Adam Buenosayres: A Novel

by Leopoldo Marechal

  – Other times, continued Samuel, I’m eating supper at home, and my mother . . .

  REBECCA TESLER: (Meek, lachrymose eyes, a blond wig that’s seen better days, work-roughened hands. She bends over the sewing machine under a small electric lamp.) Samoyel, your mother vork night and day so that you should study in Faculty of Medicine. These eyes hurt me because I look so much at sewing vork. But I see great doctor in my Samoyel and your mother’s eyes don’t hurt no more. Study, Samoyel! Doctor of Medicine, great career! Later you marry rich girl, big dowry for clinic and X-rays. Then big automobile, many clients in waiting-room . . .

  SAMUEL TESLER: (Head sinking into his soup bowl.) No, Mother! Never!20

  A fit of laughter shook the philosopher right down to his feet:

  – Do you get the picture? It’s two different worlds, putting the boots to each other!

  His laughter, following upon the sorrow of the characters just parodied by Samuel, was so dehumanized and outrageous that the visitor would have been aghast had he not intuited all the mortification implicit in Samuel’s raillery. So Adam Buenosayres said nothing, though his silence resonated with sadness. (“Remember! Remember your first verses, hidden in the desk drawer, like a delicious sin. And your father, the blacksmith, came upon them: he leafed through them in silence, put them back in your schoolboy’s folder, and said nothing as you trembled before him. And one day, Don Aquiles read your composition and pronounced: ‘Adam Buenosayres will be a poet,’ and all eyes turned to look at you, spellbound, the way they looked at pictures in the Natural History textbook. And as an adolescent you kept your secret, feeling shame before the men who weep or laugh under the sun, and timidity before the daughters of men who beneath the sun laugh or weep.”)

  But Samuel, fearing that an importunate meditation might rob him of the ideal spectator he had in his visitor, resumed his discourse:

  – As you can see, my situation is awkward in the city of the hen. That’s one problem. But there’s another problem: it’s a city full of temptations.

  – Hey, hey! cried Adam, his interest piqued.

  – Sometimes, declared Samuel, I’m sorely tempted to give up on the bleary-eyed donkey of philosophy and boot its ass over to Pipo the Wop’s corral.

  – No!

  Samuel Tesler adopted an air of mysterious reserve.

  – For some time now I’ve been visited by an angel of reinforced concrete.21

  – Really?

  The philosopher planted himself in front of his visitor. He balanced himself on one leg while raising the other behind him, piously joined his hands, and constructed a mechanical smile, his eyes mimicking ecstasy. Having struck the posture of the angel, he spoke thus:

  THE CEMENT ANGEL: (Voice at once silly and unctuous.) Samuel, worthy man! You are the last scion of a once pastoral race that sang the rosy-cheeked Eclogue. Why do you insist on living in the sinful city? (Admonitory.) Do you not fear the scourges of tuberculosis and offensive newspapers? (Didactic.) Remember that Argentina has some three million square kilometres, ready to receive the seed of bread and the sweat of human labour. (Imperious.) Get thee to the prairie, O illustrious little loafer! Make the plough march before thee; let the oxen of aromatic manure march before the plough; let the earth, before the oxen, open her fertile vagina! (Between suggestive and chaste.) Let there be a woman by your side, let her conceive fourteen look-alike children who will gulp down bitter mate and intone the National Anthem without mispronouncing a single word. (Lyrical.) Out there on the pampa of sturdy loins and beneath a sun not yet grown old and grey, the smell of your feet will be your song! (Dubious.) But even if you hold to atavistic propensities and disdain Ceres in favour of money-spinning Mercury, run to the plain anyway! Has it not been compared to a billiard table? Well then, on it thou shalt lay down the three balls.22

  Breaking the angel pose, Samuel let out a single guffaw so irresistible that his visitor gave in to the temptation to join him in exercising that privilege of human dignity.

  – Not a word of lie! insisted Samuel Tesler. The angel and I punch each other out every night.

  – Looks to me like your angel is a demon with a dangerously matrimonial bent, observed Adam Buenosayres, still laughing. Now I understand your little excursions to Saavedra! Which one of the girls is the angel’s candidate? (“Watch out!”)

