Adam Buenosayres: A Novel

by Leopoldo Marechal

  A repeat of yesterday, Adam was thinking. And tomorrow it will be the same scene all over again. It chilled him to think of this flightless reality that endlessly returned, day in day out, inevitable and monotonous as the ticking of a clock. He turned over in bed, and melancholy springs moaned deep in its guts. “The day is like a trained bird,” reflected Adam. “It comes into the world every twelve hours, at the same spot on the globe, and bores us with its eternal song and dance. Or it’s like a pedantic schoolmaster with his sun hat and his primer of stale knowledge – This is the rose, this is the pomegranate.” With a start, he remembered that he too was a teacher. Thirty-two pairs of listless eyes would soon be peering at him from behind their desks. “Shall I go to school?” he asked in his soul. He recalled the damp building, the principal’s saturnine face, and decadent countenances of the pedagogues, and Adam resolved in his soul: “I won’t go to school!” This is the rose, he then mused. No! The rose was Solveig Amundsen,15 no matter what the day said. The memory returned of that last afternoon in the big, rambling house in Saavedra. That empty hopeless feeling and the sting of humiliation were mellowing into something like nostalgia for a cherished impossibility. In Solveig Amundsen’s garden, already wilting with autumn, Lucio Negri (the quack doctor!) had stood before the earnest young girls and fervently preached “mental hygiene,” deeming it all the more desirable in “the Amundsen madhouse,” as the place was quite reasonably dubbed. No doubt about it, Lucio Negri had taken advantage of the chance absence of the four brightest lights of the tertulia – the astrologer Schultz, Franky Amundsen, Samuel Tesler, and the pipsqueak Bernini – who hadn’t showed up that day. Lucio had chosen his moment deliberately, of course. Solveig was present among the girls, and Adam was sitting beside her in his role as poet without apparent prospects. At Adam’s rejoinder, that charlatan of a doctor reproached the poet by quoting Adam’s own verses:

  Love more joyous

  than a child’s funeral.16

  The girls had laughed at his metaphor, then stared in distress and incredulity at Adam, and laughed again in chorus – their pigeon breasts stuffed with laughter! But Solveig Amundsen shouldn’t have laughed with the other girls. Maybe she wouldn’t have, if she’d known that her laughter would detonate the collapse of a poetic construction and the ruin of an ideal Solveig. “I’ll have to take her my Blue-Bound Notebook,” said Adam to himself without much hope. As for Lucio Negri, how could he understand why a child’s funeral is joyful? Adam beckoned a memory from childhood – back there, in Maipú17 – evoking the little house on the hill, at night, and the dead child propped up in his little chair beneath smoking candles, the flash of sequins on his tunic, the little gold-foil wings his mother had sewn to his shoulders. The parody of an angel, true! But the angel’s eyes looked out no more. Two cotton swabs in his nostrils contained the incipient stench of rotting flesh. Green flies crawled across his powdered cheeks. Outdoors, however, guitars and accordions were making merry. Sugared mate and gin were doing the rounds. Lead-footed dancers stumbled, and furtive couples wandered off among thistles into the night (Adam understood later!), perhaps moved by the obscure urge to prolong the painful yearning of the generations with their hot blood. The drunken guitarist sang:

  Little angel, you fly away

  with a drop of wine,

  Adam, in his innocence, wanted to know the reason for all this jubilation. Someone answered that the child in the chair wasn’t dead. He was now living a blessèd existence in God.

  Little angel, you go away

  with a flower in your hand18

  That had to be why a child’s funeral was a festive occasion. It meant going away to live eternally in another, thanks to the eternal virtue of the Other. Solveig Amundsen probably didn’t know this. All the same she shouldn’t have laughed at Adam that afternoon, because she too, unawares, was living within him an existence emancipated from the four seasons. “I’ll take her my Blue-Bound Notebook,” Adam resolved in his mind.

