Adam Buenosayres: A Novel

by Leopoldo Marechal

  Much lyric material is quoted in the novel, including verses from tangos, folk songs, children’s poetry, doggerel, and Marechal’s own poetry. So as not to disrupt the flow, I have placed my translations of this material in the main text and the original versions in the endnotes. Readers of Ulysses will notice that I use the same protocols for dialogue as Joyce does; that is, a dash to mark the point where a given character’s speech begins. This partially replicates the Spanish punctuation observed in Marechal’s text (in Spanish, a second dash normally marks the point where the speech act ends). In fact, as Lafforgue notes, Marechal in his manuscript notebooks often neglected to add the closing dash (“Estudio filológico preliminar” xxiii–xxiv), perhaps unconsciously under the influence of his reading of Ulysses. On the other hand, as Barcia observes (103), Marechal never used the Joycean stream-of-consciousness technique. Indeed, he seems to hesitate when punctuating complex narratorial layering; in Book Two, chapter 1, for example, he vacillates between the dash and quotation marks when handling Adam’s interior monologues, sometimes presenting them as soliloquies (see Lafforgue and Colla’s critical edition). Nevertheless, once in print, the punctuation remains quite stable in all succeeding editions. In this translation, with the exception noted above, I reproduce Marechal’s punctuation of dialogue and interior monologue.

  Marechal often cites classical phrases in Latin. Unless the phrase is very short and its meaning obvious, I usually provide translations in the notes. When we read, for example, that Adam says something to himself ad intra, it is obvious that he is speaking inwardly. Adam’s penchant for using Latin phrases, an anti-modernist gesture, is as odd in Spanish as it is in English. The narrator uses phrases from both classical and medieval Church Latin, often with cheeky jocularity.

  The annotation, intended for both scholars and non-specialist anglophone readers, owes much to Pedro Luis Barcia’s 1994 edition, as well as to the recent critical edition of Javier de Navascués, who was kind enough to exchange manuscript notes with me. References to Barcia’s notes are indicated by page number (e.g., Barcia 100n); likewise to Navascués’s critical edition (e.g., Navascués, AB 227n). Textual material quoted in the notes, if the original is in Spanish prose, is rendered in my English translation, unless otherwise indicated. All errors and omissions, of course, are entirely my responsibility.

  Leopoldo Marechal in 1929. (Courtesy of María de los Ángeles Marechal)

  Sketch of Marechal from mid- to late 1920s. (Artist unknown, often attributed mistakenly to Xul Solar)

  Sketch of Marechal by Aquiles Badi (Paris, 1930). (Courtesy of María de los Ángeles Marechal)

  Argentine artists of the “Grupo de París” around Aristide Maillol’s Monument à Cézanne in the Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, 1930. Standing, left to right: Juan del Prete, Alberto Morera, Horacio Butler, Raquel Forner, Leopoldo Marechal. Sitting, left to right: Maurice Mazo, Alfredo Bigatti, Athanase Apartis. (Courtesy of the Fundación Forner-Bigatti)

  Artists of the “Grupo de París” in Sanary-sur-Mer on the French Riviera, 1930. Left to right: Alberto Morera, Alfredo Bigatti, Aquiles Badi, Leopoldo Marechal, Raquel Forner, Horacio Butler. (Courtesy of the Fundación Forner-Bigatti through the Centro Virtual de Arte Argentino)

  Marechal’s working sketch of Schultz’s “Neocriollo,” the astrologer’s visionary model of Argentina’s future inhabitants. (Courtesy of María de los Ángeles Marechal)

  Sketch by Marechal for the magazine Valoraciones (August 1926). His poem “Jazz Band” appeared in Martín Fierro 27–28 (10 May 1926). (Courtesy of María de los Ángeles Marechal)

  Leopoldo Marechal, Susana Rinaldi (tango singer and actress), and composer Astor Piazzolla. Photo first published in the magazine Extra in 1968. (Courtesy of photographer Gianni Mestichelli)

  The original cover of Adán Buenosayres, published by Sudamericana in 1948.

  ADAM BUENOSAYRES

  To my comrades of Martín Fierro,1 alive and dead, each of whom could well have been a hero in this fair and enthusiastic story.

