Come, sad friend!
In the shadow of the conservatory,
by the side of fraternal roses.16
He had been right to fear the crucial moment when the heavenly Solveig would be measured against the earthly Solveig. The confrontation had taken place. From now on, all that was left to him was the brackish taste of defeat, as he returned to his tremendous solitude, leading a poetic phantom by the hand. Weaver of smoke! Would he never learn? Yes, a phantom of light, engendered by the night that wept for its darkness; or was born of the solitude that wept for itself and fashioned a bit of music to keep itself company. Was that all?17
Adam Buenosayres contemplated Solveig; in her hands the Blue-Bound Notebook was a dead thing:
I, a potter seated upon the carpet of days
with what clay did I model your idol-like throat
and your legs that turn like streams?18
That’s what she was: clay to be moulded. And the work of his thumbs, wrought in her entirety by his own hands from head to foot, north to south, east to west, zenith to nadir, according to the three dimensions of earth and the fourth of poetry. Weaver of smoke! What for? So that night might not weep; so that solitude might bear a child.
My thumb formed your belly
smoother than the skin of nuptial drums,
and put strings in the new bow of your smile.
The work accomplished in his retreat, kneaded from silence and music. Come to life and breathe, powerful statue! Let red blood circulate in your veins of poetic marble! Ah, she moves not, nor burns! Pygmalion!
Now Solveig’s hands were rolling and unrolling the Blue-Bound Notebook.
Two parallel creatures, reflected Adam Buenosayres. God’s creature on the divan, mine in the Notebook. Perhaps made from the same clay. Two parallel lines, never to meet. And Don Bruno had humiliated him because he didn’t know the definition of parallel lines. But wait, wait! Something of his own remained in the ideal creature he’d forged: the number, measure, and weight of his vocation to love, the sum of his thirst, the physiognomy of his hope. And according to Don Bruno, parallel lines also converged, albeit in the Infinite. What about the others? What would he do with his heavenly Solveig?
Make the fruits ripen
and the rain leave its country of lamentation
idol of potters.
Adam recited the poem in his heart. So well did the verses resonate with the colour of his thought that he felt within a kind of musical excitement that announced the precise moment when the stuff of pain transmuted into the stuff of art. Idol of potters! Whom was he invoking in that prayer? A woman made of literature, who could neither listen nor respond to him from the pages of the Blue-Bound Notebook. What to do, then, with the heavenly Solveig? Fine! Just as he’d given her body, soul, existence, and language, he would also give her a poetic death. He himself would carry the mortal remains of the heavenly Solveig in his arms. For want of earth in which to bury her, he would invent an opulent literary interment. He would do it that very night in the room of his torments, in a solitude shredded by sobs. The Blue-Bound Notebook would have a second part: a cursed funeral and a liturgy of ghosts, their eyes pouring tears down to their feet.
At this point, Adam observed, as so many times before, two external signs about to betray his turmoil: a deep inhalation painful to the chest and an affluence of tears to his eyes. Fearing he might be found out, he took a quick look around the tertulia: by the window, the three ladies engaged in animated conversation; atop his ladder Mister Chisholm struggled with a recalcitrant strip of wallpaper. Marta Ruiz and the engineer were now holding forth on the sky-blue divan. And in the metaphysical sector, the argument was again heating up, Samuel Tesler dominating the conversation as usual. Adam calmed down: it was clear nobody was looking at him. But at the same time he felt the urgent need to let his voice join all the other voices, to share in that audible world, to melt completely into the tertulia, if only to forget himself and set aside the commotion in his soul. A truce! More desperate than thirsty, he knocked back his whisky at a single gulp. As he turned to set down his empty glass, the enigmatic Ramona appeared at his side with another glass filled to the brim. Ancient Hebe. Silent Hebe. Merciful Hebe, ministering angel.
Señora Amundsen underlined her confidential remark with a telling gesture.
– Was it hard? Señora Ruiz asked her in a hushed voice.
– Like a rock. And only once a week or so. And thanks to a laxative of castor oil, belladonna, and henbane – I had to take it on an empty stomach every morning.
