Adam Buenosayres: A Novel

by Leopoldo Marechal

  Chapter 2

  Ethel Amundsen brought the rhapsody to a splendid close with a crashing chord in the lower registers of the keyboard. The upright piano shuddered, two terra-cotta shepherds sitting on it toppled over, and the merchant ship placed between them began to pitch, as if casting off its moorings. The applause already resounding in the parlour grew warmer still as Ethel spun round on the piano stool, got to her feet, and walked over to the sky-blue divan, swinging her firm, guitar-shaped hips. Señor Johansen cried a hearty Bravo!, and even Captain Amundsen1 seemed to smile from his bromide photo up on the wall.

  – A wonderful little woman! observed the spheroid Señora Johansen, turning her crass eyes to Señora Amundsen, who sat placidly smoking.

  Her freckled face smiling, Señora Amundsen was silently taking in the group gathered on the sky-blue sofa. At one end Ethel and Ruty Johansen lounged beneath the intellectual gaze of the astrologer Schultz and the engineer Valdez. Toward the middle of that divan among divans, the bronze heads of Haydée and Solveig Amundsen joined the very dark head of Marta Ruiz in an intimate exchange of secrets. Still smiling in silence, Señora Amundsen stroked the full glass she held squeezed between her thighs.

  But Señora Johansen was waxing sentimental:

  – All grown up into a fine young woman. It seems like just yesterday . . . Olga! I can still see them in those heavy boats at the rowing club: Ethel and Ruty in their little-girl bathing suits, their skinny little legs!

  – We grow old, Ana, said Señora Amundsen.

  Turning to Señora Ruiz, she added, amused and tender:

  – The moment we let our guard down, the little imps suddenly grow up and rob us of our illusions.

  Señora Ruiz, yellow and dry, her clothes hanging from her stick-like frame, clapped her mousy little eyes on Señora Amundsen.

  – Illusions? she croaked lugubriously. Then, correcting herself:

  – Oh yes, illusions, quite so. (Silly old fool! she muttered in her soul. She hasn’t lost her illusions, and she’s well into her third youth, after raising Cain for years on end!)

  Señora Johansen, however, was not about to give in to such melancholy thoughts.

  – It’s not like that, she retorted. Our daughters are like mirrors: we look at them now and see ourselves as we once were; we remember and feel young again.

  – Yes, yes, of course, approved Señora Ruiz, critically studying Señora Johansen’s double chin, her torrential udder, her fat haunches. She glanced at Ruty and, in spite of herself, admired her fine figure. “Mirrors,” she mentally grumbled. “Thank God it doesn’t work the other way around. Lord help the girl if her potential suitors saw her in the mirror of her mother!”

  Whether because of the music, the emotion of the subject, or the second double whisky she was finishing off, Señora Amundsen, her eyes on the portrait of the captain, felt a knot forming in her throat. Then she looked at her three daughters reclining on the sky-blue divan and whimpered:

  – If only the Captain could see them now!

  – The captain was a great man! Señora Johansen affirmed solemnly.

  – A man with backbone, seconded Señora Ruiz. Going down with his ship, when he could have saved himself. That’s what I call backbone. (Drunken old bag! she said to herself, looking furtively at Señora Amundsen. It’s that skinful of bad whisky makes her weepy. If only Doctor Aguilera would show her what that cursèd drink does to her liver!)

  – The law of the sea! explained Señora Johansen in a fateful tone.

  With a dainty handkerchief, Señora Amundsen dried her eyes and then proceeded to blow her freckled nose.

  – You have no idea, she sobbed, what it’s like to be widowed at such a young age, with three small children and another on the way! I don’t know what would have become of me if it weren’t for poor Mister Chisholm.

  – Mister Chisholm is such a good man! Señora Johansen clucked, glaring at Señora Ruiz.

  – I’d say he was a God-send, asserted Señora Ruiz. (The incredible cheek of that Englishman, taking over the widow, her children, and the Captain’s pension. I suppose that’s what they call “British phlegm.” Poor Captain!)

  A burble of dark laughter stirred in her body and tickled her throat. But she snuffed it out immediately, remembering that laughter too is excitement, and Doctor Aguilera had forbidden excitement. So she arranged her bones in the armchair and took a look around the room, sharp as slander, poisonous as envy.

