The man who always sat at don Alejandro's right was the beetle-browed young man, Fermín Eguren, the chairman's nephew. I am not a believer in the methods of realism, an artificial genre if ever there was one; I prefer to reveal from the very beginning, and once and for all, what I only gradually came to know. But before that, I want to remind the reader of my situation at that time: I was a poor young man from Casilda, the son of farmers; I had made my way to Buenos Aires and suddenly found myself, or so I felt, at the very center of that great city—perhaps, who can say, at the center of the world. A half century has passed, yet I still feel that first sense of dazzled bewilderment—which would by no means be the last. These, then, are the facts; I will relate them very briefly: Don Alejandro Glencoe, the chairman, was a rancher from the eastern province,* the owner of a country estate on the border with Brazil. His father, originally from Aberdeen, had settled in South America in the middle of the last century. He had brought with him some hundred or so books— the only books, I daresay, that don Alejandro had ever read in his life. (I mention these heterogeneous books, which I have held in my own hands, because one of them contained the seed from which my tale springs.) When the elder Glencoe died, he left a daughter and a son; the son would grow up to be our chairman. The daughter, who married a man named Eguren, was Fermin's mother. Don Alejandro ran once for the House of Deputies, but political bosses barred his way to the Uruguayan Congress. This rebuff rankled him, and he resolved to found another Congress—a Congress of enormously grander scope. He recalled having read in one of Carlyle's volcanic pages of the fate of that Anacharsis Cloots, worshiper of the goddess Reason, who stood at the head of thirty-six foreigners and spoke, as the "spokesman for the human race," before an assembly in Paris. Inspired by Cloots' example, don Alejandro conceived the idea of establishing a Congress of the World, which would represent all people of all nations. The headquarters for the organizational meetings was the Confitería del Gas; the opening ceremonies, set for four years thence, would take place at don Alejandro's ranch. He, like so many Uruguayans, was no follower of Artigas,* and he loved Buenos Aires, but he was determined that the Congress should meet in his homeland. Curiously, the original date for that first meeting would be met with almost magical exactness.
At first we received a not inconsiderable honorarium for the meetings we attended, but the zeal that inflamed us all caused Fernández Irala, who was as poor as I was, to renounce his, and we others all followed suit. That gesture turned out to be quite salutary, as it separated the wheat from the chaff; the number of delegates dropped, and only the faithful remained. The only salaried position was that of the secretary, Nora Erfjord, who had no other means of subsistence and whose work was overwhelming.
Keeping tabs on an entity which embraced the entire planet was no trivial occupation. Letters flew back and forth, as did telegrams. Messages of support came in from Peru, Denmark, and Hindustan. A Bolivian gentleman pointed out that his country was totally landlocked, with no access to the sea whatsoever, and suggested that that deplorable condition should be the topic of one of our first debates.
Twirl, a man of lucid intelligence, remarked that the Congress presented a problem of a philosophical nature. Designing a body of men and women which would represent all humanity was akin to fixing the exact number of Platonic archetypes, an enigma that has engaged the perplexity of philosophers for centuries. He suggested, therefore, that (to take but one example) don Alejandro Glencoe might represent ranchers, but also Uruguayans, as well as founding fathers and red-bearded men and men sitting in armchairs. Nora Erfjord was Norwegian. Would she represent secretaries, Norwegians, or simply all beautiful women? Was one engineer sufficient to represent all engineers, even engineers from New Zealand?
It was at that point, I believe, that Fermín interrupted.
"Ferrican represent wops,"* he said with a snort of laughter.
Don Alejandro looked at him sternly.
"Sr. Ferri," don Alejandro said serenely, "represents immigrants, whose labors are even now helping to build the nation."
Fermín Eguren could never stand me. He thought highly of himself on several counts: for being a Uruguayan, for coming of native stock, for having the ability to attract women, for having discovered an expensive tailor, and, though I shall never know why, for being descended from the Basques—a people who, living always on the margins of history, have never done anything but milk cows.
One particularly trivial incident sealed our mutual enmity. After one of our sessions, Eguren suggested that we go off to Calle Junín.* The idea held little interest for me, but I agreed, so as not to expose myself to his railery. Fernández Irala went with us. As we were leaving the house we had been to, we bumped into a big, burly brute of a man. Eguren, who'd no doubt been drinking a little too much, gave him a shove. The other man blocked our way angrily.
"The man that wants to leave here is going to have to get past this knife," he said.
I remember the gleam of the blade in the dimness of the vestibule. Eguren stepped back, terrified. I was scared, too, but my anger got the better of my fear. I put my hand inside my jacket, as though to pull out a knife.
"Let's settle this in the street," I said in a steady voice.
The stranger answered back, his voice changed.
"That's a man to my own heart! I just wanted to test you fellows, friend."
Now he was chuckling.
"You used the word 'friend,' I didn't," I rejoined, and we walked out.
The man with the knife went on into the whorehouse. I was told later that his name was Tapiaor Paredes or something of the sort, and that he was a famous troublemaker. Out on the sidewalk, Irala, who'd been calm up to that point, slapped me on the back.
"At least there was one musketeer among the three of us!" he exclaimed. "Salve, d'Artagnan!"
Fermín Eguren never forgave me for having witnessed him back down.
I feel that it is at this point, and only at this point, that the story befores. The pages that have gone before have recorded only the conditions required by chance or fate in order for the incredible event (perhaps the only event of my entire life) to occur. Don Alejandro Glencoe was always at the center of the web of plans, but we gradually began to feel, not without some astonishment and alarm, that the real chairman was Twirl. This singular individual with his flaming mustache fawned upon Glencoe and even Fermín Eguren, but with such exaggeration that the fawning might be taken for mockery, and therefore not compromise his dignity. Glencoe prided himself upon his vast fortune, and Twirl figured out that all it took to saddle Glencoe with some new project was to suggest that the undertaking might be too costly. At first, I suspect, the Congress had been little more than a vague name; Twirl was constantly proposing ways to expand it, and don Alejandro always went along. It was like being at the center of an ever-widening, endlessly expanding circle that seemed to be moving farther and farther beyond one's reach. Twirl declared, for example, that the Congress could not do without a library of reference books; Nierenstein, who worked in a book-store, began bringing us the atlases of Justus Perthes and sundry encyclopedias, from Pliny's Historia Naturalis and Beauvais' Speculum to the pleasant labyrinths (I reread these pages with the voice of Fernández Irala) of the illustrious French encyclopédistes, of the Britannica, of Pierre Larousse, Brockhaus, Larsen, and Montanery Simón. I recall having reverently caressed the silky volumes of a certain Chinese encyclopedia, the beautiful brushstrokes of its characters seeming more mysterious to me than the spots on a leopard's skin. I will not reveal at this point the fate those silken pages met, a fate I do not lament.