Adam Buenosayres: A Novel

by Leopoldo Marechal

  The door opened. Irma flew in like a gust of wind, performing a balancing act with the breakfast tray. She threw it onto the table, looked for Adam’s eyes. Seeing herself ignored, she scolded saucily: “What a long face!” She slammed the door as she left. Her laughter tinkled outside. And Adam had said her eyes were like two mornings together.

  Chapter 2

  Hesitant, his soul hanging from a thread and his heart thumping like a drum, Adam tapped his knuckles against the door of the other’s room. With bated breath, he listened a long while for some sign of life. But a hard silence reigned within that cave, as though room number five were not a hollow cube but a solid mass. Clenching his fist, Adam knocked again, then put his ear to the door; again the only response was a silence that seemed to revel in its very perfection.

  “Koriskos answers not,” Adam said inwardly. “Koriskos sleeps.”

  Determined that an enterprise so well begun should not fail, the visitor placed his hand on the doorknob and exclaimed:

  – Open, Sesame!

  The door swung open without a sound, and the visitor slipped into the cave.

  – Close, Sesame!

  The door closed ponderously behind him.

  It is not unlikely that at this point the reader, facing an adventure so ominously begun, may be overcome by anxiety and abandon my novel in search of gentler climes. But if the blood of San Martín or Cabral1 still flows in his veins, and if the armour of his forebears hasn’t yet succumbed to the rust of centuries or the greed of dusty antique dealers, the reader will slough off his weakness and ask me: So, what was inside room number five? My answer: total obscurity, palpitating shadow, living darkness; as if the last night, hunted down by the day and its dogs, had taken refuge, trembling with fright, inside room number five.

  (Samuel Tesler, philosopher, was born in Odessa2 beside the Pontus Euxinos, a happy and highly portentous circumstance that in his opinion destined him ineluctably to classical studies. Although he more than once insinuated that the supernatural was involved in his advent to this world, Samuel Tesler was not, like Pallas Athena, born from the majestic skull of Zeus, or even, like flinty Mars, thanks to an unusual percussion in the maternal vulva, but rather in the straightforward, natural way of ordinary folk. True, his enormous infantile head – the formation of which had so leached his mother of calcium that she lost most of her teeth – had resisted for long hours against crossing the sorrowful threshold into the world. In the end, it yielded to the heroic forceps, whose deployment left a bloody mark on each of his temples, two pitiful roses that his mother used to kiss and anoint with her tears. As for the manner of his breastfeeding, Samuel Tesler never denied having managed, albeit with great difficulty, to wring some juice from his mother’s desiccated dugs, and yet whenever he broached this subject, he always intimated the collaboration of some she-wolf or nymph at whose kindly breast he suckled alongside Jupiter. Historians, in spite of their abundant reticence on many matters, all coincide in affirming that Samuel Tesler did not undertake in his cradle any exceptional labour, having neither strangled the serpent of Hercules, nor squared the circle, nor even solved a third-degree equation with nine variables. On the other hand, it is well established that, possessed of a truly extraordinary diuretic capacity, he applied himself to wetting countless diapers, which his grandmother Judith hung to dry by the big stove in the kitchen. Even though his father was only a humble mender of violins and his mother a meek spinner of hemp, Samuel Tesler claimed to descend in a direct line from the patriarch Abraham and King Solomon; and whenever anyone cast doubt on the priestly character of his lineage, he pointed to his furrowed brow and swore up and down he could feel there the two horns of the initiates. He was barely five years old when he emigrated with his tribe and their gods to the lands of the River Plate, where he grew in ugliness and wisdom, scouted out landscapes, studied customs, got a feel for the people and, thanks to his amazing mimetic talents, came to consider himself a native of our pampas, even going so far as to wonder, when looking at himself in the mirror, if he wasn’t the spitting image of Santos Vega.3)

