El Astrólogo

The building the Astrologer occupied stood in the middle of a wooded estate.

The house was squat, and its reddish roofs could be made out from far off above the thickness of the wild trees.

Through the gaps left by the swellings of growth, amid the true surf of grasses and creepers, fat black-bottomed insects droned all day long through the endless rain of weeds and stalks.

Not far from the house, the mill wheel turned its three-bladed limp on a prism of rusted iron, and farther off, above the stable, you could make out the blue and red panes of a partition wrecked by rust.

Behind the mill and the house, beyond the walls, the bottle-green saw-edge of a stand of eucalyptus loomed dark, pluming the sea-blue sky with gushes and raised crests.

It seemed to him he was out in the country, far from the city, and the sight of the building cheered him.

Squat though it was, the building had two floors, with a ruined balcony on the second and a peeling set of Greek columns at the entrance, up to which climbed a wrecked flight of steps trimmed with palms.

All around, intricately, the garden rose up, contrived to look like a little wood, and now in the stillness of dusk, under a sun that hung a pearly crystal atmosphere upon the air, the rosebushes poured out their overpowering scent, so piercing that the whole space seemed to fill with an atmosphere red and cool as a flow of water.

But this is not something to say aloud.

And yet, I would live better here than there.

Here I could have a laboratory.

At the foot of an arbor's post a dog was dozing, and when he stopped to call out before the front steps, the Astrologer's gigantic figure appeared in the doorway, draped in a yellow duster with his top hat pulled down over his forehead, shading his broad, diamond-shaped face.

A few locks of curly hair escaped over his temples, and his nose, the septum fractured at its midpoint, was extraordinarily bent off to the left.

So heavy that head must have been!

"Come in."

"I'm going to introduce you to the Melancholy Ruffian."

On the veneer of an old cabinet shoved into a corner, the bluish light broke into livid half-shadows.

Seated in an armchair upholstered in threadbare green velvet was a man dressed in gray, a jet-black wave of hair slanting across his forehead, and he wore light-suede ankle boots.

The Astrologer's yellow duster rippled as he approached the stranger.

And Erdosain looked again at that nearly round face, slack with peace, in which the man of action was betrayed only by a mocking, shifting spark deep in his eyes, and by that habit of raising one eyebrow higher than the other as he listened to whoever was speaking.

Off to one side, between the jacket and the silk shirt the Ruffian wore, Erdosain made out the black butt of a revolver.

Undoubtedly, in life, faces mean very little.

And, halted now, his yellow arm cutting across the blue Caribbean Sea, he exclaimed:

"In Missouri, a hundred thousand members."

"In Little Rock the Invisible Empire claims that all the Protestant pastors are bound to the brotherhood."

"In Texas it dominates absolutely in the cities of Dallas, Fort, Houston, Beaumont."

"In Binghamton, home of Smith, who was Grand Dragon of the Order, seventy-five thousand adepts were counted, and in Oklahoma they had the Chambers decree a "bill" suspending Walton, the governor, for persecuting them, so that practically until recently the state lay under the control of the Klan."

That was what the Astrologer called him, because many years earlier the pimp had tried to kill himself.

That had been a murky affair.

From one day to the next, Haffner, who had for some time been living off prostitutes, fired a shot into his chest, next to the heart.

The contraction of the organ at the precise instant the bullet passed through saved him from death.

Afterward, naturally, he went on with his life, perhaps with a little more prestige for that gesture which none of his comrades in plunder could fathom.

The Astrologer went on:

"And I speak to you frankly."

"I don't know whether our society will be Bolshevik or Fascist."

"At times I lean toward thinking that the best thing one can do is to whip up a Russian salad that not even God could make sense of."

"I believe no more sincerity than this can be asked of me at the moment."

"Understand that for now what I mean to make is a bloc where all the possible human hopes can be consolidated."

"My plan is to address ourselves above all to the young Bolsheviks, students and intelligent proletarians."