Winter had caught up you with in Amsterdam: days and nights came and faded away under skies of slate or coal. Your solitude had become a perfect thing, among men and women who were closed off from you like so many other worlds. And you fell back into yourself, until you became a creature of strange ways who during a whole winter burned his bridges and hunkered down in the redoubt of a Flemish room. Your pattern of sleeping and waking followed no order at all, only the rhythm imposed by those painful readings: they were books of forgotten sciences, hermetic and tempting as forbidden gardens. They had already revealed the notion of a universe whose limits expanded vertiginously in a succession of worlds organized like the turns of an infinite spiral. But your reason stumbled in that grove of symbols that hadn’t been designed for her; and your being diminished in a progressive annihilation, as the notion of a gigantic macrocosm dilated before your eyes. True, a route of liberation was offered you, a means of abandoning the circle of forms; but the ways were so dark and the intineraries so indecipherable that your reason fell faint over the books. At times an unexpected insight flashed up in the vortex of your mind, and it was the delicious pleasure of those intuitions which sustained and encouraged you along the harsh road of your reading. Other times, your eyes fell in defeat before letters hopping about like little demons. Then, deserting your room, you went out to wander the frigid wharves, past the barges dozing in the canals under a sky of slate or coal. You returned to your room at nightfall, only to fall into the same fever, which was later prolonged in sleep in the guise of disturbing dreams: you dreamed that an infinite chain of deaths and births led your steps through worlds where your being took on a thousand absurd forms. Or you found yourself in the Alchemical City, crossing the thresholds of the twenty doors of error and milling about its inaccessible ramparts, without finding the single door that leads to the secret of Gold. Thus were your body and soul consumed in that abstract universe. You were walking one evening through the gardens of Wundel, when the cries of pleasure from passers-by caught your attention: men, women, and children were shouting and pointing skyward where thousands of swallows, north-bound on their return journey, were condensing into a dense cloud of ink up above; thousands of aching wings, little hearts beating, tail feathers polished by many gales, and tiny eyes still reflecting the sun of other latitudes, pressed together at the zenith, hesitating before the decision to plummet earthward. The throng of people, under the influence of the sign of spring, let the ice within them melt, knocked down their walls, rebuilt the broken bridges of language and smiles. Abruptly, something like the neck of a whirlwind stretched down from the cloud, and a column of swallows descended slowly into the bare trees, clothing them in wings and whispers. You did not return to your torture chamber. The next day found you in Leyden, in fields teeming with red, white, and yellow tulips.
At last you are on the island of Madeira, an ancient cone of mountain rising above the waves. You’re on your way back down and have stopped halfway for a rest. Sitting in the shade of a laurel tree, you chew on an enormous loquat that bleeds rivulets of juice. All around you, flowers and fruit display an Eden-like enthusiasm. Green lizards are toasting on the hot rock. The sun beats down on both the island and the sea encircling it in a double embrace of surf. Then you contemplate your boat anchored in the roadstead; around it swarm the canoes of islanders, who dive into the sea after tossed coins. You’ve been reading in Plato’s Critias about the loves of Poseidon and the glory of Atlantis, the submerged continent — perhaps you are now perched on one of its remaining islets. You recall again that phrase: “From the central island they quarried the stone they needed; one kind was white, another black, and a third red.” And when finally you go down to the jetty, you notice that the lumps of rock on the surf-washed shoreline are black, red, and white.16
Home again, you enacted once again the confrontation of two worlds. You came back to your country with a painful exultation, a passionate urge for action, and a desire to make the free strings of your world vibrate in the ambitious style you’d seen overseas. But your message of greatness left your world cold; and in that coldness you did not read, certainly, any lack of vocation for grandeur, but only that the hour had not yet arrived. Then night truly fell upon you.
Adam Buenosayres refills his pipe. It’s raining hard again outside his window. He wants to cling yet to the images he has warmed up and relived in memory. But the images flee, disappear in the distance, return to their murky cemeteries. The past is now a dry branch, the present announces nothing to him, and the future is colourless before his eyes. Adam remains empty before a deserted window.
“Which was leading him to so sorry a pass…”
Chapter 2
— You, Mother! Are you aware of the responsibility you bear for your Son, who is soon to enter the stormy fray of life, with no other spiritual or moral arms than the ones forged in the home? Home, I said. Sacred word! Mother, have you reflected upon the dangers lying in wait for your child if he’s left exposed to the temptations of the street, which looks to be the case?
The Principal waits for an answer, his little eyes radiating severity and reproach. His voice is mellifluous, even though his earthen complexion, his sharply defined features, his rustic torso, and a viscous melancholy oozing from him like resin from a tree all reveal him to be an authentic son of Saturn. He wears — and swears by — a greenish-skyblue-grey suit, with spongy tones and rare glints of indigo, astonishing colours which, according to the scholar Di Fiore, could be produced only in the workshop of the great outdoors, or in one governed by the most niggardly economy. Nonetheless, his outfit is brightened by three vehement notes: a shirt the colour of magpie vomit (Adam Buenosayres’s definition), a frenetically green bow tie, and boots of hallucinatory yellow.
— Answer, Mother! insists the Principal, getting pedagogically vexed.
But the woman takes refuge in a seamless, humble, vegetable silence. She stands with her arms curved round her belly and her eyes in thrall to those magic, hypnotic boots. To be sure, her mind floats intact on the surface of the Principal’s speech, which she doesn’t understand and never will.
— She won’t cry, whispers Quiroga, the teacher from San Luis de la Punta de los Venados.1 He’s standing beside the large window in the Principal’s office with some fellow teachers — Adam Buenosayres, Fats Henríquez, and Di Fiore. Outside the window the sky is grey and pregnant with rain.
Fats Henríquez, embalmer of birds, fixes his cold, Anubis-like gaze on the Mother.
— Hard as a rock, he says at last, turning to look at a dead swallow lying in the palm of his hand.
— She’d be better off crying and getting it over with! Adam Buenosayres mutters between his teeth. The poor thing would spare herself the rest of the damn speech and give Pestalozzi2 his first-degree satisfaction. Second-degree satisfaction is when the kid starts crying because his mother is crying. The third degree is the crowning touch, when Pestalozzi in turn weeps along with mother and son. That’s what he likes to call “a positive reaction”!