Gaucho Demon is a glabrezu-type demon who appears in the fourth phase of the Caldero cycle as a gaucho-looking guide to La Jabalina through the fractured semi-worlds.
| Cycle | Caldero, fourth phase |
| Spanish entry | Gaucho Demonio |
Description
The chronicle fixes him as un gaucho demonio borgeano (“a Borgesian gaucho demon”), of the glabrezu stock the Abyss breeds in its old taxonomy. No name, pact or price is recorded; only his office as guide (baquiano) of the broken worlds.
Role
When Arafel returns with the Sword of Kas, the Gaucho Demon takes the lead, guiding La Jabalina through semi-worlds half made or half unmade. Under his guidance:
- Scylla is turned irreversibly to wet ash;
- the company falls into an extradimensional prison, the dark echo of Ushuaia in 1946;
- Vecnina is executed;
- the company allies with the stone Patagonian goliaths;
- it lets itself be swallowed by a Leviathan, since the only exit was through its death.
The chronicle says the phase destroyed them as a group and rebuilt them as something else.
The epithet
In this stretch of the cycle history and fiction collide, with an aged, nearly blind Borges among the rubble of the semi-worlds. The guide seems to come out of that same library; the Librarian crosses thresholds in more than one cycle, and the Gaucho Demon is perhaps the shadow those pages cast on the Abyss.