Adam Buenosayres: A Novel

by Leopoldo Marechal

  The eyes of the dragon – his docile, melancholy eyes – pleaded for a response. Adam was still uneasy, but determined to stick with him through all his transmutations, even if they outnumbered those of Ovid and Apuleius put together. So he answered:

  – Bah! I don’t think it’s because you’re behind with the rent. Beneath the abundant boobs of Doña Francisca there beats a heart of gold, believe me. It’s her housewife morality that’s offended by your unholy habits.

  Samuel Tesler listened to his visitor’s argument in disdainful silence, his mouth bitter, but his eyes meek and sad.

  – Let’s take a closer look at Doña Francisca, persisted Adam in a grave tone. Let’s come down to earth, Eye of Baal! Doña Francisca had a husband – may he rest in peace – who used to get up every morning at five and go to bed every night punctually at ten. Doña Francisca’s spouse’s bowels – and the whole neighbourhood knew this – never failed to move at precisely six-thirty; you could set your watch by it.

  – And could such a jewel of a man have died? an incredulous Samuel interrupted.

  – He died prematurely, answered Adam sadly. Whom the gods love die young.10

  The look the philosopher gave his visitor was half approving, half anxious. In fact, he was regarding him as he would a disciple who was getting a little too big for his britches. Which only encouraged Adam, who continued:

  – By her mathematical mate, Doña Francisca conceived two sons, Castor and Pollux, who maintain their father’s noble line. Both keep toothbrushes in the bathroom; Castor has a blue one, Pollux a dark red one. Faithful to the principles of modern hygiene, the two champions purge themselves “religiously” at the change of every season. It’s a known fact that the Company raised Castor’s salary less than two months ago, but it’s equally true that Pollux will be promoted up to Management as soon as his boss kicks the bucket. Unfortunately (and here Adam shook his head in dismay) the intellectual harmony between these two upright young men is not as perfect as their aggrieved mother might wish. They’re both cinephiles, but Castor’s favourite star is Bessie Love, while Pollux prefers Gloria Swanson. Fanatical soccer fans, Castor stands by the famous blue jersey of the Racing team; Pollux roots for the invincible San Lorenzo. Free of the scourge of illiteracy, Castor reads Crítica and Pollux La Razón.”11

  His benevolence exhausted, Samuel Tesler was showing signs of a vast discontent.

  – But don’t get the idea, Adam advised him, that they’re a pair of innocent duffers. No! They also pay tribute to the night, to frenzy, to dissipation. Every Saturday night Castor and Pollux observe the following program. From nine till half-past midnight, movies at the Rivoli. At one in the morning, homage to Venus at the goddess’s temple on Frías Street. At two in the morning, chocolate y churros at the café Las Rosas. At two-thirty, back to the maternal hearth and home for restorative sleep.

  His arduous portrayal of these characters finished, the visitor looked to Samuel for the praise he felt he’d earned. But the philosopher gave no sign of indulgence.

  – Nice morality! he scoffed, his brow jutting forward in menace. A bunch of bourgeois slobs insulated in fat and conventionality!

  And with all the dignity that his underclothes would allow, he added:

  – I know the type! They seize the day by force and stuff it chock-a-block with their schemes and scams, their shouts and their farts. And then they’re surprised if the philosopher, excluded from the day, takes shelter in the sweet beneficence of the night!

  He levelled a threatening finger at his visitor:

  – Answer me this, since you’ve seen at least the cover of the odd book of metaphysics. What is the bird of the philosophers?

  – The owl, Effendi, answered Adam.

  – That’s right, the owl. The nocturnal bird par excellence.

  And placing his right hand on his breast, he solemnly declared:

  – Well, then, I am the owl.

  Surprised but polite, Adam Buenosayres held out his hand to the owl who, with minimal fanfare, had just presented himself as such. But the owl was busy with the remainder of a half-smoked cigarette that now drooped from his lower lip, trying to light it and putting his nose in serious jeopardy in the process.

  – And what is the most grossly diurnal bird? he asked once he’d achieved combustion. The bird that is fat and graceless like no other?

  Adam didn’t answer.

  – The hen! exclaimed the philosopher. The perfect symbol for Buenos Aires!