  He slowly stretched, and the bed-springs again moaned their de profundis.19 Out on Monte Egmont Street, the voices were getting louder, the hubbub of men and women who, like Lucio Negri, understood only the literal sense of things and gave themselves over entirely to the illusion of a reality as changeable as its hours and as ephemeral as its shouts, like horseflies intoxicated by the day’s nectar, grimy with sweat and pollen, buzzing with relish beneath a sun that would go down as surely as they would. “Bah!” thought Adam ill-humouredly. “Lucio Negri will be powerless to prevent the day from eventually losing its worn-out alphabet or the world from tottering as did Don Aquiles, the silly old schoolmaster of Maipú, when looking for his misplaced spectacles among the schoolboys’ bags. Nor – alas! – will he forestall the moon turning to blood, or the sky being rolled up like a scroll.” The tremendous words of the Apocalypse thundered in his ears from the night before: Sicut liber involutus.20 Adam had stopped reading at that image and held his breath to listen to the hard, ominous silence of the night. There, in the heart of stillness, he seemed to hear the click of great springs breaking loose, a crunch of forms being instantly annihilated, an insurrection of atoms repelling one another. Terror-struck, Adam had fallen to his knees and for the first time felt his clumsy prayer reach the heights that had been denied him so many times before. Surely that sacred dread was a prelude to the living science that his soul, weary of dead letters, had been longing for. A sacred dread. But how easily it melted away now into the noise and colour of the new day!

  Propping himself up, Adam Buenosayres reached out to the bevy of pipes calling out to him from the table. He chose Eleonore,21 with its cherry stem and porcelain bowl, and carefully filled it with tobacco from Uruguay that for a moment would become his soul. Skilfully lighting up, he breathed in the soul of Eleonore, then exhaled and watched it curl in the air, a dragon of smoke. He resumed the sweet horizontal posture of sleep and death, and savoured the delight of smoking inside his closed cubic space, in that penumbra where forms unfleshed themselves to the point of resembling numbers. For some time now he had been suffering one of two kinds of anxiety when he woke up: either he had the unspeakable impression of opening his eyes onto a strange world whose forms, even that of his own body, struck him as so absurd that he was promptly plunged into a state of fear and apprehension of ancient metamorphoses; or else he stumbled into this world as though into a bazaar full of hopelessly pawed-over objects. But there had been a time when days would begin with his mother’s song:

  Four white doves,

  four blue ones,

  four little red ones,

  death gives to me.22

  A little boy rubbing his blue eyes, pulling on clothes pell-mell as he rushed out to the morning that opened like a book filled with ravishing images! Later, Don Aquiles had read aloud in class the first stammerings of Adam’s ecstasies and pronounced judgment: “Adam Buenosayres will be a poet.” The other children clapped astonished eyes on Adam; he turned pale, his essence laid bare, the exact form of his anxieties exposed by that pedant from Maipú who, moreover, believed in the immutable regularity of the cosmos and who, every morning, watch in hand, used to invigilate the sun’s rising, lest it deviate from the hour specified in the almanac and incur his reproof. Don Aquiles limped methodically, and the schoolchildren, choking with laughter, would sing to the rhythm of his hobbled gait:

  Coo-coo, coo-coo,

  sang the frog,

  coo-coo, coo-coo,

  beneath the water.23

  Suddenly the old man stops beside Adam’s desk and looks at him: what a gaze, filtered now through memory, through bluish spectacles, his octopus eye lurking in navy blue waters!

  Adam Buenosayres fondly reviewed in mente those figures from his childhood. But old images and new conflicts alike were being thrust aside by his day’s arduous launch, especially now that Eleonore, the pipe smoked before breakfast, was steering him into tobacco’s subtle, exceedingly noble, altogether poetic inebriation. “Glory to the Great Mani
tou,” he recited in his soul, “for he has given humans the delight of Oppavoc!”24 Better still, under the influence of the sacred leaf, his paralyzed will seemed to be reviving: he looked again at the objects in his room and this time found the pomegranate and rose worthy of an interest bordering on praise (splendor formae!); then he trained his ears on the din in the street, but inclined now to a benevolent attitude. At that moment, a terrific commotion inside the house hijacked his attention. Irma! Monte Egmont Street left behind, she was climbing the stairs amid a clatter of pails and brooms; she sang to the withered canary, praised the prudent cat, laughed at the bald scrub-brush, cursed the bobtailed duster. Next he made out the clomp of her shoes in the study and the creak of the furniture she was ruthlessly punishing. No doubt about it, Irma was one big unabashed shout. But an eighteen-year-old shout . . . and Adam had told her that her eyes were like two mornings together, or maybe he’d kissed her. It had been springtime, and perhaps the strong smell of the paraísos25 had stirred their blood – hers, as she spread the sheets over his bed, all of her curving like a live bow; his, when he left off reading to look at what she wished him to see, even though he felt she didn’t want him to look, not suspecting that she wanted him not to suspect that she wanted him to see, O Eve! And Adam had followed the line of her bare arms which, as she raised them, revealed two dark thatches of fleece, or he saw the flash of thighs, dark olive like the skin of apples. A thick fog suffused him suddenly, erasing all memory and understanding until he was left prey to an aggression that willed him, trembling, toward Irma. And when Adam’s eyes asked “yes?” she answered “yes” with hers. Then it was as though he lost this world (forgetting it and himself) only to find it again afterward (remembering it and himself), but a world now without lustre, sullied by coarse melancholy, as though his shipwrecked soul were blind to the intelligible grace that illumines things. Without a glance or a word, they parted company at last. Adam heard her laughing on the staircase, then prattling below as if nothing had happened. He was left to savour his shame, his useless remorse, angry at himself for having fallen again into Nature’s famous trap (Hail, old Schopenhauer!).26 Of course! Nature played with the dishonour of the poor freak who, originally meant for paradisal beatitude, had scandalously fallen to earth and, like an insect at night, been singed by any glimpse or simulacrum of his first happiness.