  – Don’t worry, it isn’t Solveig Amundsen! replied the suddenly melancholy philosopher.

  He fell into an ecstatic silence, as though the cool shade of a woman had abruptly fallen over his kimono’d figure.

  (Samuel Tesler, philosopher, lectured his disciples in the Agora many times on the inanity of woman, who, being a mere fragment of the Adamic rib cage, could barely hide her naked metaphysical lack. Precisely this destitute nudity – he affirmed with abundant quotations both modern and classical – explained why women were eternally obsessed with getting dressed up at any cost and did not hesitate to strip carnivorous animals of their sleek furs, birds of their sublime plumage, reptiles of their scales, trees of their fibres and bark, worms of their glistening spit, and the earth of its precious metals and gems. Samuel Tesler, philosopher, did not censure this exploitation of the three kingdoms, meant to repair an absolutely irreparable nakedness, even though a certain cosmic pity, which never brought a tear to his eye, occasionally moved him to lament the sad lot of the lowlier creatures. He would point out in passing that Jehovah had tried in vain to cover a nudity which, though decked out with the entire visible Creation, remained for all that even more naked than before. But what the philosopher would not allow – and on this point he was intransigent to the point of anger – was that woman, after adorning herself with all the graces of the natural world, should do the same with the graces of the intellect, thanks to the despicable servility of poets in love or poetic lovers, whose truly laughable erotic fantasy was capable of embellishing their false idols with the attributes of goddesses, naiads, sylphs, and nereids. To combat this temptation to subordinate the subtle order to the gross order of existence, he taught his disciples an infallible trick he’d resorted to himself, consisting in the reverse operation. For example, imagining the divine Cleopatra picking her nose and making little snotballs, or Helen of Troy sitting on the john. Such prudence won for Samuel Tesler the recognition of his contemporaries, who had the following epitaph engraved on his tomb: “Traveller who goeth to Cytherea: here lies a man who never confused the Terrestrial Venus with the Celestial Venus.”)

  A prickly silence lay between the two interlocutors. Adam said nothing, but was thinking that Samuel was about to confide in him and that his confidence would oblige Adam to respond in kind, an eventuality Adam was trying to forestall for the sake of the “name under reserve” and the secret contained in the Blue-Bound Notebook. Samuel’s muteness was slightly alarming: true, the muscles of his face had relaxed, as though fatigued from maintaining the actor’s mask, but now they were rearranging themselves to suggest yet another expression, this one grave and morose.

  – Don’t worry, it isn’t Solveig Amundsen! he repeated at last. I’m going to tell all; I want to give you a lesson in frankness.

  – Me? asked Adam apprehensively.

  – Yes, you! said Samuel with energy. Do you think nobody notices you posing like Hamlet with a head cold every time the brat looks at you? Haven’t I seen you break out in an Othellian sweat whenever anyone mentions the brat’s name?

  – You’re crazy! Adam Buenosayres managed a laugh. (“Look out, look out!”)

  – And today, Thursday, why have you ruined a philosopher’s sleep? added Samuel. To fish for information about Saavedra and find out what I’ve seen or heard in that grotto of delights!

  Sharp as awls were the eyes that impaled the visitor, and Adam’s eyes wobbled under the weight of so much truth. The philosopher, sensitive to the other’s embarrassment, desisted from severity and switched to mercy:

  – No, brother! It’s time porteños overcame their stupid reserve. The thirty-two foreign
philosophers who dishonoured us with their visits, who took Buenos Aires’s pulse and inserted a thermometer into her anal orifice, finally came up with the diagnosis that our city is sad.23 Reasons? They didn’t give any. They were too busy stuffing themselves with our famous chilled beef. The gringos didn’t realize that Buenos Aires is an archipelago of men, all islands unto themselves.

  Samuel laughed malevolently:

  – What I can’t understand is how our great Macedonio, living in Buenos Aires, could come to this astounding metaphysical conclusion: “The world is an I-less soul-idarity.”24 God forgive him his neologisms. Under the same circumstances, I draw a very different conclusion.

  – What conclusion? the visitor wanted to know.

  – This one – round, musical, and meaningful: “The world’s a fartful I-ness.”