  His eyes frolicked in a cruel dance. A deceitful smile crossed his belligerent features. Thus jovial and monstrous, Samuel exhibited a third face, no less formidable than the other two.

  – The City of the Owl Against the City of the Hen, he recited cryptically.

  – What’s that? Adam wanted to know.

  – It’s the title of my work. I pluck the hen and toss it into the boiling pot of my analysis. I add the young cob of melancholic corn and a lively sprig of sarcasm . . .

  – Altogether, a real criollo hash, said Adam scornfully. That’s our literature, all right!

  – You mean yours, you bunch of mulattos!12 corrected the philosopher, visibly piqued. In mine, you’ll see a cackling people who busily scratch and peck at the earth, night and day, never remembering sad Psyche, never turning their eyes heavenward, deaf to the music of the spheres.

  By the time he’d finished this declamation, the malignant line had reappeared on his forehead.

  – To conclude my thesis, I propose that a dun-grey chicken replace the dove of the Holy Spirit on the Buenos Aires coat-of-arms.13 And to top it off, I suggest that Doña Francisca and her Pythagorean crapper of a husband be declared historical monuments, and that they be provided with their own water closet so that visitors won’t piss on them. As author of such a useful work, I ask for only one thing in return: that Irma be immediately banished from Buenos Aires, packed off to her native Catamarca,14 shipping prepaid.

  Seated at the foot of the bed and laughing abundantly, Adam Buenosayres warmly applauded the philosopher’s thesis. But Samuel appeared insensible to his guest’s fervour. On the contrary, whether because he hadn’t yet forgiven him for the tirade about Castor and Pollux or because he was having trouble digesting that “criollo hash” so irreverently served up by his visitor, Samuel kept dolefully quiet.

  – Poor Irma, exclaimed Adam. To cast out such a defenceless creature!

  The philosopher’s jaw tightened, his mouth pursed in a bitter sneer:

  – Defenceless? With her damned tangos and her buckets she’s capable of waking up every last reader of Teutonic philosophy, asleep since the days of old Mannie Kant.

  As if moved by an ancient rancour, he added:

  – That creature must have the devil in her. One of these days I’m going to wring her neck.

  – Poor Irma! insisted Adam. What does she know about philosophers? To her, Kant is probably a Jewish pharmacist on Triunvirato Street.

  Samuel Tesler was looking at him now with waggish curiosity.

  – She’s a flower of nature, Adam concluded. Let us breathe her sylvan fragrance.

  A tremendous guffaw shook the philosopher’s rugged bust; the straight line of malice joined the sinuous, sea-voyage line, etching a strange glyph. (“Look out!” Adam cried out in his soul.)

  – It seems to me, said Samuel, that you’ve gone a little further than breathing her, O Poetaster!15

  Adam made no reply. (It was true, he’d said her eyes were like two mornings together.) But the philosopher, sensing an uncomfortable memory in his guest’s silence, didn’t let up:

  – What I just don’t get, is how you can be fooling around with Irma while at the same time claiming to be in love with Solveig Amundsen.

  (“Heads up, here it is!”)

  He looked at Adam askance:

  – So you give Irma your body and Solveig your soul? It’s a case of proportional distribution quite typical among the scoundrels who tote a lute around in this vale of Irmas.
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  The “name under reserve” had been pronounced, and Adam Buenosayres understood the battle was imminent. How painful that the name had passed the impure lips of the dragon! The name he himself hadn’t dared utter, not even in his Blue-Bound Notebook. But what to do? Tackle the dragon and tear from his mouth the sweet name he’d profaned? He thought about it a moment, then decided that if he attacked, he wouldn’t find out what the dragon could and must reveal to him.

  – That’s ridiculous! he protested at last. A mere girl! Anyway, I haven’t been to the Amundsens’ for many a Thursday now.16

  On the offensive, he added:

  – Speaking of the Amundsens, I hear you’ve been skulking around that house full of girls at all hours. They say you haven’t missed a single tea in Saavedra, and that for some time now – I can scarcely credit it! – you’ve had a manic attack of personal hygiene.

  Samuel Tesler smiled, disdainful and bored, but something vital stirred beneath his armour.