Señora Ruiz considered these details with the condescension of a veteran warrior listening to a novice bragging about his first taste of battle. For her part, Señora Johansen listened in visible sadness; bitter memories seemed to be coming back to her, for two furrows crossed her forehead and her chin sank reflectively into her fat neck.
– Yes, she sighed finally. Something similar happened to me when I had Ruty.
– Constipation? asked Señora Amundsen.
– Probably a mere trifle, Señora Ruiz intervened disdainfully. Something quite “banal” as Doctor Aguilera would say.
– How do you know? grumbled Señora Johansen resentfully.
Peevish, half amused, Señora Ruiz looked at the two stupid old women who dared speak of their trivial aches and pains to her – to her, of all people! “How do you know?” indeed! If her nine surgical operations all in a row didn’t give her the right to pronounce herself on these matters, may the Lord shut her mouth and strike her dead!
– It’s those long days lying abed brings on the constipation, she finally declared. Doctor Aguilera always told me so.
– At any rate, my bowels didn’t move for two weeks, explained Señora Johansen in a piteous voice.
But Señora Ruiz frowned.
– Impossible! she objected. No one can go two weeks without a bowel movement.
– Two whole weeks, not a day less, Señora Johansen insisted stubbornly.
– Strange, mused Señora Ruiz. I’ll have to ask Doctor Aguilera about that.
– And how did you feel? asked Señora Amundsen. Any cold sweats, cramps, nausea?
– It was like I had a big lump of lead in my stomach, asserted Señora Johansen, quivering at the mere recollection.
Señora Ruiz’s wizened face brightened with a sudden enthusiasm. Stupid old women! What did they know about nausea and chills? She evoked her nine operations like so many glorious days of battle. She could as easily stretch out on the operating table as lie down for an afternoon nap on her lemon-yellow sofa.
– Trifles, she said dismissively, neither proud nor modest.
Then she leaned toward the other two and asked in a low voice:
– Do you know what a faecal bolus is?
Señoras Johansen and Amundsen waited in suspense.
– So you don’t know? insisted Señora Ruiz, already savouring her triumph. It’s faecal matter that accumulates and hardens into a ball in the intestine.
– Goodness gracious! exclaimed Señora Amundsen.
“Silly old bags!” thought Señora Ruiz. They had never known the anxious pleasure of putting one’s faecal matter in a nickel flask and one’s urine in a clear bottle and taking it all to Doctor Aguilera; nor could they imagine the frisson when Doctor Aguilera sniffed and prodded those ignoble materials, then dignified them with flattering scientific names.
– Massages, purges, enemas – nothing touches it! she went on. The bolus won’t budge, and every day it gets bigger and bigger.
– Can it be possible? murmured Señora Johansen in alarm.
– I ought to know! Señor Ruiz rejoined. Doctor Aguilera took one out of me the size of an ostrich egg.
– I can’t believe it, said Señora Amundsen.
– If you doubt my word, just go to Doctor Aguilera’s office. He still has it there in a glass jar.
Certainty on the one hand, astonishment on the other. Looking in wonder at the rickety figure of Señora Ruiz,
Señora Johansen struggled to understand how that stick of a body could produce so wondrous a faecal bolus. Señora Amundsen, on the other hand, sad as sad can be, meditated on how cruelly fate brings plagues raining down upon man, the poor human being who must live out a few wretched days in this world of misery. Señora Ruiz, for her part, was digesting her victory, congratulating herself for the lesson in modesty she’d just given that pair of old fools. She felt exultation rising up irrepressibly from within as she recalled the nine surgical epics starring herself in the lead role – her, all alone! Swathed in gowns of lilac, white and pink, she’d been at the centre of a phalanx of illustrious doctors revolving around her like planets. And foremost among them was Doctor Aguilera, resplendent as an Olympian god.
Marta Ruiz’s skirt had worked its way up a little too high. She gave it a quick tug, clamped it between bony knees, and turned back to the Amundsen sisters, who were listening attentively.
– A darling blouse, she mused, entirely hand-sewn, in lawn. Imagine a jabot made of tiny pleats festooned with genuine lace. It has a high collar with a tie of the same material, and long sleeves with cuffs that end in flounces done with the same pleats and lace as the jabot. It’s just divine!
