– Okay, an ombú then, Adam conceded. But when you get right down to it, your infatuation with Haydée Amundsen makes you just as good a candidate for the scaffold and the epistle.
– But I don’t know how to rhyme, alleged the philosopher, visibly saddened.
From this point forth, the Visited and the Visitor, having laid their arms aside, knew the taste of peace, the ease of a language without sharp edges, and the nobility of hands reaching out to one another. The dialogue deepened as Visited and Visitor penetrated further into the domain of good sense. Gently obliged to make a confession, the Visitor exposed the scant reality of his love. With a passing reference to a mysterious Blue-Bound Notebook, he confessed that his love had only the fragile essence of an ideal construct, although this was based on a flesh-and-blood woman. Upon hearing this, and after exacting from him certain bits of information with the utmost tact, the Visited asked the Visitor if he wasn’t making incursions into the realm of Celestial Aphrodite. And since the Visitor wasn’t sure about that, the Visited proceeded to convince him of his happy hypothesis by means of an eloquent display of examples he claimed to have drawn from ancient literatures, both Oriental and Occidental, wherein discourse on divine love was so frequently couched in the language of human love that it bordered on gibberish. Convinced by such solid documentation, the Visitor admitted he was fashioning a heavenly woman on the basis of an earthly woman. The Visited, attentive to the metaphysical work of the Visitor, asked if the terrestrial woman was still indispensable to his labours of sublimation. And since the Visitor answered yes, the Visited opened wide the floodgates of his discretion to announce that he bore a message from a beauty whom the angels of paradise called Solveig Amundsen, and that this same belle dame had displayed a truly otherworldly benevolence by bidding him communicate to the Visitor that his presence was greatly missed in the gardens of Saavedra. To convey the pleasure that inundated the Visitor upon hearing this gratifying news is a task beyond the style of mortal man. In spite of the caution induced by his immeasurable hopelessness, the Visitor asked the Visited if the message from the lady fair was an expression of her immense courtesy or perhaps of a deeper feeling that the Visited might have noticed. When the Visited answered that in his opinion the second hypothesis was more plausible, the Visitor felt he was blessed among the Blessed. Whereupon Visited and Visitor agreed to meet in Saavedra that very afternoon.
Samuel Tesler, philosopher, did not die of indigestion caused by smoked herring; this calumnious rumour was circulated throughout Villa Crespo by a rival sect. Equally apocryphal is the legend that has him die, like Pythagoras, in a bean field. This story was invented by Samuel’s heterodox disciple Kerbikian, an Armenian dishwasher at the Café Izmir on Gurruchaga Street, of whom it is said that, being gifted with a singularly obtuse intelligence, he never understood the first thing about the philosopher’s teaching. What really happened – and it might even be true – is that Samuel Tesler, ripe now for grand revelations thanks to his judicious practice of the heroic virtues, simply climbed down from this world as one gets off a Lacroze streetcar.29 Surrounded on his deathbed by the innermost circle of his disciples, he implored them not to weep for him, nor to cover their brows with ashes, nor, in their anguish, to rend their clothes (being mindful of the exorbitant price of English woollens30); he exhorted them rather to forget the ephemeral gifts of natura naturata and to seek instead the invisible, yet intelligible, traces of natura naturans.31 Already in his death throes, Samuel Tesler first gave vent to a burst of laughter, then to a fit of sobbing. When asked about the reason for his hilarity, he replied that before him he beheld the true image of Death in a surpassingly beautiful virgin who was calling him now to a sleep induced by the opium poppies wreathing his brow; so it made him laugh, he said, to recall the skeleton armed with scythe and other lugubrious props attributed to Death by the brooding imagination of versifiers. As for his weeping, it was provoked by the sad thought that centuries would pass before Buenos Aires might be blessed again with a thinker of his calibre. At the moment his soul flew free, they say, a strong odour of benzoin, myrrh, and cinnamon wafted from his body and spread throughout the entire neighbourhood. So strong it was, that the good people of Villa Crespo wondered if Abdullah the Turk’s perfume shop wasn’t getting looted over on Warnes Street.