  – Yes, he confessed, I like the landscape in Saavedra, that broken terrain where the city comes to an end.

  He obviously wanted to change the subject, for he added right away:

  – And speaking of Saavedra, I haven’t seen any of those fat-assed angels that your friend Schultz says hatch new neighbourhoods.

  With those words, the philosopher swung his legs over the edge of the bed, anxiously looked for his slippers, and stood up, thus offering a new perspective of his mutable nature: his gigantic torso was now perched atop two dwarfish legs, short, thick, and bandy. At the same time, his Chinese kimono was displayed in all its splendour.

  At long last, the moment has arrived to describe this remarkable robe, with all its inscriptions, allegories, and figures. For if Hesiod sang of laborious Hercules’s escutcheon, and Homer of the deserting shield of Achilles, how could I not describe the never-yet-seen, never-evenimagined kimono of Samuel Tesler? If someone were to object that an escutcheon is not a dressing gown, I would reply that a dressing gown can nevertheless be an escutcheon, as in the case of Samuel Tesler – that unsung paladin who for lack of a steed rode a double bed and whose sole act of chivalry was a dream-state he sustained in dogged self-defence against the world and its rigours.

  The kimono, egg-yellow in colour, presented two faces: front and back, ventral and dorsal, diurnal and nocturnal. On the right flank of the ventral face were depicted rampant neocriollo dragons furiously biting their own tails. On the left flank, a field of ripe wheat seemed to billow beneath the dragons’ panting breath. In the wheatfield, a farmer with a kind face sat cross-legged, smoking. His Chinese-style mustachios hung in two long shoots down to his feet. The right-hand strand was tied around the big toe of his left foot, and the left-hand strand around the big toe of his right foot. On the farmer’s forehead was emblazoned the following heraldic device: “Man’s first care is to save his own skin.”17 The pectoral area of the kimono showed a citizen blissfully placing his vote in a gleaming rosewood ballot-box, while a grey angel whispered in his ear. The voter’s breast boasted the legend: Superhomo sum! In the abdominal region of the kimono, the figure of Dame Republic was embroidered with threads of a thousand colours; she wore a Phrygian bonnet and blue peplum; her breasts were bounteous, her cheeks rosy, and she poured gifts from a great cornucopia over a delirious multitude. At the level of her mons pubis could be seen the four Cardinal Virtues lying dead in as many funeral coaches on their way to the Chacarita Cemetery; the funeral procession was formed by the seven Capital Sins, who wore monocles and smoked triumphal cigars, banker-style. Also on the front of the kimono appeared the preamble of the Argentine Constitution written in uncial characters from the sixth century; the twelve signs of the Zodiac, represented by the country’s flora and fauna; a table for multiplication and another for subtraction, both identical; the ninety-eight amorous positions from the Kama Sutra, very vividly rendered, along with an advertisement for Doctor X, a specialist in venereal disease; a horse-racing schedule, a cookbook, and an eloquent prospectus for “MotoGut,” a popular laxative.

  When Samuel Tesler turned around, the dorsal or nocturnal face of the kimono was exhibited. It was graced with the design of a tree, its branches extending outward in the four cardinal directions, then turning back so that their extremities joined in the leafy treetop. Two serpents wound themselves around the trunk of the tree. One serpent spiralled downward, its head reaching the roots, while the other ascended and hid its head in the treetop, where twelve resplendent suns hung like fruit. Four rivers gushed forth from from a spring at the foot of the tree, flowing north, south, east, and west; Narcissus leaned over this spring, contemplating the water and slowly turning into a flower.

  But as I was saying, Samuel Tesler had just stood up. He put out his cigarette in an ashtray, crushing it with his thumbnail, then went to the blackboard and carefully wiped it clean of the notes for the twenty-seventh. Finally he went to the window. His eyes looked out over the city as it laughed naked under the sun’s harpoon. As though in the grip of an idée fixe, he raised an eloquent arm, taking in zinc rooftops, brick terraces, distant bell-towers, and the tall stacks smoking in the wind:

  – There you have Buenos Aires! The bitch that devours her pups in order to grow.

  Shouts and laughter from outside cut his speech short.

  – Who’s shouting out there? asked the philosopher with knitted brow.