  The truly sane option would be to ignore the calls from the outside, like Rose of Lima!27 In suspense and terror, Adam had read the story about her battle against the world, about how that rose had imposed a progressive self-destruction upon her mortal coil. One midnight, upon closing the gloomy book and resorting to the never idle loom of his imagination, Adam had evoked the image of Rose in her torture chamber. She had erected a cross in her room where she crucified herself in imitation of her adored Lover, the pain of her cracked sinews and wracked bones affirming the heaviness of flesh which, slight though hers was, had not yet overcome the law of its misery. On her bowed head, through hair that had once been so beautiful, the spikes of her metal crown raked new blood from old scabs. Her gaze fell inert upon the strewn rubble and broken glass that served as her bed, the one she had chosen for her conjugal bliss. Thus did Rose keep her vigil in the deep night of America. Perhaps sounds from the big house filtered into her room – her father’s laboured breathing, her mother’s muttered reproaches, even in dreams, against her daughter’s heavenly folly, or the sighs of her sisters as they dreamed, no doubt, about love affairs. But she paid them no heed, absorbed as she was in her task of annihilation: she was destroying the self within her, so that she might reconstruct that self in the Other. Such was the work of her needle, an embroidery in blood . . .

  The violent clatter of falling objects in the study wrenched him from his abstractions. Adam heard Irma let fly the stoutest, most energetic obscenity of them all. But a human howl from the next room cut her short:

  – Infernal womaaan!

  He recognized the voice of Samuel Tesler and heard the philosopher’s fist hit the wall three times to demand Adam’s testimony and solidarity against Irma’s excesses. “The Bachante has awakened Koriskos,”28 observed Adam. “Koriskos is right, the Bachante’s at fault.” So he answered with the required three fist-blows. Instantly the philosopher’s cursing voice folded into itself, a decaying wind that sputtered out among soft sleepy grumblings. Still attentive yet to the other’s murmurs, Adam Buenosayres heroically left his berth and went to open the window wide, letting a torrent of light into the room. Then, faithful to the venerable custom of lyric poets, he returned to bed and gave himself over to breathing the strong autumn air. The aroma of paradise no longer wafted up from the trees on Monte Egmont Street, as on that barbaric spring day with Irma (Adam had said her eyes were just like two mornings together, maybe he’d even kissed her). Now instead came the breath of autumn, heavy with seed, the pungence of dead leaves. Better, though, was the scent of white roses, for they would speak to him always of Solveig. That afternoon he had watched her bend down in the shade of the greenhouse among the roses – they were practically drunk on the smell – and she too was a snow-white rose, a rose of damp velvet; her voice, so moist and clear in timbre, seemed akin to water, the water in the well back in Maipú, when a stone fell in and drew forth secret music. Alone in the flower nursery, they were brought closer together than ever, up against their great opportunity and their inevitable risk. Adam, as he stood by her side, suddenly felt the birth of a grief that would never leave him, as though that moment of supreme closeness opened between them an irremediable distance, as with two stars whose ultimate degree of proximity coincides with the first of their separations. The grotto-like light did not at all undermine the integrity of forms, but rather exalted them prodigiously. The form of Solveig Amundsen became painfully vivid, imbued with a plenitude that made him tremble with anxiety, as though so much grace sustained by such a weak frame suddenly revealed the risk of its fragility. Once again the admonitory drums of night had begun to beat, and before his hallucinated gaze Solveig withered and fell among the pale roses that were as mortal as she.