  The door closed behind him; Adam Buenosayres ventured a step into the blackness. He’d have gone further if he hadn’t at that moment recalled the wisdom of famous travellers in the night – Montecristo, Rocambole, and other paladins of our childhood – who always allowed their senses to adapt to the darkness. Heeding this useful lesson, Adam Buenosayres did not rashly continue forward, but stood stock-still and sent his five senses on ahead. The first to be assaulted was his olfactory sense: the thick stench of an environment corrupted by its relations with animal life, either through the exchange of gases between animal and atmosphere, or the fermentation of rancid sweat, or the biodegradation of urine imperfectly controlled during expulsion or too long stagnant in those receptacles that human dignity, always jealous of its prerogatives, has seen fit to call “chamber pots.” A moment later his keen sense of hearing picked up the rhythm of deep and laborious breathing in the depths of the lair; its alternate movement, in musical notation, went like this: inhalation in crescendo and sharp snore, exhalation in diminuendo and bass snore.

  Anyone else might have trembled upon hearing the dragon breathe, but not Adam Buenosayres. Listening to the bellows wheezing in the dark, he reflected on the innocent vulnerability of sleeping persons and felt tenderness at his foe’s defencelessness. He might even have fallen down the slippery slope of tears but for a sudden break in the concert of respirational music. The dragon, still invisible, had abruptly turned over in bed and unleashed a gigantic explosion of flatulence.

  “Koriskos salutes me,” thought Adam, “with salvos from the artillery!”

  Now used to the dark, his eyes discerned the layout of room number five. In front of him, a rectangular window was protected by a heavy curtain against the assault of light. To his right, the baleful face of a mirror. On his left, what looked like written characters traced in white chalk against a background of absolute black. He began to register shreds of an unknown perfect whiteness, then the spectrum of greys, and later the corpulence of furniture lurking in the corners of the room like domestic beasts. Sure, now, of the terrain he was invading, the visitor headed for the window and yanked open the curtain, opening the floodgates to the light. Turning his eyes back to the cave’s interior, he saw Samuel Tesler on his bed in a laterally recumbent position and intelligently oriented toward the earth’s magnetic pole. Samuel’s eyelids flapped against the sudden sunlight, strong as acid, and an enormous sigh seemed to deflate his entire body. He frowned. He smacked his lips as if tasting a drop of vinegar. Then, with a heave of his mountainous hip beneath the dismal covers, he rolled over and continued snoring, backside to the day.

  (Although none of the philosopher’s written doctrine confirms this, the oral tradition preserved by his disciples maintains that Samuel Tesler lived in the world as if in a deplorable hotel where – he sadly alleged – he was taking a total-rest cure in an attempt to recover from the fatigue of having been born. When queried as to the origin of this evidently intractable fatigue, the philosopher put it down to the cumulative effect of his numerous reincarnations, beginning with the partition of the original Hermaphrodite. He solemnly declared he’d been a fakir in Calcutta, a eunuch in Babylon, a dog-shearer in Tyre, a flautist in Carthage, a priest of Isis in Memphis, a whore in Corinth, a moneylender in Rome, and an alchemist in medieval Paris. He was once asked, in a Villa Crespo café called Las Rosas, if a job wouldn’t assuage the tedium of so many different transmigrations. Samuel Tesler answered that work was not an “essential” virtue of human nature; the almighty Elohim had created man only for otium poeticum,4 he maintained, and work was an “accidental” impairment to our nature brought about by the wilful “separated rib”; and seeing as how he, Samuel Tesler, was a man who kept his conduct grounded in the essential, he was not about to lower himself to a chance accident that reminded him of that unpleasant episode in Paradise. Another time, it is told, on the terrace of Cir
o Rossini’s restaurant, a bedspread salesman engaged Samuel Tesler in the tired old debate of the Cricket versus the Ant. The philosopher, not without first expressing his disdain for both invertebrate animals and bedspread salesmen, heroically defended the Cricket, to whose health he drank three glasses of Sicilian wine. And since the salesman insisted on knowing what he thought to be the ideal economy, Samuel Tesler replied that it was the economy of the bird, the only terrestrial animal that can convert ten grains of bird-seed into three hours of music and a milligram of manure.)

