— His nuptial suit, murmured Schultz in a desolate tone.
But the Young Man’s bedazzlement lasted only a moment. Without further delay, like the Anonymous Lover shortly before him, he bolted for the main door held open by Doña Venus and took off for the street, mistrustful and urgent.
— He’s fleeing, Schultz said to his companion Adam Buenosayres.
He was indeed going back into the same night whence he had arrived astride his magic broom. His was a return from a witches’ sabbath, skulking and precipitate, before the cock’s trumpet announced the day.
— An erotic collapse, groaned Adam (and he had told Irma her eyes were like two mornings together…).
The chain-lock once again in place, Doña Venus was standing (if such may be said of a sphere) and looking around among the men for someone to replace the ghost who’d just exited through the hallway. Her doubtful eyes fluctuated between the Italian Gasfitter and the Galician Conductor, as though studiously feeling out the maturity of each. She still hadn’t come to a decision when the anteroom door half-opened and Jova’s head appeared, smiling urbi et orbi.
— Boys! clucked the most naked among the bedizened.
Even the Mature Gentleman set eyes on that unexpected puppet’s head. Then Jova, responding to all gazes and none, stuck a mocking tongue out at everyone and no one (a sort of red mollusc between the two valves of her lips), and disappeared instantly, closing the solemn door behind her.
— What a girl is Jova! grumbled Doña Venus between sighs.
When she turned back to the men in the vestibule, her choice had been made. With a slight gesture she got the Galician Conductor to his feet and, with another motion, she pointed him toward the door of the anteroom. The Conductor, more distracted than ever, entered the lair in turn, taking with him the secret of his impenetrable soul. Afterward, Doña Venus walked across the vestibule to the patio and looked out at the sky.
— It’s clouding over, she said. Lousy weather.
She rotated heavily, like a sphere on its polar axis. She saw the Mature Gentleman getting to his feet and she watched as he methodically smoothed out the wrinkles in his suit, folded with great care the pages of his newspaper, tucked it under his arm, and drew back the chain on the door.
— Are you leaving? Doña Venus asked in a honeyed voice.
— It’s getting late, responded the Mature Gentleman.
He opened the main door familiarly, slipped into the hallway, and closed the door behind him. Doña Venus hadn’t taken her eyes off him. All graciousness, she explained:
— An old franelero, the peep-and-go-home type.
Lulu the lapdog growled as though voicing disapproval of the franelero’s desertion. Doña Venus, with difficulty, crouched down and stroked Lulu’s pink belly. Then she got settled again on her stool and, before closing her eyes, murmured:
— A bloody old franelero.
With that laconic epitaph, the story of the Mature Gentleman came to a close. The characters still waiting in the vestibule became aware of their increasing solitude. Indeed, of the brilliant conversationalists gathered round the stool, only the Gasfitter was still there, or at least half there, since for a while now his face had been expressing absence. Moreover, as soon as the woman and her dog closed their eyes, a disturbing silence descended upon the vestibule, broken only by the occasional neighbourhood rooster or the odd earlybird streetcar careening down Canning Street. A silence pregnant with sounds which, though still proper to the realm of night, announced dawn’s imminence: sounds that acquire a recriminatory accent in the ears of those who have abused the night. The new circumstances helped improve the tone among the men remaining there under the bloody light. And Samuel Tesler had the honour of steering the conversation in a nobler, altruistic direction. The philosopher was emerging from his abundantly fluvial drunkenness, not yet with a specific thought in mind, but moved rather by a kind of vague desperation that found an outlet in eloquent gesticulations and ominous groans.
— Where is it all going to end? he burst out at last, a single gesture of his hand taking in the vestibule, the building, perhaps the world.
A macabre chortle escaped his lips.
— Human dignity! he lamented. How nauseating!
— There are two forms of prostitution, Bernini intervened. Legal and clandestine. Here we have…
— Go to the Devil! cried Samuel Tesler. They’re just two scientific names for the same ignominy!
Schultz leaned over to a Buenosayres lost in thought.
— The Jew is showing his true colours, he whispered. Now we’re in for some moral whining.7
— Mea culpa, groaned a laconic Buenosayres.
But Bernini was warming to his theme.
— It may be ignominious, he said, but it’s a necessary ignominy. I’d like to know what would become of us without this ignominy!
The talking head of Doña Venus spun around to face the conversationalists.
— That’s mother of all questions, she croaked mechanically.
— Hmm, Adam observed. Is there such a thing as a necessary ignominy?
The pipsqueak Bernini stared at him in amazement. Then, in a truly overwhelming display of statistics, he spoke of the phalanx of foreign men who had brought with them not only their useful labour, but also their dangerous soledad, their solitude, and their soltería, their bachelorhood (and here Bernini underlined the common etymology of the Spanish words soledad and soltería).8 He painted the bleakest view of the dangers facing society due to that mob of single expatriate men. As the peroration of the impassioned sociologist unfolded, the abominable spectres of adultery, rape, and child molestation went filing by in martial order. But then he evoked those “safety valves” that certain retrograde minds had just now dismissed as ignominious; he sang the praises of those humble institutions, such as the very one in which they now found themselves, which anonymously fulfilled a mission as indispensable as it was secret. Instantly, the abominable figures of adultery, rape, and child molestation fled with their tails between their legs, and society under siege could breathe easy again.
One might have expected thunderous applause to greet the discourse of the sociologist Bernini. But it did not turn out that way. Adam Buenosayres condemned it from beginning to end. Samuel, the philosopher, unexpectedly relapsed into Dionysian mode and celebrated the end of the speech with a gush of laughter that elicited loud imitations in the vestibule. However, the talking head hadn’t yet given her verdict:
— That dwarf does have the gift of the gab, Doña Venus pronounced mellifluously. Given half a chance, he’d talk his way past the hangman.