Chapter 3
He caught up with him only a hundred yards up the street, for the philosopher, after tearing full speed across the dangerously exposed intersection at Camargo Street, had finally stopped and was waiting in the deep shadows that the trees, under the glare of the lights, cast upon the sidewalk. Adam Buenosayres, in flight as well, found Samuel sitting on a doorstep, his gnomish legs ridiculously shrunken and his cyclopean thorax heaving and wheezing audibly.
— So? asked Samuel, as soon as he saw Adam arrive.
Adam Buenosayres, still panting, went to the curb, peered into the secret depths of the street, pricked up his ears, and listened for a long moment. Canning Street was still completely deserted; along its whole length, not the slightest sound disturbed the silence of the night.
— Nobody, he answered. Not a soul.
— What about the others? Samuel asked again.
— They disappeared.
At this unpleasant news, the philosopher began to declaim in a stentorian voice:
What’s become of my comrades
from the Cerrito and Ayacucho?1
But Adam, shaking him by the shoulders, cut off his recitation of Bartolomé Mitre’s famous poem:
— Don’t raise a ruckus in the neighbourhood! he said. We’re going back to Monte Egmont Street.
— Hmm! Samuel grunted skeptically. I wonder what time it is.
— Four in the morning.
The philosopher tried to get up. After considerable tribulation, he at last got to his feet, took two or three uncertain steps, wobbled dangerously, and grabbed hold of an iron railing to keep from falling.
— What’s the matter now? Adam asked in incipient alarm.
Samuel chortled indulgently:
— The street’s spinning. It’s drunk, the poor thing!
— You’re drunk as a skunk, Adam upbraided him, not hiding his displeasure.
— Who? shot back Tesler, as though mortally offended. Me, drunk?
He wrenched himself free of Adam Buenosayres, who was trying to hold him up. Haughtily straightening up his torso, he said:
— Look at me now!
He began to walk rigidly, tripped again, ran into a tree and embraced its trunk, laughing like a lunatic. But then a terrible nausea shook him from head to foot, and the laughter froze on his lips.
— Listen up! he said. I’m going to launch a manifesto.
Adam ran to help and held his forehead covered in a cold sweat. Evidently, the philosopher’s wild dance in the vestibule, immediately followed by his mad dash, had agitated the spirits so liberally imbibed that night, which were now roiling chaotically inside him. Seeing how things stood, Adam mentally calculated how far he would have to drag that Silenus: two and a half blocks to Warnes Street; three long blocks from Warnes to Monte Egmont; and one more block to number 303. Not counting the stairway, which promised to be quite a challenge. Meanwhile, Samuel, for all his anguished heaves and sweats, couldn’t chuck it up.
— It’s no use, he admitted at last, straightening up and wiping his sticky forehead with a handkerchief. I’d need the ivory finger of the Romans.
Seeing that he was coming around, Adam took him by the waist, and together they set off at a stumbling sort of gait, a compendium, Adam reflected, of all the local movements described by Aristotle. Breathing with relish the night air whose freshness hinted at the coming dawn, the philosopher was obviously recovering the natural harmony of his physical constitution.
His soul, on the other hand, was growing perturbed and showing signs of a stormy contrition. Sighing deeply and heavily, Samuel Tesler cursed the hour when his own weakness and the influence of disastrous friendships had led him to such extreme craziness. In a single glance, he took in his present indignity and, putting his head on Adam Buenosayres’s shoulder, he wept a long while for his misspent youth. He turned finally to the silent friend standing by him in his grief and, breathing an effluvium of alchohol and stomach acids into his face, treated him to an incoherent monologue that ended in a somewhat laboured justification of his sin. After all, if one considered the matter dispassionately and from a philosophical point of view (and his friend Buenosayres, to whose indisputable equanimity he was appealing, was an expert judge in such intellectual niceties), what did his nocturnal drunkenness and his final sarabande mean? What else, he asked, if not a Dionysian move of liberation, demanded of him by his oppressed soul? Moreover, his race was very familiar with those exalted states of liberty, for the theme of bondage and escape resonated all too strongly in their history.
— And, he asked between two burps, isn’t my race a symbol of both terrestrial incarceration and ultimate liberation in life eternal?
In front of Baalzephon, at dawn’s early hour, the hard-hearted King, he of the vulture’s head, wept and grieved beside the Red Sea. By the sea that vomited up his bright and colourful cavalry, by the blood-coloured sea, wept the King. All those bronze chariots, all those upright horsemen, all those good horses with flashing skin and fiery nostrils! As one launches a stone from a catapult, he had thrown them after the fleeing slaves, like a rabid dart had he thrown them. That is why the King in his purple finery was weeping, the King of avian profile: for he saw the slave traversing the watery abode, and the slave went hand in hand with his God, and it was the terrible God who rolls up and unrolls the sea like a papyrus scroll. And the King had watched as horse and horseman, arms and chariot wheels, all foundered. That is why the King wept, in front of Baalzephon, hard by the blood-coloured sea. And on the other shore the slaves cried out their freedom: I shall sing unto the Lord — said the slaves by the beard of their prophet — I shall sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea. And the prophet sang: The Lord shall reign for ever and ever.2 And the slaves repeated it in jubilation. But the prophet turned his eyes to the desert, and in that terrible solitude he sought for the way to the land of milk and honey.
— A theological race! Samuel proudly proclaimed.
— But terribly fallen, Adam objected.
The philosopher didn’t hear him. He was prevented by the rustic symphony of an early-morning cart with its squeaky wheels, the clop-clop of its little horse, its lamp mounted on the axle, its load of vegetables, its driver asleep at the reins.
— A just man! Samuel began to whimper, pointing at the sleeping man. Unbeknownst to himself, he fulfils the Pythagorean precept, arising before dawn…
— All right, all right, Adam interrupted him. More blubbering?
No, Samuel Tesler was not once more on the verge of tears. Something else was happening to him. Just as he’d recently gone from contrition to tears and from tears to metaphysical consolation, so too was his mutable heart slipping down the slope of a cloying tenderness. It had been prompted by the early-morning cart, which had put him in mind of Boaz,3 the sleeping man (back in the days when his race was bucolic!); by the sweetness of going home on the shores of the new day; and by the silent friend who walked with him, whose ineffable love story he alone knew and appreciated for its true worth. Hence, as both men walked along, Samuel tenderly squeezed the arm of Adam Buenosayres. Under cover of the silence enveloping them both, Samuel recalled the figure of a certain brat who was already good at putting on airs among the willowy women of Saavedra. And he said, in his soul, that only someone as naive as his friend Buenosayres could find in such a feeble creature the raw material of a Laura or a Beatrice. But his mental associations, moving until now in more or less calm neutrality, suddenly lurched toward displeasure and wrath when the image of Lucio Negri came to mind. He saw the quack doctor on the sky-blue divan, whispering into the ear of Solveig Amundsen, who listened to him with the air of an adolescent sphinx. A restrospective indignation pulled him up short: