– No, it’s not true, he whimpered in response to the voices. To fend off the vision of death still haunting him, he would recite his lesson in National History: “A bullet had killed San Martín’s horse, and just as a Spanish soldier was about to run him through with his bayonet . . .”30 But it was no use, the death scene would return in terrifying detail – the candelabras, the flowers, the hushed murmurs. “Aaah!” His anguished shout would wake up his mother then. “It’s Adam, he’s had a bad dream,” she would say. “I’d better wake him up.”
Half amused, half in earnest, Adam evoked that childhood as though it were not his but an absent brother’s, or something he’d read many years ago in the book Corazón,31 beside the rain-lashed windowpane, as his grandmother Ursula sang:
Good Friday, Good Friday,
day of great Passion,
when they crucified him,
the Divine Redeemer.32
Nevertheless, how well he recognized himself in the soul of that afflicted child! It was certainly more pleasant to remember his grandfather Sebastián, buried not long before in the cemetery at Maipú. How to reconstruct the face of Grampa Sebastián? He clamped his eyelids tight and thought about him intensely. Right away, his features loomed out of the interior blackness: his curved nose, his rain-soaked beard, his eyes round and shiny like the heads of screws. Everyone in Maipú knew that Grampa had got to Buenos Aires by sailboat, just like Juan de Garay,33 and that he’d been a smuggler in Rozas’s times.34 Adam said so in class. The other kids didn’t believe him, but Don Aquiles took the opportunity to teach them that Rozas had been “a cruel despot” and that smuggling was a very ugly thing, punishable by law. What would Grampa have been like back in those days? Did he wear a chiripá, leather boots, and a silver knife in his belt, like the ones you see in National History engravings? Adam closed his eyes, as he used to do in the Maipú nights, and once again recalled him sitting out under the trellis that bore the family grapevine full of greedy sparrows, holding the porcelain jug tucked between his thighs (he liked dark wine), and laughing in praise of the morning. Then he’d tell endless tales, children and adults alike hanging on every word of his colourful language and feisty proverbs.
Of all his stories, the one about blood was best! Grampa Sebastián had been taken prisoner by the Mazorca. His men were wounded, his smuggler’s whaleboat burned. Two Mazorca agents (perhaps escaped from the novel Amalia35) take him to the residence of the Illustrious Restorer. The henchman on his right (God save us all!) has a patriotic scar clear across his face. The one on his left is smiling, but his smile looks a lot like his buddy’s scar. Grampa, however – and he doesn’t want to brag, mind you – Grampa is as calm as if he were running a shipment of Paraguayan yerba. It’s siesta time; not so much as a cat can be seen in the streets of Buenos Aires. Finally, they go into an entrance hall, cool and dark as a cave, and come out onto a patio where a mulatta dressed in red, hunched over her mortar, mashes corn (they were probably having mazamorra that night!). All of a sudden, right then and there, Grampa runs into Don Juan Manuel himself. He’s sitting on his folding cot, drinking mate without sugar and staring at his slippers, embroidered perhaps by Manuelita. One of the thugs, the scarface, whispers something in his ear, but the Illustrious Restorer, engrossed in thought, seems not to hear him. Finally he tears his eyes away from his slippers and looks at Grampa Sebastián’s boots, through which protrude earthy toes with nails of quartz. “So you’re the rascally Basque who brings in merchandise from Paraguay?” Don Juan Manuel says at last. “In the service of God and the Holy Federation,” answers Grampa. His words fall in a strange silence; the black woman is no longer mashing corn but gawking in amazement at the scene. “Let’s see. How many savage Unitarians have you taken over to the other side?” “I don’t smuggle men, Illustrious Restorer.” “Humph!” exclaims Rozas. “I suppose you want me to believe that you’re a good Federalist.” “I am a good Federalist!” replies Grampa, and he isn’t lying. Don Juan Manuel’s eyes are now following a fly that buzzes and swivels among the clusters on the grapevine. The black woman’s eyes are a pair of saucers, and the scarface studies the nape of Grampa’s neck as though choosing the best spot on which to play a tune with his knife.36 “And your insignia? Come on now, where’s your good Federalist insignia?” asks Rozas mockingly.37 Grampa Sebastián starts laughing; his hilarity shakes his beard like a gust of wind. Quite matter-of-factly, he unbuttons his shirt to reveal his bare chest and the wounds he got in the fray. Blood is running beneath his gold-studded gaucho belt, down his thighs, and dripping onto his leather boots. There’s his insignia! The illustrious Don Juan Manuel is struck dumb, for sunlit blood at times can be as beautiful as the purest rose. He turns to his men: “Let him go.” Then adds: “I like this Basque!”