  Indispensable Prologue

  On a certain October morning in 192—, at not quite noon, six of us entered the Western Cemetery,2 bearing a coffin of modest design (four fragile little planks), so light that it seemed to carry within not the spent flesh of a dead man but rather the subtle stuff of a concluded poem.3 The astrologer Schultz and I held the two handles at the coffin’s head, Franky Amundsen and Del Solar had taken those at the foot. Luis Pereda went ahead, stocky and unsteady as a blind boar. Bringing up the rear came Samuel Tesler, pawing with ostentatious devotion a great rosary of black beads. Springtime laughed above the tombstones, sang in the throats of birds, waxed ardent in the sprouting vegetation, proclaimed amid crosses and epitaphs its jubilant incredulity toward death. And there were no tears in our eyes, nor sorrow in our hearts, for in that simple coffin (four fragile little planks) we seemed to bear not the heavy flesh of a dead man but the light material of a poem concluded. We arrived at the newly dug grave; the coffin was lowered to the bottom. From the hands of friends, the first lumps of earth drummed upon the bier, then the gravediggers’ brutal shovels took over. Samuel Tesler, proud and impudent, knelt down on the abundant earth to pray a moment, while at the head of the grave the men proceeded to erect a metal cross bearing, on its black tinplate heart, the inscription:

  ADAM BUENOSAYRES

  R.I.P.

  Then we all made our way back to the City of the Tobiano Mare.4

  In the days that followed, I read two manuscripts that Adam Buenosayres had entrusted to me at his death: The Blue-Bound Notebook and Journey to the Dark City of Cacodelphia. Both works struck me as so extraordinary that I resolved to have them published, confident that they would find a place of honour in Argentine literature. But I later realized those strange pages would not be fully understood by the public without some account of who their author and protagonist was, so I took it upon myself to sketch out a likeness of Adam Buenosayres. At first I had in mind a simple portrait, but then it occurred to me to show my friend in the flow of his life. The more I recalled his extraordinary character, the epic figures cut by his companions, and above all the memorable exploits I had witnessed back in those days, the more the novelistic possibilities expanded before my mind’s eye. I decided on a plan of five books, in which I would present my Adam Buenosayres from the moment of his metaphysical awakening at number 303 Monte Egmont Street until midnight of the following day, when angels and demons fought over his soul in Villa Crespo, in front of the Church of San Bernardo, before the still figure of Christ with the Broken Hand.5 Then I would transcribe The Blue-Bound Notebook and Journey to the Dark City of Cacodelphia as the sixth and seventh books of my tale.

  The first pages were written in Paris in the winter of 1930. A deep spiritual crisis later made me drop everything, including literary activity. Fortunately, and just in time, I understood that I was not called to the difficult path of the Perfect Ones.6 And so, to humble the proud ambitions I once held, I turned again to the old pages of my Adam Buenosayres, albeit listlessly, penitentially. But since penance sometimes bears unexpected fruit, my faint interest gathered a new momentum that carried me through to the end, despite the setbacks and misfortunes that impeded its progress.

  I publish it now, still torn between my hopes and fears. Before this prologue ends, I must warn my reader that the novelistic devices of the work, strange as they may seem, are all employed to the end of rendering Adam Buenosayres with rigorous accuracy, and not out of vain desire for literary originality. Moreover, the reader will readily ascertain that, in both the poetic and comic registers, I have remained faithful to the tone of Adam Buenosayres’s Notebook as well as his Journey. One final observation: some of my readers may identify certain characters or even recognize themselves. If so, I will not hypocritically claim that this is due to mere coincidence but will accept the consequences: well do I know that, no matter where they are placed in Schultz’s Inferno and no matter what their antics in my five bo
oks, the characters in this tale all rise to “heroic stature”; and if some of them appear ridiculous, they do so with grace and without dishonour, by virtue of that “angelic wit” (as Adam Buenosayres called it) that can make satire, too, a form of charity, if performed with the smile that the angels don, perhaps, in the face of human folly.

  L.M.