  Adam Buenosayres couldn’t bring himself to wake up the sleeping man. Instead, he looked at the clutter surrounding him. On the table lay a large book, wide open like a mouth. In front of the austere mirror, four chairs faced one another in a bizarre arrangement, as though a conclave of ghosts had been sitting in them the night before. A notebook lying open on the floor exhibited the dragon’s vigorous handwriting. Over here, a couple of discarded socks still held the form of the human foot; over there, a faded rag blindfolded the lone eye of the bedside lamp. And books were everywhere, in piles on the floor, stacked up against walls. Monographs strewn as if by a lion’s paw. Tomes whose rent bindings bled knowledge. Folio-sized volumes groaning like beasts of burden. A blackboard set up by the window seemed to redeem the decorum of the lair; on its surface Adam Buenosayres could now read the characters that had looked mysterious in the dark:

  APRIL 27

  1 p.m. – A brilliant idea about catharsis in ancient tragedy. The aestheticizers at Ciro’s will shit bricks.

  2:20 p.m. – The laundry woman brings me a paltry bill ($1.75). I perform a dialectical miracle and revive her wilted hopes that she’ll collect. She’s Galician Spanish,5 a race given to lyricism: she’s dreaming if she thinks she’ll get the better of me!

  3 p.m. – Sexual discomfort and fleeting sublimation of the quo usque tandem6 (preventive reading of Plato).

  3:30 p.m. – Is Plato’s Demiurge a poor Italian construction worker or the hypostasis of the Divinity manifesting itself as the efficient cause of Creation?

  4 p.m. – Melancholy for unknown reasons, maybe hunger (must keep a couple of chocolate bars on hand).

  4:45 p.m. – If I take the yod out of the word Avir, it becomes Aor. (How the greasy beards in the Synagogue would tremble if they knew!)7

  There was nothing more on the blackboard, so Adam Buenosayres turned his eyes to the master of so much wisdom and studied him with renewed interest. It must be said that Samuel Tesler slept without visible signs of pride, but without undue modesty either. His face was expressionless, like that of an extinguished streetlamp or a dead man, its entire expanse shiny with an oily sweat produced, no doubt, by the exertion of sleep. Two clear lines were sketched across a forehead as broad as a hemisphere. One was sinuous, denoting a sea voyage. The other was the straight line of benign malice. The arcs of his eyebrows pointed menacingly at his enormous nose (custom-built, according to Samuel, for breathing the divine pneuma); the proboscis, as if intimidated, looked like wanting to take leave of its face, perhaps for a landscape more accommodating of its sierra-like grandeur. From his half-open mouth, snorting and musical, the dragon’s breath coursed like an invisible torrent between twin rows of gold-filled teeth.

  “Koriskos snores,” said Adam to himself. “But he must perforce awaken. He is summoned by the day, by reality, by the blackboard.”

  Putting hesitation behind him, he shook Samuel by the shoulders:

  – Wake up!

  Samuel Tesler blinked with the dazed air of a fish hauled up from great depths.

  – Eh? he sputtered between sighs. What?

  – Get up, illustrious professor of sleep!

  Samuel Tesler struggled to sit up, still not quite awake, and clamped foggy eyes on his interpellator. Upon recognizing Adam, he fell back against the gutted cushions.

  – Quit messing around, he begged. I’m dog tired!

  Without insisting further, Adam Buenosayres waited for Samuel to come around. And he didn’t have to wait long, for the dragon, yawning noisily, gave himself a good stretch until his bones achieved a euphonious crack.

  – What time is it? he finally asked in resignation.

  – Twelve o’clock on the nose, Effendi, replied a ceremonious Adam.

  – It can’t be!

  – Eye of Baal, that’s the exact time!

  – Hmm! What day is it?

  – Thursday, Sahib.