O adventures of yesteryear! thought Adam. Horses, rain, wind! Horses with sonorous bladders and pure vegetable breath, thundering across the wide open spaces of Maipú, on a day devoted to the fabulous enterprises of childhood! What to do now? What to do with these useless hands? Maybe the eight strapping Basques who’d borne Grandfather Sebastián to the Maipú cemetery had buried adventure along with him. It had been a summer morning, and the eight Basques, arriving in front of Ugalde’s general store, had set down the coffin to have a sangría of wine, water, and sugar. Adam had stayed outside, and his child’s eyes wandered from the black box parked in the dust to a flock of sparrows darting about nearby on the parched earth. Where had Grampa gone? To the ranch of “Don Cristo,” as they said on that old gaucho record they used to listen to on the phonograph at home? That’s probably how it was: Grampa Sebastián had gone to that ranch in the sky, where they’d given him permission to unsaddle his dapple-grey horse and let it run loose among the stars.38
Adam Buenosayres put down the pipe Eleonore, now cold in his fingers, and contemplated his hands, two dead grey things that ended in five dead grey points. On that same day, which strode ahead like a vulgar orange-hawker, how many possible destinies were offered him by land and sea! But what to do with his five-pointed hands? A shifty player, a weaver of smoke39 – that’s what he’d been and still was! It would be better to go all the way, right down to his last card, as Grampa Sebastián had done, in the great dream each man weaves in the external world and which is called “a destiny” – whether the dream was good or bad, sublime or ridiculous, at least it would be an authentic gesture, an honourable posture before the Absolute. But he, immobile as a god who sits cross-legged and makes himself a self-reflecting mirror, had always been prone to the poetic madness of assuming imaginatively his possible destinies and living them out ad intra, a hundred phantasmagorical Adams having struggled, suffered, triumphed, and died. Did he want to be a political leader, a movie star, a plutocrat, or a saint? He had only to close his eyes, and a virtual Adam tasted power, covered himself with laurels, amassed the gold of fortune, or was interred with the palm-branch of the martyr.
Disturbed by the recollection of his mental destinies (some of those fictions would certainly make him squirm with shame and ridicule, were he to review them now by the clear light of day!), Adam contemplated once more his dead, grey hands. For some time now, he thought, his existence had been limited to a tiresome recapitulation of the already lived, as if his soul, seeing its present as a desert and its future denied, was now labouring in that pivotal stage of life that they say precedes its demise or metamorphosis. He felt the urgent need to question himself deeply, in order to know at least what was at stake in his presumed death or transformation. He would have loved to consult with the illustrious Boethius!40 Or even Poe’s crusty old crow, if only he would appear at his bedside!