  Insular in body and soul, far from the tertulia, Mister Chisholm was working alone, re-papering the vestibule. He’d just finished the front wall and was perched on top of a small step-ladder, pipe in his right hand and drink in his left, listening with utter indifference to the hubbub from the parlour. His grey eyes, as if entranced, were passing over the brand new wallpaper design: a flurry of green birds in flight across a blood-red sky. Strident voices from the parlour snapped him out of his reverie.

  “The natives are arguing again,” Mister Chisholm said to himself. “Shouting and arguing is all they know how to do. About their so-called problems. Poppycock! They think they move of their own free will, but who pulls the strings? Rule, Britannia!”

  And he thought:

  “Only England knows how to colonize. A unique style. Let the natives fantasize all they want: Britannia makes the wheels turn, the Empire’s solid. All right! But what about . . .”

  Here Mister Chisholm felt a pang of anxiety, though only a very slight one, as behooves an Englishman:

  “What about our cousins to the West?”

  Two or three lines creased Mister Chisholm’s forehead, then quickly faded away.

  “Bah!” he reflected. “Yankee-land! They’ve got no style, they’ve only just learned to walk on their hind legs. Barbarians! They make a mess of everything, starting with the English language.”

  Calm now, Mister Chisholm climbed down the steps of the ladder, sucked back the rest of his double whisky, and stirred the bucket of paste, still smoking his pipe newly replenished with tobacco and optimism.

  Who was responsible for spoiling Mister Chisholm’s imperial cogitations? In one corner of the parlour – to the right and down-stage for the reader – a singular polemic had just broken out between Samuel Tesler, metaphysician, and Lucio Negri, doctor of medicine. Lord and master of an easy chair, Samuel Tesler had positioned himself at the very corner of the room. To his left sat the melancholy effigy of Adam Buenosayres, troubadour. To Samuel’s right stood the statuesque figure of Lucio Negri, who with amorous strategy offered his finest profile to the girls seated upon the sky-blue divan, without for a moment losing sight of the philosopher who was attacking him ruthlessly. Near Adam Buenosayres, Señor Johansen – fat, pink, neat and tidy – looked on gravely. His tame little eyes went back and forth as each contestant spoke, and Señor Johansen seemed to be wrestling deeply with doubt, as if weighing the words of the two on an untrustworthy scale.

  – What in the world has Genesis got to do with anything? protested Lucio, sneaking a glance at the girls. Are you going to tell me the little tales told in Genesis contain even a speck of scientific knowledge?

  Samuel Tesler smiled indulgently.

  – According to my grandfather Maimonides,2 he answered, Genesis is a treatise on physics. Naturally, my granddad Maimonides, who also happened to be a sawbones, was versed in the language of symbols.

  – Hegel dismisses the Scriptures for their lack of verisimilitude, retorted Lucio.

  At this point, the philosopher leapt up as if a German trumpet had just blasted him in the ear.

  – Hegel? he exclaimed. A strutting peacock! He rejects everything that can’t comfortably fit into his German professor’s skull. A cranium uninhabitable by Metaphysics!

  – Of course, said Lucio, you know more than Hegel does.

  – Much more! agreed the philosopher, enfolding himself in the flowing tunic of his dignity.

  Unruffled, Lucio Negri turned to the melancholy effigy of Adam Buenosayres.

&nb
sp; – A flake! he exclaimed, pointing at Tesler and exchanging a smile with Solveig Amundsen, who was watching him from a distance.

  Adam Buenosayres hadn’t missed that little exchange, a look for a smile. He would have liked to stay out of the futile argument and given himself over to his melancholy thoughts, especially now that he had to reckon with a new disappointment in love. However, he could see Lucio Negri looking at him, inviting him to intervene in the debate. “Careful,” he warned himself, “don’t say anything inappropriate.”

  – In Villa Crespo, he began reluctantly, there’s an old Italian woman I’ve dubbed Clotho. Sometimes I see her in the San Bernardo Church, kneeling at the high altar. And looking at her, I wonder if Clotho doesn’t know more than all the philosophy in the world.

  – Don’t worry, confirmed Tesler, she does know more.

  Señor Johansen, who was following closely, did not look happy at this.

  – Sounds like nonsense to me, he proffered timidly. Although I don’t know anything about philosophy.

  – If you don’t know anything, why are you butting in? Samuel reprimanded him acridly.