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter 1

  The little white kerchief

  I offered you,

  embroidered with my hair.1

  Temperate and blithe are the autumn days in the witty and graceful city of Buenos Aires, and splendid was the morning on that twenty-eighth of April. Ten o’clock had just struck. Wide awake and gesticulating beneath the morning sun, the Great Capital of the South was a gaggle of men and women who fought shrieking for control over the day and the earth. Rustic reader, were you graced with birdlike powers and had you from your soaring flight cast your sparrow’s gaze o’er the burgh, I know that your loyal porteño breast would have swollen, obedient to the mechanics of pride, before the vision laid out below. Booming black ships, moored in the harbour of Santa María de los Buenos Aires,2 were tossing up onto her piers the industrial harvest of two hemispheres, the colours and sounds of four races, the iodine and salt of seven seas. Other tall and solemn vessels, their holds chock-a-block with the plant, animal, and mineral wealth of our hinterland, were setting sail in the eight watery directions amid the keening farewells of naval sirens. If from there you’d followed the Riachuelo3 upstream to the refrigeration plants, you’d have seen the young bulls and fat heifers jostling out of crammed holding-pens and bellowing in the sun as they waited for the blow between the horns, the deft knife of the slaughterman that would offer a sacrificial hecatomb to the world’s voracity. Orchestral trains entered the city, or departed for the woods of the north, the vineyards of the west, the Virgilian central plains, and the bucolic pastures of the south. From industrial Avellaneda to Belgrano,4 the metropolis was girded with a belt of belching smokestacks that scrawled wrathful sentences by Rivadavia or Sarmiento5 across the manly sky. Murmurs of weights and measures, the clink of cash registers, voices and gestures clashing like weapons, heels in flight: all these seemed the very pulse of the throbbing city. Here the bankers of Reconquista Street drove the mad wheel of Fortune; there the engineers as grave as Geometry contemplated new bridges and roads for the world. Buenos Aires in motion was laughing; Industry and Commerce were leading her by the hand.

  But whoa there, reader! Hold your horses, rein in your lyricism, come down from the lofty heights into which my sublime style has launched you. Descend with me to the neighbourhood of Villa Crespo, in front of number 303 Monte Egmont Street. There’s Irma, vigorously sweeping the sidewalk and wailing the first lines of “El Pañuelito.” She stops short and leans on her broom, dishevelled and hot, an eighteen-year-old witch. Her sharp ears tune in the sounds of the city in a single chord: the Italian construction workers’ song, the hammering from the garage named La Joven Cataluña,6 the caterwauling of fat women arguing with the vegetable grocer Alí, the grandiloquence of Jewish blanket vendors, the clamour of boys tearing around after a ragball.7 Then, confirmed in her exalted morning mood, she takes up her song once more:

  It was for you,

  but you’ve forgotten it.

  Soaked in tears,

  I have it with me.8

  Adam Buenosayres awoke as though returning. Irma’s song hooked him out of deep sleep, pulling him up through fragmented scenes and evanescent ghosts. But after a moment the thread of the music broke off, and Adam fell back down into the depths, surrendering to the delicious dissolution of death. Local deities of Villa Crespo, my tough and happy fellow citizens! Old harpies writhing like gargoyles for no reason at all; tough guys crooning tangos or whistling rancheras; demon kids flying the team colours of River Plate or the Boca Juniors;9 bellicose coachmen twisting on their padded seats as they hummed a tune northward, hurled a curse southward, shouted catcalls to the east and threats to the west! But above all, you, my neighbourhood girls, duets of tapping heels and laughter, suburban muses with or without the rasping voice of Carriego the poet!10 Surely if the girls had climbed the stairs to number 303 and looked in on Adam Buenosayres’s room, our hero’s presence would have moved them to generous silence. Especially had they known that, with his back turned against the new day, defector from the violent city, fugitive from the light, he forgot himself in sleep and in forgetfulness cured his pains – for our protagonist is already fatally wounded, and his agony will be the subtle thread running through the episodes of my novel. Unfortunately, Monte Egmont Street knew nothing of this. And Irma, who wouldn’t have scrupled to rouse Ulysses himself as long as she could sing, launched into the second verse with verve:

  A bird sang a sad song,

  my sweet darling,

  when you left me.11

  His head tossing and turning on the pillow, Adam Buenosayres’s figure traced a vast gesture of denial. Against his will he was surfacing again, uprooting himself from the phantasmagorical universe that surrounded and hemmed him in. Smoky faces, silent voices, and vague hand gestures faded away below. One face, his grandfather Sebastián’s, was still calling out to him, but it dissolved like the others, in zones of stupor, in delicious depths. Adam hit the rock-bottom certainty of this world and said aloud:

  – Too bad!

