— Savages! she spluttered from dreamland. He was in the prime of youth. Death? It’s too good for those sons of bitches! I’d tie them up and turn them over to the young man’s mother and let her scratch their eyes out with her fingernails, or peel them raw, or burn them with matches, nice and slow…
— Holy smokes! murmured Franky. Who the heck could this woman be talking about?
— I think it’s the mafiosos from Rosario, ventured Pereda.
— An atrocity! said Doña Venus in hushed tones that trailed off until they died in silent depths. Killing them would be letting them off easy.
Her voice had been rising and falling like the tide, and it had ebbed again, so normality was re-established in the vestibule. But the astrologer had been very impressed by the ferocity channelled through the medium of Doña Venus.
— That woman has the soul of an executioner, he recognized. A primitive cruelty. Too bad she isn’t acquainted with Oriental torture techniques!
— Or those of the American Indians, Bernini one-upped him, not giving an inch in questions of folklore.
— Bah! Schultz rejoined.
— Are you familiar with them?
— No, but I can imagine what they’re like. Raw bestiality, right? Limited to the realm of the physical. In the East they torture on the spiritual or moral plane.
Bernini smiled condescendingly.
— Do you know about the camoatí torture?4
— And you, Schultz retorted. Ever heard of the torture of the Enamoured Odalisque?
Franky faced the two contenders:
— How about the Water Drop torture? he suggested mysteriously. Or the Quail Feather torture?
Between the blood-coloured walls, in the mucilaginous light of the vestibule, under the beetle-browed surveillance of the Conductor, before the benevolent eyes of the Gasfitter and the resentful pomposity of the Mature Gentleman, the depictions by the three specialists made their macabre rounds. The pipsqueak Bernini initiated the series: here is his Prisoner being hoisted up to the highest branches of a gigantic quebracho tree and left to hang there, right beside the round wasps’ nests. The Prisoner is stark naked, and the wasps, still calm, are buzzing around his ears and eyes, up his nose, between his lips. The thing is not to budge! Put up with it! The Prisoner tries to stifle all movement, knowing what kind of torment awaits him. But finally he can stand it no longer; he shudders, he convulses. The wasps go into a frenzy, they attack in swarms, sting him everywhere, and cover him with a thousand small, bloody wounds. Then it’s hours of fever and thirst; the Prisoner becomes delirious, laughs or weeps, chants a war cry or stammers a love song. The long night comes to an end. In the morning the vultures circle above a bit of tattered flesh dancing in the breeze at the treetop.
The listeners found Bernini’s description somewhat literary and were quite taken by it. But right away Schultz took his turn to speak. He sketched a more peaceful tableau and immediately won the sympathy of his audience: An Oriental chamber, sumptuous with carpets and incense-burners smoking with aromatic resins. The Prisoner is lying on an ottoman of incalculable worth. Surrounded by opulence, the Prisoner hesitates, doubts, fears. Suddenly the curtain of beads is pulled back, and — wait for it! — in comes the Odalisque, beautiful and agile as an Arabian gazelle. The Odalisque begins her work of seduction, and the Prisoner — ay! — gets caught up in the golden webs she spins. The amorous assaults multiply: the Prisoner believes he is up against one of Mohammed’s houris. Exhausted at last, he would like to sleep. But the Odalisque won’t let him, she extracts from the Prisoner every last drop of his ardour. He passes out, but the Odalisque insists. No response! The Prisoner is asleep. Then two gigantic Ethiopians enter the chamber; they whip the Prisoner with branches of stinging nettle and force him to drink aphrodisiac potions. On and on goes the torment between the Odalisque and the Prisoner, until finally he collapses in a heap among the carpets. The Prisoner dies of love.
Schultz’s story left his listeners in the vestibule incredulous, a condition the astrologer did his best to overcome with a few wise reflections on love and death. He tried, but did not succeed, because Franky Amundsen was burning with desire to add his two cents’ worth to the literary contest. Pondering the matter deeply, Franky hesitated between the Water Drop torture, which the ferocious Culquelubi inflicted on the ex-Knight Templar in Salgari’s The Philtre of the Caliphs, and the Quail Feather torture suffered by Tickner, Sexton Blake’s young assistant, in the terrifying story of The Blue Fear. Finally he decided on the latter: now the Prisoner is trussed up inside the torture chamber; his tormentor, a grinning Chinese, has just removed his shoes and socks (here, the audience began to smile). What does the Chinese torturer do next? He takes a quail feather and starts tickling the soles of the Prisoner’s feet (the audience’s smile widened). The Prisoner is laughing his head off, he weeps with laughter (frank hilarity among the audience), until finally the joke becomes intolerable. His ears are buzzing, his nerves exploding, and his laughter degenerates into howls and sobs. As a result of the torment, the Prisoner goes mad.
If Schultz’s depiction had provoked resistance, Franky’s unleashed a veritable deluge of objections. The pros and cons of laughter as a means of torture were carefully weighed, until Doña Venus, as comatose as ever, stirred atop her stool and emitted a verdict with no right of appeaclass="underline"
— Three bullshit artists, she said. That’s what they are: three bullshit artists.
The severity of the judgment flummoxed the three polemicists. Adam Buenosayres and Luis Pereda started laughing. Meanwhile, something began to stir beneath the rock-hard shell within which hunkered the Galician Conductor:
— Torture! he snorted. If you want torture, go to the police. That’s what they know best: how to torture the folks they arrest, trying to force them to confess. And confess they do, whether they’re guilty or not
— Can you swear to that? Franky asked him in an agressive tone.
— Forget wasps and feathers, continued the Conductor, oblivious to Franky. The interrogations go on day and night; they don’t even let them sleep. They twist their victims’ big toe or (pardon my language) their testicles. They feed them anchovies and smoked herring, to get them thirsty, and then they deny them water.
— Barbarians! Doña Venus squawked peacefully.
But the Gasfitter smiled, beaming all over with benevolence.
— Whaddya want! he said. If they don’t lean on ’em, they won’t cough up the goods!
— What about the albas corpus appeal?5 objected the Conductor, his voice pure poison.
Franky started.
— What appeal? he cried, not believing his ears.
— Albas corpus, said the Conductor. That’s the legal way.
Franky turned to the group with consternation.
— Did I hear right? he wondered.
— It’s true what they say, commented Pereda. Every gallego is born with a copy of the Criminal Code in his hand.
Doña Venus turned her sleeping head from side to side:
— Yes, she said. They’re stupid brutes.
Everyone burst out laughing, and the Galician Conductor glowered menacingly. Fortunately, the pipsqueak Bernini, already famous for his powers of observation, explained that Doña Venus, drifting in and out of lethargy, had merely got her timing wrong, and that obviously her insult had not been for the conscientious natives of Galicia,6 but for the police torturers just alluded to by the Conductor himself; and that, crude though her language may have been, it testified to her incommensurable thirst for justice. That elementary interpretation of the facts restored peace to the vestibule, a peace all sensed had been under threat. The Galician Conductor put aside his remaining aggressiveness, and the rest of the party sighed with relief. Just then, the door handle turned again: yes, the door to the anteroom was opening to release the Taciturn Young Man, now rather wilted. No doubt about it, the den of love was heaving him, vomiting him out. The Taciturn Young Man tarried at the threshold and blinked once or twice, as if dazzled by the bloody light in the vestibule. His hat was pulled down over his eyes, and with an unsteady hand he was trying to straighten his dishevelled clothes.