffs were eluding his auditory sense. Luis Pereda confessed his interest in the dubious skirmish on high because, if true, it would confirm the existence of angelic taitas gathered in a celestial ’hood. Del Solar, for his part, expressed his displeasure in tough-talking criollista mode, formally threatening that he was “outtahere” if the others didn’t quit goofing around. But Schultz and Adam clamoured to hear more on the subject; Samuel, thus encouraged, demanded silence and got it. He raised his arm to point at the lights of the city, still visible on the horizon.
— There lies Buenos Aires, he told the group. Two million souls…
— Two and half million, Bernini the statistician corrected him.
— I’m talking in round numbers, grunted Samuel. Two million souls caught up, most of them unawares, in a terrible supernatural fight. Two million souls in battle. They fall down here, get up again there, succumb or triumph, oscillating between the two metaphyical poles of the universe.
— Obscure, said Franky.
— Very obscure, Bernini concurred.
But the astrologer Schultz and the poet Adam understood.
— I was talking about a fight here on earth, Samuel continued, an invisible and silent fight. It’s not only men who engage in this metaphysical combat. The true battle is decided above, in the sky over the city: the battle between the angels and the demons who contend for the souls of porteños. Listen! It’s right here, in this suburban wasteland!
— Unforeskinned knave! Franky chipped in. Didn’t we agree that it’s only the fat-assed angels who live around here?
— What fat-assed angels? asked Samuel, disconcerted.
— Schultz’s angels, the ones that are supposed to hatch new neighbourhoods in the Buenos Aires of the future. Hey, just imagine the butts on those broody little angels!
A squall of hilarity shook the group of adventurers. Even Tesler, forgetting his solemnity, let go a guffaw that echoed deep in the night. But the astrologer Schultz, affable as always, explained that his incubator angels could easily exist alongside Samuel’s martial angels, since both types were under the sign of action, the only difference being that his, Schultz’s, were more faithful to the creative aspect of that entity qualified as angelic, according to the Oriental doctrine he professed. And as for the culeiform observation of our friend Franky, he continued, it betrayed the grossest kind of anthropomorphism; only an uncultivated mind, like our friend Franky’s, could attribute human form to an angel. Shamed to the marrow of his bones, Franky asked what form Schultz assigned to his hatching angels. Schultz replied that he’d conceived them in the form of an upright cone whose radius was equal to its height, a design that ensured a base adequate to incubation purposes. But, he added with some reserve, he’d already surpassed his own theory and was currently working out another one, truer and less conventional. When Franky humbly beseeched him for some hint as to his new theory, the astrologer flatly refused, wrapping himself in a silence no one dared disturb.
But there was one among those men who could no longer contain his irritation. Luis Pereda, furiously pacing back and forth in the dark, thundered that he’d had it up to here with angels. The nation’s literature had been suffering an epidemic of angels, he averred, and all this angelic blather was getting to be a royal pain in the arse, etcetera, etcetera. Samuel Tesler responded, threateningly, by asking if the literature of the suburbs that he and his sectarians were promoting wasn’t even more pestilential. Pereda retorted that criollo literature was grounded in Buenos Aires reality, whereas all that angelic junk was like second-hand costume jewellery. Samuel Tesler then called him a blind agnostic and accused him of denying the existence of pure intelligence, because what was truly non-existent was the universe of taitas and compadritos he’d been glorifying with an enthusiasm worthy of a better cause. At this blasphemy, Pereda staggered in the night as if knifed in the back; it was all he could do to stammer that he’d soon show Tesler a couple of nenes who’d knock his socks off.
At the same time, Adam Buenosayres, overwhelmed by anguish, was confiding an intimate secret to the discretion of his brother Franky: yes, the world of angels did exist, and he personally had been struggling with an angel for three months now. It wasn’t a body-to-body combat, naturally, but something like the thrashing of a fish that’s taken the hook and fights the pull of the fisherman. Attentive and respectful, Franky listened to his brother Adam, then embraced him tenderly and implored him to take it easy, assuring him that the fresh night air would soon smarten him up, incredibly sloshed though he was. But far from soothing Adam, Franky’s words only provoked another fit of tears of such emotive depth that Franky, in spite of himself, had to wipe moisture from his ocular conjunctivas.
Meanwhile, the dialectical combat between Samuel and Pereda was heating up — voices were growing shrill, the pipsqueak Bernini was itching to get into it, and Schultz was trying to put some kind of order into their ideas — when suddenly, a frightful shout came out of the dead of night, from not far off. They all went still. What voice could that be? Who was crying out in the night? But Franky quickly recovered his wits.
— It’s Del Solar! he exclaimed. Something’s happened to him.
He ran ahead of the others in the direction of the shout. After twenty paces, he saw a dark figure get up off the ground, vigorously cursing and swearing.
— What’s up? asked Franky, recognizing their guide.
— I tripped over something, said Del Solar. Don’t come near yet.
— What the hell is it? One of those conical angels?
— An angel it ain’t, Del Solar grumbled. Its smell is enough to turn your guts.
Sure enough, as the expeditionaries approached, they detected a suspect fetor in the air.
— It’s a dead body! Bernini finally exclaimed.
Before long they had gathered round the dark form outstretched on the ground. The stench had become unbearable, and they all held their breath, except for the astrologer Schultz, who was inhaling the pestilential air with relish, declaring with ascetic piety that the odour was a great tonic for the soul. Wild conjectures flew as the group tried to identify the shape. But Samuel Tesler, in the nick of time, activated his famous lighter and, by its dim light, the mystery was cleared up: the dark mass that had tripped Del Solar was a dead horse.
The animal appeared phantasmagorical in the quavering light. It was a pampa-brown horse, ugly as can be, with a big head and ungainly feet, its bone structure visible beneath its dirty, mangy hide. Both its eyes were wide open to the night (the left eye had been pecked at by some night buzzard). Its drooping lower lip revealed worn and stained teeth, and from those teeth Adam, almost in tears, plucked a blade of grass the horse would never finish chewing.9 The soil where it lay had been churned up, and Schultz surmised the poor beast must have struggled to stand up when in its death-throes. But he took a keen interest in the little pile of manure deposited beneath the horse’s tail, which elicited from the astrologer a few profound reflexions on the ars cacandi10 and its relation to death.