  He half opened his eyes; through the lashes he sensed the darkness thinning, an inchoate clarity, a hint of light filtering through the dense curtain. Before Adam’s eyes, in the illegible chaos filling the room, colours started gathering and pushing each other aside, and lines began to attract or repel one another. Each object sought its sign12 and materialized after a quick, silent war. As on its first day, the world sprang forth from love and hate (Hail, old Empedocles!13), and the world was a rose, a pomegranate, a pipe, a book. Caught between the call of sleep still tugging at his flesh and the claims of the world already stuttering its first names, Adam looked askance at the three pomegranates on the clay plate, the wilted rose in the wineglass, and the half-dozen pipes lying on his work table. I’m the pomegranate! I’m the pipe! I’m the rose! they seemed to shout, proudly declaiming their differences. And therein lay their guilt (Hail, old Anaximander!14): they had broken with what primordially was undifferentiated; they had deserted the blissful Unity.

  Adam felt a bitter taste on his tongue – not just the fleshy one, but on the mother tongue of his soul as well – as he watched the parodic genesis unfold in his room. Like a god in the mood for cataclysms, Adam shut his eyes again, and the universe of his room returned to nothingness. “Blast it all, anyway!” he grumbled, imagining the dissolution of the rose, the annihilation of the pomegranate, the atomic explosion of the pipe. Perhaps on merely closing his eyes, the city outside as well had vanished. And the mountains would have faded away, the oceans evaporated, the stars fallen like figs from a tree shaken by its maker . . . “Hell’s bells!” said Adam to himself. Alarmed, he opened his eyes, and the world put itself back together with the meticulous exactitude of a jigsaw puzzle. He would have to give up his midnight readings of the Book of Revelation! Its terrible images of destruction kept him wide awake, then dogged him in dreams, and left him the next morning with an obscure sense of foreboding. Now more than ever, he needed to keep a weather eye on what was happening in his soul, ever since the drums of the penitential night had beaten for him. It wouldn’t do to succumb to a childish dread of geneses and catastrophes. The truth was that when his eyes were closed (and Adam shut them once again), the rose, for example, was not obliterated at all. On the contrary, the flower lived on within his mind, which was now thinking it; and it lived a lasting existence, free of the corruption tainting the rose outside. For the rose being thought was not this or that rose, but all roses that had ever been and could be in this world: the flower bound by its abstract number, the rose emancipated from autumn and death. Thus if he, Adam Buenosayres, were eternal, so too the rose in his mind, even if all
the roses out there were abruptly to perish and never bloom again. “Blessèd is the rose!” Adam said to himself. To live, as the rose, eternally in another, and for the eternity of the Other!

  Adam Buenosayres opened his eyes for good. When things insisted on their irrevocable sign, he dejectedly saluted: “Good morning, planet Earth!” He wasn’t yet ready to break the stillness of his supine body; it would have been a concession to the new day, which he resisted with all the weight of his dead will. But from Monte Egmont Street the new day reminded him again of its dominion: “Goal! Goal!” howled ten children’s voices in victory. “Foul! Foul!” roared ten others in protest. The clash of quick battle was heard, then peace being negotiated among insults and laughter, then kids tearing around again as they resumed their game. Afterward, when the uproar of the dust-up had settled down to the level of the ambient street noise, Adam picked out the acrid voice of his landlady, Doña Francisca, cackling reproaches, growling offers, belching disdain as she beleaguered the grocer Alí. “Two hundred pounds of belligerent fat,” thought Adam, recalling her mountainous udders. He imagined the ecstatic figure of Alí standing by his vegetable cart and listening without hearing, absorbed instead by some memory of patient oriental markets.