— Ha! laughed the Glyptodon. Just look into my right eye!
One by one, the seven men looked through the ghost’s eye. They saw an extensive landscape, sad and sterile, mountain ranges being eaten away by a ferocious wind that gnawed away bits of matter and set it a-whirl in eddies. Clouds of sand obscured the sun or settled slowly like ash from a volcanic eruption. In the midst of the great simoom, large animals, armour-plated and armed to the teeth, lumbered heavily across the plain, claws and snouts picking at the mineral pampa in search of sustenance.
The prospect was bleak, and the excursionists of Saavedra went mute as statues. But Schultz the astrologer, after thanking the spectre for the valuable lesson in geology, asked if he would be so kind as to answer two or three questions from his friends, noteworthy one and all in the arts and letters. The ghost said yes, so Samuel stepped forward to ask about the origin of the human contingents who would likely come to settle that unpopulated region. The Glyptodon seemed to hesitate, mumbled something about not being allowed to reveal the future, and ended by insinuating that the plain’s ethnographic formation would be quite similar to its geological formation, for the human contingents mentioned by Samuel would also be a re-aggregation of elements in destruction, swept from the eight directions of the Globe all the way to our plains by the terrible and ever restless wind of History.
The philosopher of Villa Crespo was more than satisfied with the Glyptodon’s mysterious prophecy. And the creature’s goodwill might have reached the sublime, if Franky Amundsen — skeptical worm in the bright red apple of the ideal — hadn’t piped up, asking point-blank if its peludo-like structure didn’t have something to do, symbolically at least, with a famous political leader who at the time was both the darling of the masses and the delight of the Muses.22 His millenarian honour offended, the Glyptodon replied he was not about to listen to stupidities, or sign autographs, or give any interviews, or get embroiled in petty politicking; whereupon he threatened quite seriously to pack up and go home to his phantasmal realms. But the High Priest Bernini devoutly implored him to leave some message for future generations before departing. The Glyptodon nodded, lifted his tail to let fly three large spheres of fossilized manure, then disappeared into the blackness whence he had come. Fortunately, that message has not been lost to posterity. One of those spheres can be found today in the National Museum of Natural Science,23 erroneously classified as aerolite. Another, in the Museum of History, is displayed as a mortar shell left over from the War of Paraguay.24 The third is the terrestrial globe held aloft by two cyclopean figures of reinforced concrete standing atop the building of daily newspaper El Mundo.25
“The Adventure of the Glyptodon,”26 as it later came to be known, would have been enough to set off anybody’s imagination, and all the more so in those men, well seasoned in the dangerous game of fantasy. No sooner had the monster faded into the night, according to the epic heroes’ subsequent testimony, than a great confusion descended upon their minds and memory, producing a strange blend of reality and appearance, history and legend, the possible and the absurd. Clearly, Franky Amundsen’s metal flask, circulating with a frequency no less generous than alarming, was not completely innocent of the turbulence afflicting their souls, nor of the visions and mirages that followed one after another, culminating in “The Adventure of the Teetery Plank.” But what most inflamed the group’s fantasy were the geological and stratigraphic mysteries still up for discussion: the wildest hypotheses were buzzing like bees. The astrologer Schultz, however, eventually expressed his boredom:
— What do I care about the earth! he exclaimed disdainfully. To me, the important thing is man. After all, the earth is merely a station, a phase — and only one! — in the evolution of Universal Man.
— Fine! thundered Samuel Tesler. But what the heck is Universal Man?
— What, you ask? answered Schultz. Why, it’s MAN, in capital letters.
Franky Amundsen raised his arms toward a sky teeming with stars.
— O wisdom! he cried in exultation. What an unfathomable definition! Eat your heart out, Perogrullo, Master of the Obvious!27
He turned to Del Solar and whispered in his ear:
— Just watch! The Neocriollo can’t be far away.
But Bernini was stepping back into the arena, his Anglo-Saxon side more alert than ever.
— That’s right, he said. Let’s talk about Man. Even there, all honour goes to the Pampa.
— Eh? interrogated Samuel. What honour are you talking about?
— Practically nothing, laughed Bernini. Just this: in the Tertiary era, when the whole world was still mired in the most terrible bestiality, the first humans appeared on our plains.
The peal of laughter that shook the philosopher of Villa Crespo echoed long across the landscape.
— It’s no joke! Berinini protested indignantly. It’s a proven fact, and by an Argentine, to boot!
— By an Argentine, unfortunately, declared Del Solar bitterly. If it had been some Frenchy or Kraut, this gentleman — he pointed at Tesler — would swallow it hook, line, and sinker. But, oh no, even prehistoric man has to be imported from Europe!
— I didn’t say anything! Samuel demurred.
— Nobody said anything about Europe, said Schultz.
— And if not in the pampa, Bernini bellowed, in what other Tertiary era have they discovered traces of homo sapiens?
— None at all, responded Schultz. The pampa’s not the place to look for them. You’ll find them at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
The adventurers’ stupefaction was limitless when they heard this novel idea. But the astrologer hastened to reassure them.
— Have any of you read Plato’s Critias?
— Schultz and his whoring books! groaned Franky. The poor guy’s got bats in his belfry!
Unfortunately, Adam Buenosayres, Luis Pereda, and Samuel Tesler had all read the Critias. And so the inevitable argument broke out, thanks to Schultz, who held that the sunken island of Atlantis was rightfully the true cradle of humanity.28 The legendary Altantians were a red-skinned race, he added. But Samuel Tesler, his voice dripping with irony, wanted to know the basis for such a rash conjecture. Schultz replied as follows: given that man’s creation was a work of divine charity, and red being the colour symbolic of charity, the first humans must necessarily have had red skin. When Samuel Tesler’s only comeback was a nasty, ill-omened little laugh, Bernini jumped, declaring the astrologer’s thesis deficient in scientific rigour. This in turn roused the ire of Adam Buenosayres, who countered that, fortunately, the thesis had plenty of poetic rigour. For Schultz at least, there could be no doubt about it: the descendants of Neptune and Cleito had achieved an amazing civilization in Atlantis and then scattered over the face of the earth, perhaps moved by their Neptunian instinct to sail the seas, or by their need for conquest, or in flight from the barbarous despotism of the last Atlantian kings, whose inquity earned the island the terrible punishment of the watery god. And it was equally evident for the adventurers of Saavedra that Schultz was spouting more balderdash than ever uttered by mortal on this sorry planet. As he went on talking, a zephyr of mockery began to stir amid the group, a breeze that stiffened into a wind when Schultz alleged that the Incan and Aztec civilizations were remote vestiges of another, far more ancient civilization, a colonial reflection of Mother Atlantis, which had once flourished in North America. But when the astrologer dared to maintain that our aboriginal peoples had descended from those northern cultures, or more precisely, that great hordes of them, in flight from servitude or war, had wandered south to the pampas where they descended into barbarism; when Schultz tried to pass that one off and once again make us out to be the backwater of the world; well, then the derisive wind swelled to a full-fledged gale, and the members of the audience expressed themselves by exuberantly heckling, stomping their feet, shouting obscenities, and blowing raspberries; these, courtesy of Franky Amundsen, whose excellence in that difficult art had won him many an admirer. But that beautiful celebration of the spirit didn’t last long; the party was spoiled when the pipsqueak Bernini, who never rested on his laurels, began to show new signs of agitation.