– What dress would you wear it with? asked Haydée Amundsen with interest.
– I’m thinking about my tailored suit, Marta said hesitantly. Although I wouldn’t mind wearing it with a garnet skirt.
Haydée scowled in disapproval.
– Why garnet?
– Red and white, replied Marta, are the colours that go best with a dark complexion. I’ve tried blues and greens. A disaster, my dear!
But Haydée disagreed. She detested red, even though her fair skin handled it quite well. But she could die for pale blue or navy blue or even dark violet, three colours that enhanced her white complexion and her flaming bronze hair.
– For the fall season, she said, I think I’ll go for the blue silk outfit we saw the other day at Ibrahim the Turk’s store.
– Have you picked out the style? asked Marta.
– Hmm, what do you think about the deux pièces, with a silk print écharpe around the neck?
Marta reflected for a moment.
– Not bad, she decided. But in that case I’d recommend the jambon sleeves.
– How’s that?
– My dear, answered Marta. They’d give your shoulders a little more width, because they are a little narrow.
Haydée bit her lips. The comment had hit the mark.
And Solveig Amundsen? Wearing silks and satins, or a clinging gold lamé dress, she would descend the triumphal steps by the light of great chandeliers or candelabras, passing before the admiring eyes of plenipotentiaries. Heron or peacock feathers on her forehead of bronze: her plumage fluttering in the subtle breeze of praise, and in that breeze alone! Marten furs or astrakhans draped over her shoulders as she stood beside sleighs drawn by horses, their hooves stamping the hard snow. Or autumnal plaids, as she walks through an English garden, her two greyhounds sniffing the yellow leaves, the dead beetles. Or printed fabrics and brightly coloured kerchiefs at the seaside. Or perhaps . . .
Lucio Negri could not understand the closed-mindedness, the obtuse intelligence, the stone-age mentality of those who refused to recognize the ascendent direction of Progress, a reality so obvious that only eyes blinded by outmoded obscurantism could fail to see it. How could one not cry out in admiration and laugh with joy at the marvels of the contemporary world, so full of novel surprises and so fertile in inventions, through which man, surpassing himself, now dominated the dark forces of Nature and reduced them unconditionally to his service? And what about Science, which through the effort of patient workers was cracking, one by one, the secrets of the universe we inhabit?
Señor Johansen, though silent, heartily applauded such convincing avowals. And his fatherly heart could not help picking out this wise young doctor as the ideal husband urgently needed by Ruty, in view of her twenty-eight years and a vocation to matrimony that was threatening to get out of control. Why not? Chance encounters tended to produce such miracles, and these society gatherings were organized for such praiseworthy ends . . . But wait a minute! The Jew was talking now.
For his part, Samuel Tesler not only recognized technical progress, but he didn’t mind admitting that certain mechanical inventions (aviation, electric refrigeration, radiotelephony) produced an instant erection in his virile member – a phenomenon, he went on to say, that left no doubt as to his enthusiasm for the cult of machinery. But when he considered that this whole conquest had come at the cost of the most formidable spiritual regression of all time, he, Samuel Tesler, trusted in the sanction of his bladder and pissed buckets on Progress and every single one of its miracles.
With a fervor not entirely unrelated to his second whisky, Adam Buenosayres approved of Tesler’s words and seconded his concluding urinary judgment. Under the influence of the heat in his entrails, a vigorous instinct to fight was awakening within him.
– What cannot be denied, he said, is that the history of man has followed and continues to follow a progressive . . .
– Aha! So, you finally admit it? interrupted Lucio.
– A progressive descent, concluded Adam, and not an ascent, as modernism seems to believe.
– And how do you know it’s a descent?
– A tradition common to all races, Adam argued, describes the first man as newly born from the hands of a God – a divine work, a perfect work that went quite downhill over time.
– That God really is a convenient joker, laughed Lucio. It’s the wild card that serves as the basis of all kinds of absurd explanations.
Samuel Tesler looked at Adam with eyes damp with melancholy.