  He stopped a moment, apparently to meditate on the profundity of his maxim, then scrutinized his visitor as if to gauge how amazed he was by so much brilliance. And Adam Buenosayres’s wonderment must not have been scant, for Samuel Tesler returned to his theme:

  – Now then, he announced, between generous and bitter. I, a European, am going to take the initiative. I’ll speak to you with brutal frankness.25

  – It must be a hair-raising story, Adam laughed. How did your romance start?

  – Ah! growled Samuel. That’s what I ask myself, metaphysical animal that I am.

  He fell into a studied silence, behind which could be discerned a feverish preparation for his next histrionic move. Then, leaving the window, he picked up the chamber pot from his bedside table and stood there urinating into it, with a dignity Diogenes Laërtius would have attributed to his namesake, the one in the barrel. A harmonious lament issued from the urinal: a deep crescendo was followed by a sharp decrescendo, petering out in the final musical drops. The philosopher put the recipient back in its place, sat down on the unmade bed, and asked his visitor point-blank:

  – How would you define love, if I asked you to?

  – Oh no you don’t! protested Adam. Don’t come to me asking for definitions!

  – I’m not asking you for the kind of nitwitted definition you’d get out of Reader’s Digest. I’m looking for something transcendental, a definition in three bound volumes.

  – You’ve got some nerve if you’re expecting anything of the kind from me!

  Samuel Tesler lowered his head to signal his dismay.

  – O world, o world! he sighed. What has happened to sacred Philography?26

  – What if you give me your definition? proposed the visitor in a conciliatory spirit.

  Samuel Tesler raised a professorial index finger:

  – I won’t begin with a definition, but rather a methodology. Summarizing Plato’s ideas – although only on the plane of the earthly Venus, the real lollapalooza – I’ll say that love has two phases: the bedazzlement of the subject (me) upon seeing the beautiful form (Haydée Amundsen), followed by the anxious urge of the subject (me) to take possession of the beautiful form (Haydée Amundsen) in order to procreate in her beauty. Am I right?

  – Too right! grumbled Adam. That second phase smacks of metaphysical obscenity.

  – Anyway, Samuel reminded him, it’s clear that I, being well versed in the subject, had the right to be initiated according to the classical norms. Right or wrong?

  – Right.

  – Well then, declared the disconcerted philosopher, the thing happened to me backward!

  – What do you mean, backward? demanded the visitor, likewise in consternation.

  – I mean there was no initial bedazzlement, in spite of the methodology. I’m telling you, at first Haydée was nothing more to me than a topographical feature of Saavedra; she left me completely indifferent. In a word, I didn’t notice any symptoms betraying the penetration of one of the Imp’s arrows into the third space of my rib cage.

  – Then what?

  – Then, in the course of my metaphysical inquiry into primordial matter, I started observing all her gestures, poses, and grimaces. As you can see, it was merely out of scientific interest.

  – Poor innocent schmuck! exclaimed Adam on the verge of laughter.

  The kimono’d philosopher glared at him.

  – Are you going to let me talk? he said acrimoniously.

  The visitor recovered the serious composure befitting so thorny a subject, and Samuel Tesler proceeded:

  – Later I had the amazing realization that, whenever I saw her, Haydée always looked decidedly stupendous, as if she took on the fullness of her grace when she came before my eyes.

  – It had to happen! Adam murmured fatalistically.

  – Until one day I discovered a highly suggestive phenomenon. Every time the creature appeared to me in a happy mood, I felt terribly low. And vice versa: if I saw she was sad, I was idiotically and inexplicably thrilled.

  – And you still didn’t realize? Adam asked.

  Samuel Tesler smiled with pity.

  – Clearly, I’m not too quick on the uptake. Once the magnitude of the phenomenon had sunk in, I took stock of my heart. I opened books, consulted authors, and got to the root of my problem. And finally in my head there was a noonday light: I was up to my balls in love!

  – It was about time! laughed Adam. So then what?

  – Well, the first phase of the methodology having been altered, it was only right that I proceed to the second phase: to wit, the possession of the beautiful form.

  – Cynic!

  – Everything was inviting me to that pleasant exercise in practical Philography: the cement angel, my condition of a bored Faust, the aromatic nights in Saavedra . . .