For lack of one and the other, Adam resolved to dialogue with himself. First question: who was he, this absurd entity, this nebulous smoker, this object enclosed within a cube of bricks and mortar, in a house on Monte Egmont Street, in the city of Buenos Aires, at eight o’clock on the morning of April the twenty-eighth of whatever year? Answer: he was, of course, h
uman, the enigmatic reasoning animal, that tricky mélange of a mortal body and an undying soul, the dual freak whose bizarre antics made the angels weep and the demons laugh, the unlikely creature whom its own Creator regretted. What reasons did Adam Buenosayres suggest to justify the invention of the human monster? The Creator needed to manifest all possible creatures; the ontological order of His possibilities required a link between the angel and the beast; hence, the human hybrid, something less than an angel, something more than a brute. What did Adam do after putting forward such a wise hypothesis? As usual, he admired himself at length, graciously acknowledged ad intra the wild applause of an invisible public, and then turned his attention to the question of his corporeal nature. What observations did he make concerning his body? He observed that his animal component conformed to the noble structure of the vertebrates and he recalled, not without vanity, that he occupied in this order the enviable rank of the mammal family; he went on to classify himself among the two-handed mammals, a zoological dignity that justified Adam’s legitimate pride. What other satisfaction did he derive from his study of his carnal nature? He told himself that his body, stretched out between two not very clean sheets, was the ancient and venerable Microcosm, condensation and centre of the entire visible world, summary of the three realms and possessor of three souls: the elemental soul of minerals, the vegetative soul of plants, and the sensible soul of animals. Devourer and assimilator of all the lesser corporeal natures (the great Omnivore!), his body was bound to the Macrocosm by analogy. Thus his heart corresponded to the Sun, his brain to the Moon, his liver to Jupiter, his spleen to Saturn, his kidneys to Mars, his testicles to Venus, and his penis to Mercury. How did he react when he considered these vast projections of his body? With melancholy, for he saw himself subject to two limiting conditions, space and time, which from the start condemned him to the error and fatigue of local movement, to becoming, to death. This reminded him of his childhood dread of time and space. How had the terror called Time invaded him? Back in Maipú, he had conceived Time as a stream that flowed over his house, an invisible stream whose waters brought the newborn and carried away the dead, turned the wheels inside clocks, peeled away walls, and gnawed away at the faces one loved. And Space? This terror had struck when the pedant Don Aquiles taught them in class that it would take a locomotive millions of years to get to the star Sirius; but also at night out on the plain, when he gazed up at the dense constellations of the southern sky until vertigo overtook him and he clung to his motionless horse, just to feel next to his fearful flesh something alive, close, friendly. How had he managed to get over these two terrors? He had overcome them in his soul, which was neither spatial nor temporal; by virtue of his soul, which could rescue the rose from the pain of time and space by abstracting its intelligible form from its sensitive flesh and giving it the hazard-free life of abstract numbers; thanks to his soul, which had apprehended Don Aquiles’s astronomical system, internalized it and set it in motion within like a toy planetarium; by the grace of his soul, which, being a microcosm too, not only devours and assimilates the whole intelligible world but also gives sanctuary to the spirit of spent things. What other aspects of his soul did Adam review? Its immortality, its divine origin, its fallen nature. In what personal intuitions had he recognized the immortality of his soul? In the soul’s absolute certainty of its permanence, which it discloses to its fratre corpo, causing the latter to entertain pernicious illusions; and in the soul’s incredulity, alienation, and repugnance vis-à-vis death as total annihilation, a feeling common to all human beings. By what signs had he come to understand the divine origin of his soul? By its irresistible tendency toward unity, even though it lived in the world of multiplicity; by its notion of a necessary happiness, possible only in an absolute, motionless, invisible, and eternal Other, even though the soul lived in a realm relative, changing, visible, and mortal; by its vocation for the virtues Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, divine attributes to which the soul gravitates as if to its natural atmosphere or its homeland. How had he recognized his fallen nature? Negatively, when he noticed the way his intelligence strayed, his lapses of memory, his failures of will; positively, when he exercised these three powers and observed glimmers and vague stirrings that felt like vestiges of a lost original nobility.
Did Adam concoct, as was his wont, some poetic analogy to express such a vexed duality? He had no need, Plato’s inimitable simile sprang to mind: his soul was like a wingèd chariot pulled by two different horses. One of them, sky-coloured, its mane bristling with stars, its delicate hooves airborne, tended to draw always upward, toward the heavenly meadows where it was born. The other, earth-coloured, slack-lipped, balky, its crupper twisted, paunchy, long-eared, knock-kneed, down at the mouth, and stumble-gaited, always pulled downward, itching to get stuck in muck up to the crotch. Poor Adam, the driver, held the reins of both horses and strove to keep them on track. When the accursed colt prevailed and dragged down the soul’s entire équipage, the divine equine seemed to be asleep in its traces. But when the celestial steed took over, its limbs plied a marvellous light, its nostrils flared to the scent of divine alfalfa fields, and the coach flew, hoisting aloft the dead weight of the earthly horse. The sublime charger kept going higher until it sensed the air thinning, its sinews slackened, and it fell asleep drunk on loftiness. That’s when the terrestrial animal woke up and, finding its teammate asleep, let itself fall down hard, given over to a voracious hunger for impure matter. When, satiated, this beast nodded off, the noble bronco awoke and was master of the coach once more. Thus, between one horse and the other, between heaven and earth, now pulling on this rein and now on that one, Adam’s soul rose up or tumbled down. At the end of each trip Adam the coachman wiped acrid sweat from his brow.