  Adam pointed to a building under construction, opposite them:

  – The Italian construction workers.

  – And what’s the Italic beast laughing about?

  – Your kimono.

  And so they were. Up there on their scaffolding in the sky, the workmen had left off munching their lunch of raw onions and were excitedly gesticulating in celebration of the kimono and its bizarre designs. Samuel Tesler, enigmatic, stared at them and made the following Masonic sign: placing his left forearm inside the elbow joint of his right arm and jolting it upright, he then emphatically shook the vertical appendage two or three times and anxiously waited for a reaction. The Italians immediately responded in kind, and the philosopher, satisfied, burst out laughing: they had understood one another. Then, addressing his guest, the construction workers, the city and the world, Samuel Tesler spoke thus:

  – There lies Buenos Aires, the city whose symbol is the chicken, not so much for its ineffable grease as for the elevation of its spiritual flight, comparable only to that of the ample bird. I wonder now, and I put the question to you, my happy fellow citizens: What can a philosopher do in the city of the early-rising hen?

  Samuel Tesler paused a moment, and the construction workers applauded, though their adulation came ominously supplemented by a chorus of raspberries. Samuel Tesler nevertheless gestured his profound gratitude. Then, raising his hand to his face as if to adjust an actor’s mask, he continued in a tone of darkest melancholy:

  – It is twelve noon, and at this solemn hour two million greedy stomachs are receiving the chewed foodstuffs sent them by their fortunate owners. Food which, as you know, will be transformed into blood and faecal material. The latter will in turn pass through an ingenious plumbing system and go on to enrich the waters of the “eponymous river,” as Ricardo Rojas18 would say; while the blood, conveniently oxygenated in the lungs, will run through the generous arteries of my fellow citizens. And two million brains will think that life is just amazingly hunky-dory. And so, what will the philosopher do in the city of the hen?

  Samuel Tesler paused again, and the workers filled the silence with another ovation. But the philosopher no longer deigned to notice them. He cupped his right ear with his hand and, breath held, mimed that he was listening long and hard.

  – The clock has struck twelve! he exclaimed at last. Ah, what strange music comes to my ears this noonday! It’s the maxillary music of four million jaws joining and separating in accord with the harmonious laws of mastication. An hour from now, four million arms will return to their labour. They’ll raise the facade of the city higher a
nd ever higher, and sink the roots of the city ever deeper. They’ll strengthen the city’s kidneys, adorn her face, place shoes on her feet. They’ll stuff her pockets using the clawed hand of commerce and the calloused hand of industry. They’ll build outward – out from the skin, out from the eyes, outwardly paying lip service – all that can be touched, tasted, heard, and smelled. Then night will fall, and two million exhausted bodies will fall to earth. Two million horizontal bodies, beneath the sleepless gaze of God, will sleep noisily, rending the conjugal sheets with their farts. And who will watch over the city of the hen? A handful of select minds who, wakeful alongside their sleeping brothers, are meditating on the City of the Owl, the city within that cannot be seen or smelled or touched.19

  Samuel Tesler fell silent, his facial muscles suddenly relaxing. Through his cracked mask, however, could be glimpsed a shadow of real pity.

  – How you exaggerate! said Adam, chortling.

  – It’s the pure, unalloyed truth, Samuel assured him. I don’t know about your encounters with the city of the hen, but mine are absolutely hilarious.

  The philosopher began to mimic the voice, the look, the gestures, and even the clothes of various individuals as he named them:

  – For example, here I am, studying Hegel, and my father comes in: ABRAHAM TESLER: (Moses-like beard, furtive eyes, nose like the leap of a lion, nickel spectacles. He wears his ancient heavy frock-coat from Odessa and matching coachman’s top-hat.) My son, you vaste your time and my money on philosophies! Vy philosophies and not commerce, my dear Samoyel? You put up little stand for selling hats in Triunvirato Street. Three months later you rent a nice place with windows for display. Two years later you buy own house; five years later . . .

  SAMUEL TESLER: (Forehead bulging with genius, dignity in his eyes, greatness in his bearing. Interrupts his father with an Olympian gesture.) That’s enough, old man! My mind is made up. (Exit Abraham Tesler, rending the lapel of his frock-coat with one sweep of his hand.)