  – And you haven’t yet declared yourself?

  – Not yet, responded the philosopher. It seems impossible. There are days when I arrive at her house feeling like a real Trovatore, with a mouthful of phrases that would melt a heart of stone: the declaration is imminent, I can feel it coming, and my face is taking on shades of Tristan and Isolde. And then, nothing. Because that’s the day the creature’s in a good mood, nowhere near the idyllic trance I need her to be in. On the other hand, if I get to her place feeling totally vulgar, the poor woman suffers a fit of romanticism that could turn a guy’s stomach.

  A dense cloud had spread across Samuel Tesler’s face as he divulged the details of his impossible entanglement. With downcast eyes, drawn mouth, and rampant nose, the philosopher looked as pathetic as a unicorn in love.

  – So what do you plan to do? asked Adam, perplexed.

  – I don’t know, answered the unicorn. Sometimes I try to say to hell with her, but it’s useless! By day her image possesses me, wreaks havoc in my thoughts, and drives me to the most shameful actions.

  Here the unicorn lowered his voice, as though weighed down by a secret ignominy.

  – Imagine this: I’ve gone so far as to write her a sonnet.

  – I can’t believe it! cried Adam scandalized.

  – I’m telling you: a sonnet. Me! Do you realize how ridiculous this is? I’m not going to read it to you, of course.

  – I guess not. That really would be going too far!

  – That’s not all, insisted Samuel. At night, I’m the one who possesses her image . . .

  He suddenly fell silent, his jaws clenched, nostrils flaring, eyes foggy, mouth dry – a demonic mask27 reflecting the glint of flames from ancient cities condemned to perish by fire. But it was all erased in an instant, and Samuel Tesler’s eyelids lowered like two dead leaves.

  – Does anybody suspect what’s going on? Adam asked.

  – Anybody? groaned Samuel. Just the whole neighbourhood! The kids in Saavedra use their slingshots on me, housewives point at me, dogs follow me around nipping at my heels. And as if all that weren’t enough, the cop on the corner has decided to shadow me. I sense him right behind me at night when I take a walk along their block or stop in front the Amundsen house.

  – He probably takes you for a chicken thief, laughed Adam. It’s dangerous to wander the byways of
Saavedra with an undeclared love in your gullet. If I were you, I’d show up at the house as an official suitor and get it over with.

  – Yes, sometimes I decide I should do it. But my well-oiled imagination gets me looking at the future consequences of such a drastic step.

  – Such as?

  – First of all, the scandal among my tribe – lapels being rent, weepy Hebrew elegies being intoned. Then I, Samuel Tesler, deserter of my people and my gods, see myself inside a tuxedo rented from the Casa Martínez, climbing out of a limo in front of a church that isn’t mine; I’m surrounded by a mob of dolts saying nasty things about me, and by street urchins shrieking for pennies. The bride’s mother is blubbering like a beached whale, and her relatives stare at me with stony eyes, while clutching a little steel coffer with the guarantee of the girl’s maidenhood inside, duly signed by two public notaries. Depressing, don’t you think?

  – Brutal! protested Adam. When you look at it that way, poetry doesn’t stand a chance.

  But Samuel Tesler wasn’t flinching.

  – No, that’s not what the city expects of us. Buenos Aires is dying of vulgarity because it lacks a romantic tradition. It needs enriching with legends! I am right or am I wrong?

  – It all depends.

  – Wait’ll you see! exclaimed the philosopher, warming up now. I’ve got dozens of projects in my head!

  – For instance?

  – Among others, I’m toying with the idea of promoting lovelorn suicide. Not the bourgeois, pedestrian type, of course; I’m talking about the original, sublime suicide. Take your case, for example. If you want to help me out, you could hang yourself from an ombú28 in Saavedra, not before nailing to the tree trunk an epistle in rhyming verse (it’s gotta be a masterpiece), wherein you explain to the police the reasons for your fatal decision.

  – No thanks, Adam excused himself modestly. For now, that’s not really my thing.

  – Come on! What would it cost you?

  – It’s just that I don’t like ombú trees. They say their shade is unwholesome.

  – Slander! I’ve slept many a time in the shade of an ombú.