  Adam lowered his eyelids: how sore those poor eyes! If one abused the night, demanded everything from its dominion, then it burned like black oil ravaging eyelids that tried in vain to close. The morning after, daylight was like alcohol on the inflamed lids. “Could it be that he was a night spirit, kin to ominous birds, insects with phosphorescent rear-ends, and witches that rode meek broomsticks?” No, because his soul, diurnal, was daughter to her father, the sun of intelligibility. “If this was so, then why did he live by night?” He haunted the night because, in his era, the torch of daytime incited a war without laurels; it raped silence, it scourged holy stillness. Daytime was external like skin, active like the hand, sweaty as armpits, loud-mouthed and prolific in falsehood. Male by sex, daytime was a young, hairy-chested hero. He shied away from the light of day because it pushed him toward the temptation of material fortune, induced the anxiety to possess useless objects, as well as other unhealthy desires: to be a politician, boxer, singer, or gunman. “And the night?” Colourless, odourless, insipid as water, nighttime nevertheless got him as high as good wine. Silence-loving, the night nonetheless kindled the dawn of difficult voices and deep calls which the day with its trombones drowns out. Antipode of light, night made the tiny stars visible. Destroyer of prisons, she favoured escape. Field of truce, she facilitated union and reconciliation. Female who healed, refreshed and stimulated, she lay with man and conceived a son called sleep, the gracious image of death.

  And yet, the night could weigh heavily when finally one wanted to sleep and could not. His big, childish eyes wide open at midnight back in Maipú, when insomnia initiated him – oh, so young! – into the mysteries of his nocturnal vocation! And that “journey to silence” through the “jungle of sounds” he’d invented to fall asleep, that trip he used to take in the fitful nights of his childhood! His traveller’s ear hit its first obstacle in the dogs’ barking at the moon as it
rose or set. Further along he heard sheep shuffling in their pens, or some cow lowing its insomnia, or a restless horse scratching itself against the palisade. Further still, he came upon the swampy music of creepy-crawlers, their tiny glass guitars or water-crystal violins tinkling over the marsh. At a greater distance he heard a train perforate the night. Then something strange, like a conversation among distant roosters (Lugones’s “telepathic” cocks29), or the sound of the earth turning on its axis. At last, pure silence, healing silence would fill his ears, become song, then lullaby; for silence is the beginning and end of all music, just as white is the beginning and end of all colour. Such had been his childhood! And there it stayed, in the ringing woods of Maipú: howling werewolves would chase it among the night sounds – O adventure!

  And once upon a time . . . Adam was in his little bed, his ear pressed to the very heart of the night, when suddenly he told himself that the earth would explode willy-nilly before you could count to ten. “One, two, three, four,” he counted, hands clenched; “five, six, seven” and he held his breath; “eight, nine . . . Nothing! For now!”

  Or he would imagine his mother had died: he’s dressed in his Sunday best, crying beside the black wooden coffin – alas! – black wood, with bronze handles. His weeping isn’t loud and showy, oh no; his are the silent tears of a brave little soldier. There’s a strong smell of funeral candles, burning wax, and charred wicks, while he – poor child! – bids his mother farewell, peering into the coffin at her for the last time, before the solderers arrive – oh! – those men who seal up lead boxes with steel soldering-irons. Around him, wrapped in light-coloured clothing, the grownup women of his neighbourhood are hovering, and ancient women with great black shawls caress his cheek with hands smelling of old rags or mice or venerable yellowed papers. In the patio, men stand around talking about death, while others seated in the parlour speak of life, as all the while the mate gourd passes from hand to hand, its bombilla gurgling . . . ah, how the bombilla used to gurgle in those happy times! His classmates from third grade are gaping at him, dying to know what a kid is like whose mom just died. Among them, his seatmate María Esther Silvetti; and maybe he’d give her a peck on the forehead since they’re already boyfriend and girlfriend, have exchanged notes declaring themselves so. But how far from his mind is all that now! Adam looks only at his mother’s face, bathed in a cold sweat that others are drying with soft cloths, and at her hands, which had caressed, darned, combed, knotted his tie – poor, sad, tireless hands. And his sobbing always grows more disconsolate over those hands, and Adam is at the centre of all those compassionate voices . . . Suddenly, returning to reality, he would hear, from over there in her bed, his mother’s slow, harmonious breathing, and would realize his drama was only imaginary. And yet his tears really did flow when a hundred harsh voices accused him in the darkness: “Monster!” “There’s the kid who gets a kick out of imagining his own mother’s death!” “He imagines his mother’s death so that everybody will feel sorry for him and admire him!”