Historico-critical attempts to pigeonhole Samuel Tesler as a Cynic, an Epicurean, or a Stoic philosopher have been laughable, for the metaphysician of Villa Crespo was an Eclectic of the finest kind, and those who cannot understand this will wrack their brains until Judgment Day. Samuel Tesler had two reasons for detesting Diogenes, the one in the barrel. First, he claimed, Diogenes was the paradigm of vanity; he had only to step before a mirror to find “the man” he so eagerly sought. Secondly, Samuel found the business of the barrel grossly absurd, for he maintained that a philosopher could neither be the content of a barrel nor a barrel the vessel of a philosopher, since both philosopher and barrel were the natural vessels of the sacred liquor that Noah invented after the Flood, no doubt to recover from so great an excess of water. Samuel Tesler was no less judicious about the weeping Heraclitus and the laughing Democritus. In his view, Heraclitus was a sentimental calf and Democritus a gleeful magpie. The two of them were equally dehumanized, since neither had discovered that the true law of the human condition is the useful and prudent alternation of laughter and weeping. To laugh dramatically at one’s fellows and weep for them comically, these are two equal aspects of compassion. This aphorism was taught by Samuel Tesler, philosopher. Similar sentences testify to his eclecticism in diverse matters. They used to ask him about the surest method for achieving sofrosyne;32 cognizant of the duality of human nature, he replied: Go number two in body and in soul every day. Once he chanced to be among a circle of rubberneckers watching a Calabrian fruit-seller methodically thrashing his concubine, and the philosopher inquired into whether it was meet to punish a woman. His conclusion: In general, no; in particular, yes. To those too fond of frolicking with Venus, he said: Thou shalt sleep with women, but dream of goddesses. His optimism about the human species is manifest in a maxim worthy of Terence: I love children because they are not yet men, and the elderly because they no longer are so. Unfortunately, save for a few fragments collected by Asinus Paleologos33 in his Latin edition, nothing remains of his treatises. Rumour has it that his landlady (a certain Doña Francisca, a hairy-chested woman sometimes compared to Socrates’s wife, Xanthippe) sold off his books to collect a paltry debt and even hawked his manuscripts as used paper at three cents a kilo – a literary catastrophe, according to some admirers, equalled only by the tragic fire that destroyed the library of Alexandria.
BOOK TWO
Chapter 1
Her broomstick tapping rhythmically, Old Lady Chacharola made her way down Hidalgo Street toward Monte Egmont, slowly, all right, but erect and straight as a spindle. Her mouth cruelly clenched, eyes stony, brow stormy, the whole of her exuded bile and vinegar as she shuffled along the sunlit sidewalk in her faded, floppy shoes. In her Sicilian heart, as in a chemist’s retort, hatred simmered on the slow fire of memory, the memory of a daughter whose name she never uttered if not to curse it countless times – as countless as the drops of milk she’d fed her, she thought, then struck her wizened breasts, self-castigation for the sin of suckling a serpent. It wasn’t so much her daughter’s life in the milongas, her insults and wickedness and gossiping. No, what she could never forgive – here she kissed her thumb-crossed-over-index-finger, shrivelled crucifix – was that she’d run off with that young punk of a bandoneón player. On top of it all, they’d made off with four linen sheets she’d brought over from Italy, her chunky wedding ring, plus the fifteen pesos she’d kept in a wool stocking in the trunk. At the memory of the sheets, Old Lady Chacharola stopped and ground her teeth, a sour belch rising to her mouth. Then she moved on, a walking vessel of rage, acrimony mounted on two aimless legs.
The sparring match with Samuel Tesler behind him, Adam Buenos
ayres bounded down the stairs three at a time to Monte Egmont Street. Hard to describe the exultation propelling him: a hundred different thoughts buzzed in his mind, now interlocking in fatal oppositions, now harmonizing in jubilant syntheses, according to the various interpretions he placed upon the message that Solveig Amundsen had so imprudently confided to the philosopher, who in turn had so slyly kept it under his hat. Despite doubts and his fear of disappointment, a vision of Solveig persisted, undeniably real. In it she was calling him from afar, unfurling a new horizon of hope, exciting the mad loom of his imagination: “Within the hour, he’d be at her house, his hand on the bronze knocker, and Solveig Amundsen would rush to the door (not so much in response to the strike of metal, as borne on the wings of a vague presentiment), wearing the clear robes of adolescence Adam had seen at the first revelation in Saavedra. They would stand face to face like two universes that had drifted apart and come back together. Without a doubt, they would gaze at each other in a long silence more eloquent than any language – he, in pain (without letting it show too much!), apparently in utter sadness and reserve; she, trembling like a leaf, whether in ripe contrition or perhaps in newly awakened fervour, he would not be able to say. In his wan face, his broken body, his forsaken soul, she would read all the pain of a love denied access to any bridge, and the floodgates of her tears would open irresistibly, making her shudder from head to toe. Then, in a voice breaking with tenderness, he would say . . .” But just what the hell would he say? Adam Buenosayres tried to quash his absurd daydream, even though his pain and rancour were genuine. “Maybe he should emulate Grampa Sebastián’s heroic simplicity, throw himself at Solveig’s feet, offer her the Blue-Bound Notebook with a bloodied hand that had long been stanching a mortal wound . . .”
“Ridiculous!” he reproached himself, then carefully erased all traces of the scene from his imagination.
The three funeral coachmen set their empty glasses in a line along the bar at La Nuova Stella de Posilipo before the dead eyes of Don Nicola, who mechanically wiped the tin countertop with his grubby apron.
