“You’re absolutely right, son. It’s difficult and will take time, lots of time, indeed years of patience and toil, but happy are they who reach the Promised Land! Those who fail will be swallowed up by obscurity. But those who triumph? And, believe me, you will triumph. You will see the walls of Jericho fall at the sound of the holy trumpets. Only then will you be able to say that you have arrived. On that day you will have become the indispensable ornament, the obligatory presence, the social fixture. There’ll be no more need to sniff out opportunities, committees, clubs, and societies; they will come to you with the dull, crude air about them of de-adjectivized nouns, and you will be the adjective of their leaden speeches, the fragrant of their flowers, the indigo of their sky, the upstanding of their citizens, the trenchant and meaty of their news reports. And this is the most important thing of all, because the adjective is the very soul of language, its idealistic and metaphysical component. The noun is reality stripped naked and raw; it is the naturalism of vocabulary.”

“And all this, you think, is just a standby in case all else fails?”

“That’s right. It doesn’t preclude any other activity whatsoever.”

“Not even politics?”

“Not even politics. It is simply a matter of abiding by certain basic rules and obligations. You may belong to any party, liberal or conservative, republican or ultramontane, the one caveat being that you must not attach any specific ideas to these words, and only recognize their usefulness as biblical shibboleths.”

“If I go into parliament, can I speak from the rostrum?”

“You can and you must; it is a way of attracting public attention. As for the subject of your speeches, you have a choice between pettifogging minutiae and political ideology, but with a preference for ideology. Minutiae, one must admit, are not inconsistent with the urbane dullness that is the mark of every accomplished bigwig, but, if you can, go for ideology—it’s easier and much more appealing. Suppose you were to inquire into the reasons for transferring the Seventh Company of Infantry from Uruguaiana to Canguçu; you will be heard only by the minister of war, and it will take him all of ten minutes to explain the reasons for his decision. Not so with ideology. A speech on the most arcane aspects of political ideology will, by its very nature, excite the passions of politicians and the public gallery, provoking heated interjections and rebuttals. Moreover, it requires neither thought nor investigation. In this branch of human knowledge everything has already been discovered, worded, labeled, and packaged; you need only rummage around in the saddlebags of memory. But whatever you do, never go beyond the boundaries of enviable triteness.”

“I’ll do what I can. So no imagination, then?”