  Señor Johansen blushed red to the roots of his hair – which, truth be told, no longer amounted to much. He wanted to remind those present that he was a free man and had a right to his opinion. He cleared his throat two or three times, anxious to vindicate himself on the spot. But Samuel Tesler’s basilisk eyes bore down and seemed to hypnotize him.

  – It is nonsense, Lucio Negri confirmed. How can an old woman down on her knees know more than a philospher seated in his study?

  – That’s what I say! How? grumbled Señor Johansen, itching to get his own back.

  Adam again felt burdened by the futility of the discussion.

  – Truth is infinite, he said. It seems to me there are two ways of approaching it. One is the way of the seer; when he realizes the impotence of his own finitude before the infinite, he asks to be assimilated into the infinite through the virtue of the Other and the death of his ego. (“My Blue-Bound Notebook!”) The other is the way of the blind man; he attempts to encompass the infinite within his own finitude, which is mathematically impossible.

  Lucio Negri exchanged an eloquent look with Señor Johansen.

  – Bah! he scolded. Who, nowadays, can swallow that cocktail of finites and infinites?

  – Truth is difficult, replied Adam with reluctance.

  – Apparently not that difficult, objected Lucio. A truth that generously lodges itself in the empty skull of an old woman, just because she happens to be gawking at a wooden image!

  Señor Johansen, a man whose rights had been abused, now felt a wave of hilarity taking over.

  – A gawking old woman, he squealed with laughter. Hee-hee-hee!

  Lucio Negri was looking over at the girls, anxious to see whether his victory had been registered in that quarter.

  – A gawking old woman! Oh, oh! Señor Johansen was enjoying his vindication.

  Samuel Tesler studied him with analytical curiosity.

  – Aristotle says that laughter is proper to the human animal, he said. You laugh; therefore, you must be a man. Good thing you’re laughing; otherwise, we might never have known.

  – What do you mean by that? bristled Señor Johansen.

  The philosopher looked sadly at his buddy Adam Buenosayres.

  – It’s hopeless, he sighed. This gentleman is a pachyderm. The thorn of irony cannot penetrate his leathery hide.

  But Lucio Negri, comforted by another smile from Solveig Amundsen, charged impetuously back into the fray.

  – You fellows may talk about mystical knowledge, visions, illuminations, he admitted in perfectly good faith. But as science shows us, all that sort of thing is in the domain of nervous pathology, or maybe internal secretions.

  The end of Lucio’s sentence was celebrated by Samuel Tesler’s vibrant, unstoppable, staggering guffaws. Señor Johansen was petrified. Lucio Negri turned white, as the twenty-six eyes of the tertulia were trained upon him. Even Mister Chisholm, up on the stepladder, brush in hand, paused for a moment to frown.

  – Laughter isn’t an argument! protested Lucio Negri. Nowadays, only a retrograde mind can deny the mystery of internal secretions.3

  As though in a state of rapture, the philosopher threw himself at Lucio’s feet.

  – Internal secretion! he prayed on bended knee. Ora pro nobis!

  Flummoxed by the antics of that fearsome clown, Lucio Negri looked around the room. In one corner, the Señoras Amundsen, Ruiz, and Johansen looked perplexed. Giggles and muffled whispers bubbled up from the sky-blue divan. More adorable than ever, Solveig Amundsen gazed back at him with saddened eyes. In view of which, Lucio Negri decided to take it all as a joke; he took hold of the kneeling philosopher under the arms and hoisted him to his feet.

  – Laugh if you want, he said. But believe me, one small variation in the pituitary gland of Jesus of Nazareth, and the course of world history would have been completely different.

  Not believing his ears, the philosopher of Villa Crespo stared at him in astonishment. Then, with his gaze, he solicited the testimony of Adam Buenosayres. Finally, he let his head fall on the chest of Señor Johansen, where he laughed long and silently; he actually laughed against the shirt of Señor Johansen, who couldn’t believe what was happening. At length, abandoning Señor Johansen’s unwelcoming chest, he pierced Lucio Negri with irascible eyes.

  – Modern science seems to run according to a diabolical plan, he complained. First, science accosts Homo Sapiens and says to him: “Look here, old boy, that business about Jehovah creating you in his image and likeness is a lie. Who is Jehovah? The bogeyman! The priests in the Middle Ages invented him to scare you and make sure you don’t hang around in dance halls. As for the immortality of your soul, it’s a lot of baloney. You blockhead, how do you expect to have a soul?”