– Yep, growled the Skinny Coachman as he licked his wet mustache. Folks’s gettin’ hard as flint, not even death softens ’em up. Heartless bastards! It’s gettin’ so this job ain’t worth a fart in a windstorm.
The Ancient Coachman took off his beat-up slouch-hat and studied it morosely.
– Used to be, he averred, death meant somethin’, and people in funeral parties shelled out real sweet. I seen days where I made eight bucks in tips in just two burials! But people nowadays . . .
– Buncha heartless bastards! thundered the Skinny Coachman. They can’t hardly wait for the last clod of earth to fall in the grave, the gravediggers haven’t got the cross up yet, and they’re off like a shot. Can’t get away fast enough, back to business like pigs to the trough! Cripes!
The Fat Coachman rubbed the buttons of his frock coat with a shiny sleeve and laughed, revealing two spotty rows of greenish teeth.
– Listen to this! he said. I’m comin’ back today from the Chacarita Cemetery with this real uppity big-shot. I take him all the way to his house, and lemme tell ya, it’s away to hell and gone. So we finally get there and I hop down real quick, take my hat off nice as you please, and open the door for him. Well, if the bastard doesn’t climb down and toss me a lousy dime!
– Can’t get far with the women on that, muttered the Ancient Coachman without a speck of cheer.
An opaque drunken silence set in.
– Sad business, the Skinny Coachman growled again.
– Real sad, agreed the Ancient Coachman. Another round?
– Another round, Boss. This one’s on me! the Skinny Coachman called to Don Nicola, whose eyes lit up.
On Monte Egmont Street, Adam Buenosayres took a couple of hesitant steps like a prisoner in flight. Still not moving, his prisoner’s eyes avidly searched the open space, then closed abruptly, dazzled by the autumn sun that delineated forms, made colours laugh, and swept everything up into its tremendous joy. Turning his face up to the sphere of light, Adam felt it all melt away: old cares, new hopes, metaphysical terrors, failures to understand, memory’s voices – in a word, all the intimate details constituting the inalienable, painful, everlasting face of his soul were washed away by the happy warmth beaming down upon him. And this, too, was to live in Another, through the life of the other and the death of oneself! The more he abandoned himself to the glory of the sun, the more his chest swelled with incoming breath, whose precise correlate was the subtler inspiration of his soul. He reached the peak of the respiratory curve, felt his eyes grow moist, and knew his ecstasy was over. But from the summit he brought back a trophy: an irresistible urge to sing, to give praise. And this was the entire mechanism of poetry!
– Right eye of Heaven, Hallelujah!
As soon as he began to walk again, two new worries assaulted his mind. The first had to do with his renewed condition as a traveller, for he had broken with immobility and was diving back into the crazy uncertainty of human motion. Wrenching himself away from his contemplation of that unifying centre called Solveig Amundsen, he was re-entering the hazardous river of multiplicity. True, Monte Egmont Street looked perfectly peaceful, at least in the sector he was traversing, as bedazzled as a man brought back to life. However, he knew that upon crossing Warnes Street he’d enter a universe of agitated creatures. In that other sector of Monte Egmont, peoples from all over the world mixed languages in barbarous dissonance, fought with gestures and fists, and set up beneath the sun the elemental stage of their tragedies and farces, turning all into sound, nostalgias, joys, loves, and hates.
– One hell of a street, or a street from hell! The melting pot of races. Argentine epic?1
He balked just thinking about those who, tempting or hostile, would hook him with their gaze or voice, or even their silence. Nevertheless, now outside the abstract world of his room, he began to feel, as usual, a strong appetite for the concrete and solid, the expectancy of an angel ripe for the fall.
– To look again at forms in their thick carnality, their luscious colours, their weighty volume! To get back down in the dust and roll in it, like the sparrows and horses in Maipú. Feel like Antaeus,2 feet on the ground, Mother Earth. What about the heaven-bound horse? He’s not on this shift.
The second worry had to do with his erotic nature. He had resolved to take his Blue-Bound Notebook to Solveig, and this decision was now making him anxious. When she read it, would Solveig Amundsen recognize herself in the ideal painting he had wrought with such subtle materials? Bah! This wasn’t his main concern. The important thing was that Solveig, through these pages, would get to know an Adam Buenosayres who until now had remained prodigiously unknown to her. “When she learned of his strange love, maybe she would go to him on amorous feet, as matter flows in search of its form. They would be in the garden, in the conservatory, among the roses, autumnal, dying. But it wouldn’t matter because . . .”
– Yikes! That’s enough.
Sliding down the same old slope of his imagination, Adam hit a final doubt concerning himself both as lover and artist. After so much distance, after having transubstantiated the girl with his poetry, would he recognize the ideal Solveig of his notebook when he saw the flesh-and-blood Solveig? It frightened him to think about the two creatures in confrontation.