What did Adam do after thus analysing his body and soul? He re-examined himself as a compositum, and on realizing that he hadn’t been born of his own will, he resorted to genealogy to understand his advent to this sad world. What did he determine genealogically, then? Two different lines had joined and unwittingly incurred the infinite responsibility of bringing him onto this plane of existence. Paternal branch: his father was born by the banks of the Río de la Plata, himself the son of grandfather Charles and grandmother María, both natives of the clear-browed city of Lutecia. Maternal branch: his mother too was born beside the Río de la Plata, daughter of Grandfather Sebastián and Grandmother Ursula, who both hailed from Cantabria, hard by the barren sea. How did Adam explain the curious fact that two such different branches had left their native Europe to come together on the banks of the River-named-after-a-metal?41 The visible causes: Republican ideas in grandfather Charles, banished by the French king Louis-Philippe; wanderlust in Grandfather Sebastián, incorrigible sailor. The intelligible causes, according to the astrologer Schultz, were the neocriollo angels, those inciters to emigration, invisible tempters who roamed the world, recruited volunteers in every nation, and with their siren song led them into concave vessels. These same messengers flew before the ships, one wing steadying their vulnerable keels, the other holding wind and storm clouds at bay, thus ensuring the recruits’ safe arrival that they might fulfill their exalted destiny in the Land-which-from-a-pure-metal-takes-its-name. Didn’t Adam feel shame at the thought that angels sporting blue and white cockades might witness his scandalous inertia? He wasn’t ashamed at all: he proceeded to locate himself in space and recognized that his position was terribly fraught with motion, since he was at number 303 Monte Egmont Street in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, Spanish America, southern hemisphere, planet earth, solar system, Macrocosm, and therefore was subject to incessant movement, to the vertiginous spiralling dance resulting from the triple movement of the earth, in its rotation on its axis, its orbit around the sun, and its flight through space along with the entire planetary system toward the constellation of Hercules at the speed of 1,170 kilometres a minute. So, what did he do, now that he felt himself to be a cosmic traveller and stellar dancer?
Ad
am Buenosayres began to look sympathetically at the objects that were keeping him company on the trip. Inclining his torso toward the floor, he saw beneath the bed the following still life: a porcelain chamberpot, with little flowers painted against an onion-green background; on the pot’s left, his threadbare bathroom slippers; on its right, his old shoes, yoked unidirectionally in sleep, submitting to the dictatorial form of the Adamic foot, grimy with gross materials, comical because they highlighted in their laughable extremities man’s animal nature, lyrical in their reference to the human traveller and the beauty of his earthly translations, dramatic inasmuch as they revealed the peril and penury involved in human movement. Righting his torso, Adam passed in review the pomegranate and the rose, the fraternal pipes, the books on their shelves. His gaze then paused on the print of the Cristo de Lezo being crucified between sun and moon, a family heirloom brought from Pamplona by his grandmother Ursula that had fallen to him as the eldest grandson. His eyes at last came to rest on a photograph of The Throne of Venus, fixed by four thumbtacks to the wall. The goddess was arising from the sea, two great women steadied her by the underarms, her wet hair fell in a wash over her shoulders, and her breasts lifted haughtily or shook themselves like two wet seagulls. To kiss those breasts must have been like kissing a weeping face. How much she looked like Solveig in her portrait as an adolescent, which he’d seen in the big drawing room in Saavedra! She was only fourteen years old, her skirt short, her hair in ringlets. Maybe she came home from school with cardboard polyhedrons, the tetrahedron red as fire, the octahedron blue as air, the icosahedron clear as water, and the cube black as earth. Or perhaps she recited in class, in front of the coloured map: “The Republic of Argentina borders on the north with Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil.” If only he’d known her before, from her first breath! Adam told himself he had a right to such poetic usury, because no one had seen her the way he had, naked in her reality, exalted in her mystery. To be sure, he would take her his Blue-Bound Notebook . . .
Adam Buenosayres: A Novel Page 6