  – The soul! interrupted Lucio. Pll-ease! I’ve looked for it with a scalpel, in the dissection lab.

  – And did you find it?

  – Don’t make me laugh!

  – No wonder, explained Samuel Tesler. The soul isn’t a tumour in the liver.

  He continued:

  – Once Homo Sapiens was disabused of the illusion of his divine origin, modern science had to invent a substitute. “Listen, old man, you’ve got to realize you’re an animal. An evolved animal, I’ll admit, but an animal from head to foot. Your real Adam is the first gorilla who, by dint of Swedish calisthenics, learned how to walk on two feet and turned up his nose at raw bananas. That happened back in the pre-glacial era, about a thousand centuries before you invented the flush toilet.”

  – Clown! muttered Lucio between clenched teeth.

  – Shhh! protested Señor Johansen, casting an uneasy glance over at the girls on the divan.

  The philosopher looked at them with scientific compassion.

  – Now then, he asked, as if introducing a corollary. What did Homo Sapiens do, as soon as science revealed his true origin?

  Lucio Negri and Señor Johansen were silent.

  – You can’t guess? insisted the philosopher. Well, Homo Sapiens, thinking about his ancestor the gorilla, listened to the voice of his instinct and started playing with himself.

  – Shhh! protested Señor Johansen again. The young ladies!

  – In spite of it all, added Samuel, lots of strange things persisted in Homo Sapiens: mystical enlightenment, the gift of prophecy, a whole set of free acts that escaped surgical operations in the clinic. Then science came up with a stroke of genius: they replaced the enigma of the Trinity with the enigma of the thyroid gland.

  At this point Lucio Negri lost his patience.

  – Now, just a minute! he shouted at Samuel, adjusting his spectacles on his polemical nose. But he didn’t have a chance to continue, for Samuel Tesler had fallen back in his easy chair and was laughing a meditative laugh, or laughingly meditating, shaking from side to side a brow as vast as a landscape.

  – My beloved
tormenter is laughing, chimed Haydée Amundsen, uniting the sunshine of her curls with the black night of those of Marta Ruiz. With a birdlike movement, the girls turned their faces in unison toward the metaphysical corner.

  – An ugly Jew, pronounced Marta Ruiz, still studying the philosopher’s amazing physiognomy.

  Haydée Amundsen let out a fine trickle of mirth, a mere thread of sound passing between sugared lips.

  – He doesn’t think so! she exclaimed. You may find this hard to believe, but my beloved heartache sees himself as a mix of Rudoph Valentino, Santos Vega,4 and King Solomon, the one with the two hundred wives.

  – Him? chirped Marta Ruiz, torn between disbelief, astonishment, and hilarity.

  – None other.

  A gale of laughter shook their springtime figures. One against the other they swayed like two lilies in the breeze, their foreheads touching and their breaths commingling, scented with tea and vanilla.

  – And that pawnbroker’s nose! laughed Marta, turning now to little Solveig Amundsen, who sat quietly smiling.

  Three different loves bound up in a single bundle, or three notes of a single song: thus they sat joined and distinct upon the sky-blue divan. Marta Ruiz half closed her eyelids, as though trying to hide the secret ardor, betrayed in her eyes, that was consuming her – oh, to weep! Her marvellous pallor suggested something like the serene cold of moonlit water. But careful, now! Watch out for all that ice and snow! Behind that glacial mask, there was fire. Yes, Marta Ruiz was like the live coal that hides beneath its own ashes. How different, in comparison, was Haydée Amundsen! Her coppery hair, her golden brow, eyes of turquoise, lips of pomegranate, teeth like agates, hands of brass, breasts of marble, torso of alabaster, belly of mercury, legs of onyx: Mother Nature had been pleased to pour all her finest gems into that open jewel case named Haydée Amundsen. So loaded with treasure was she that the most indifferent onlooker would be tempted to plunge his hands up to the elbow into all that mass of bright jewels, were it not for an aura of pure, jovial innocence that, like a shield, inhibited that onlooker, reined in the ignoble greed of that buccaneer. And what to say now about Solveig Amundsen? Everything and nothing. Solveig Amundsen was the primordial matter of any ideal construct, the clay from which fantasies are fashioned. She was still proof against description, like water that has not yet taken on form or colour. Silent and dense with mystery, Solveig was rolling and unrolling a Blue-Bound Notebook.