– Chacharola, Chacharola!
A chorus of harsh voices brutally cut short his speculations. Adam took his bearings: Hidalgo Street.
– Chacharola! cried a boy’s voice, hard and rough as gravel. What about the four linen sheets you brought over from Italy?
The chorus echoed in spiteful chorus:
– What about the four linen sheets from Italy?
Instantly the old woman croaked hoarsely:
– Brigante!
– Chacharola! What about the gold ring? crowed another childish voice that had never known innocence.
– What about the gold ring? repeated the chorus.
&n
bsp; Adam quickened his pace.
– Bandito! cawed the voice of the old woman from over on Hidalgo Street.
– Chacharola! Remember the fifteen pesos in the old sock?
At the corner of Monte Egmont and Hidalgo, a troop of boys charged past Adam Buenosayres, spinning him like a top, then scattered off down the street amid whoops and shrieks. At the same moment Chacharola’s broomstick came sailing into view, describing an arc in the air. Arms a-tremble, she hurled a final insult at her cowardly enemies:
– La putta de la tua mamma!
The broomstick fell at Adam’s feet. Picking it up, he walked over to Old Lady Chacharola, and returned it to her still-clenched hand. Slowly, the old woman rearranged her wrinkles into a spectral smile. She pointed after the fleeing boys with an index finger whose nail was a sorry sight.
– A bunch of sons of whores! she pronounced in impeccable Castilian Spanish.
Then, pointing with the same digit to the nearby steeple of San Bernardo, she moaned piously:
– Today, Saint Vitalis. Bello!
– Yes, replied Adam. The mass of Saint Vitalis.3
The old crone donned a mask of ire and pierced him with two fanatical eyes.
– A martyr! she cried polemically.
– A great saint! Adam placated her immediately.
– Povero Saint Vitalis! she sobbed without a tear in her eye. Bello! Bello!
She went off down Monte Egmont toward Olaya Street, her head swinging back and forth in brooding denial.
Polyphemus lowered his cyclopean right hand (beneath its skin coursed a network of thick streams of blood). While his right hand lovingly stroked the strings of his sleeping guitar, his left hand dug into his coat pocket and jingled some hidden coins. The sound gladdened his ears, those of his body and those of his soul. His raised his majestic head and, describing with it an arc from east to west, he sought out the eye of the sun burning above him, until he felt on his skin the star’s warm gaze. Polyphemus was lucky and strong: he could look at the sun with wide-open eyes. Being blind, of course, he couldn’t see the forms and colours of the world, but in compensation his ears were open to all the music of the earth. Just now he was listening to the dulcet tones (hmm!) of the jazz band that rehearsed every day in the backroom of La Hormiga de Oro. Polyphemus didn’t mind their music, but just then he wished they’d stop so he could hear the pigeons cooing in the steeple of San Bernardo, the neighbourhood seamstresses chattering, the sparrows’ cheerful racket – the wide world of sound his ears knew how to tune in. Okay, that was just art for art’s sake. His real job was to lie in wait for passers-by, closely monitor each one’s stride, and guess whether it belonged to a man or woman, someone young or old, if the gait revealed a heart charitable or stingy, if the person was in a good or bad mood or somewhere in between. Then all he had to do was let his wonderful voice unfurl (in a register suited to each particular case) and pick up the coin that inevitably fell onto his tin plate. Polyphemus’s pride consisted in three distinct perfections: his infallible skill in ambushing souls, the heart-wrenching versatility of his voice, and above all the visual figure he struck. He could see himself clearly in his imagination – the Spanish guitar he didn’t know how to play, but which gave tone and substance to his schtick, his old moss-coloured coat, flowing beard, and eyes of a blind prophet. Finally, there was his arm, which he knew how to raise menacingly and point toward the statue of Christ with the Broken Hand. What a wonderful actor Polyphemus was! Tra-la-la! Business was great, and nobody in Villa Crespo suspected that inside the mossy old coat lurked the owner of three rental properties, with a bid pending on a fourth, all of them won through the steady practice of his art. Tra-la-la! Polyphemus felt laughter stirring in his gullet, but stifled it instantly, not only for the sake of appearances, but also because of a sudden twinge of conscience. What if he, Polyphemus, really was a miserable bandit, an out-and-out scam artist? He thought about it for a moment, his reddened eyelids fluttering. No, no way! Divine Providence, who provides even for the birds in the field, had blessed him with these gifts to help him in his misfortune. Polyphemus clung to this idea, its irrefutable logic: yes, that’s how it was. Calm now, he went back to enjoying the sun, the pure air, the jazz that wouldn’t let up at La Hormiga de Oro, savouring the sweet juice that oozed from his very ripe self-justifications. His euphoria was interrupted by the sound of footsteps approaching from his right.
Adam Buenosayres: A Novel Page 10