  As Adam Buenosayres, laughing, flung open the two window panes, the philosopher sat up again, flattered by the Oriental honorifics, music to his ears, no doubt. The bedcovers receded like the waters of the sea, at once revealing the dragon’s incredible torso, which in turn was swaddled by an even more unbelievable Chinese kimono, and released a whiff of rank jungle beast.

  (“Twice only does the just man bathe: at birth and at death.” Thus, the rigorous doctrine professed by Samuel Tesler on the subject of hygiene. Concerning his own case, he claimed to live in perfect peace with his conscience, for he did not in the least doubt that his pious progenitors had complied with the first ritual bath, nor that his kith and kin would perform the second one, lest they annoy Elohim. As for prenuptial washing, the philosopher made no objection, even though in his opinion the just man ought to be content, in vexatious matters of this sort, with the abstract odour of decency. It once happened that a few of Samuel’s adepts visited his cubicle and saw there a green-, yellow-, and blue-striped bathrobe. Shocked and alarmed, they suspected apostasy. But the philosopher set their minds at ease, telling them that just as the ascetics of old used to contemplate a skull to disabuse themselves of worldly illusions, so he put before his eyes that useless garment as a reminder of the dishonour incurred when ablutions are performed in adulation of the human body. He felt a religious dread for water and kept himself at a reverential distance, for he considered it divine, the third offspring of impalpable Ether. Hence, its use for menial purposes he found painfully profanatory. Asked if it was permissible to drink water, Samuel Tesler held that only the gods could rightfully imbibe that venerable liquid, and that man, lowly insect of the earth, ought to limit himself to wine, beer, mead, and other humble products of human industry.)

  As I was saying, Samuel Tesler righted his huge torso, crossed his arms, fixed his calm gaze on Adam, and apparently savoured the silence that sprang up between him and his visitor.

  – Okay, he said finally. Why are you here bothering me in the wee hours of the morning?

  Samuel’s serene face, his placid gesture, his mild voice, were not enough to put Adam at ease. He knew only too well the Protean virtues of that face, its wondrous capacity for metamorphosis, and how terribly quickly the dragon could rearrange his facial muscles to compose one face, then destroy it in a single breath to compose another, according to the changing circumstances of the battle. Knowing this, Adam Buenosayres decided to play along and humour him.

  – The wee hours of the morning? he replied, feigning astonishment. The San Bernardo clock is striking noon!

  – And what do your damned clocks have to do with me? Samuel protested sweetly.

  Adam hesitated a moment. How to suggest to the dragon the subtle motive for his visit, without pronouncing the “name under reserve” or exposing his secret to the curiosity of another?

  – The day is claiming you! he said at last in a solemn tone. The new day, too, wants to be on your blackboard!

  – The day is claiming me? asked Samuel with dreadful innocence.

  His dead eyes suddenly brightened: the straight line of benign malice deepened on his forehead, and a dangerous smile curved his lips. (“Watch out!” thought Adam.)

  – Thursday, mused the philosopher. Of course, of course! It has to be Thursday. If anyone should be called Thursday, it’s the man who woke me up with no consideration whatsoever.8

  “Look out, look out!” said Adam to himself again. Samuel’s playing so much on the word Thursday had him on tenterhooks. Could he have guessed? He couldn’t have, he
was still half asleep! Nevertheless, without letting his concern show, Adam put himself on alert. But now he watched as Samuel’s features were radically transformed. The fire in his eyes went out; the malicious line faded on his brow; his lips were expressionless. Now the philosopher showed him a different face, the sad and noble bust of the martyr.

  – Yes, yes, he sighed. It’s God’s will that you can’t get any sleep in this bloody house.

  Sprawled over the pillows, remorseful, easy of word, severe in mimicry, he continued:

  – Do you think it’s right that just because I owe the Fat Lady a lousy three months’ rent, I shouldn’t be allowed to sleep in peace, as did all my ancestors from Pythagoras down to our friend Macedonio Fernández?9