– There’s nothing to be done about it, he mused. He prefers his Darwinian monkey. Another joker, but a lot uglier.
But Lucio paid the philosopher no attention and returned to the attack:
– If man once lived in a better age, why is it that it hasn’t left a single memory?
– All traditions remember a Golden Age, answered Adam.
Lucio Negri turned to Señor Johansen.
– Have you ever heard of the Golden Age? he asked him quite seriously.
– Never, said Señor Johansen. Aren’t we living it now?
– For you, yes! groaned Samuel Tesler.
– It’s like this, explained Lucio. In the Golden Age men were born wise. They had no need to work, and ate all the fruits of the earth free of charge. Springs didn’t give us water, as they do now; they were fountains of red wine or white, a piacere. Streams flowed with pasteurized milk, rivers with honey, et cetera, et cetera.
Frankly amused, Señor Johansen gave Lucio a look of solidarity. Hell of a young fellow! What a fine husband for Ruty! Then, his little eyes darting between Adam Buenosayres and Samuel Tesler, he wondered regretfully how two men with intellectual pretensions could talk such old-fashioned claptrap.
– And another thing, Lucio went on. If in fact there ever existed a Golden Age with such sublime men, how is it they haven’t left any monuments, ruins of great cities, or even the slightest trace of their grandiose civilization? Archeologists dig in the earth, and what do they find? Silica knives, arrowheads, bone harpoons, vestiges of a primitive humanity that certainly didn’t enjoy a very comfortable existence. Rivers of milk and honey! Don’t make me laugh!
Señor Johansen was all a-quiver with enthusiasm. “Let them put that in their pipe and smoke it,” he said to himself. “What have they got to say to that?”
But Samuel was boiling over:
– Don’t you make me laugh! he exclaimed, stepping aggressively toward Lucio. Man in the Golden Age was sublimely intelligent and wasn’t subject to gross necessity. His only work was to contemplate Oneness in creatures and creatures in Oneness. Why the hell would he bother about monuments, aqueducts, and flush toilets?
– Of course! said Lucio ironically. He despised action.
– He didn’
t need it, the philosopher corrected him. Action would come later, in the inferior stages, until it culminated in this Iron Age we’re living now. This age of ours that pits the pure action of iron-age man against the pure contemplation of golden-age man.
The philosopher gave Adam a quick look and hissed:
– Let them choke on that bone!
Then, spreading his legs wide open in his armchair, he insisted:
– That’s not all. Let’s suppose that the original man did feel a creative urge and built colossal monuments. Do you have any idea how long ago the Golden Age would have flourished?
Lucio Negri made a vaguely dismissive gesture.
– Pile on the centuries, he grumbled. We’re adrift in pure fantasy, anyway.
– According to the Hindus, came Samuel’s lesson, the Golden Age lasted nearly two million years. Then came the Silver, Bronze, and Iron ages. Between one age and the next there were terrible cataclysms that completely changed the face of the earth. So tell me, how could there possibly be any ruins left lying around to keep the archeologists amused?
Señor Johansen, against his will, was impressed.
– Cataclysms? he asked Samuel with a worried look.
– The most recent catastrophe, the philosopher assured him, was the Universal Flood, which all traditions remember. Moses puts it at about 2,300 years before Christ, a calculation that coincides with that of most Asian peoples. The Greek Apollodorus considers that deluge to mark the passage between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, and . . .
“Ah, would that I had not lived in this generation of men, that I had either died before or been born after! For now we are in the Iron Age!” Adam Buenosayres mentally recited the elegy of good old Hesiod, who was already lamenting this Iron Age back in his time: “Men will waste away with toil and misery during the day and will be corrupted throughout the night. They will sack one another’s cities. There will be neither kindness nor justice nor good actions, but rather men will give their praise to the violent and evil man.” A prophecy, clearly. At the same time Adam reflected on the mystery of the earth’s having been wounded and scarred several times over, now sinking into the sea with its harvest of autumnal men, now rising up again from the waves, naked and virgin once more, to give itself joyfully to new human possibilities. As though the globe were no more than the theatre of a divine comedy, whose stage décor changed according to the libretto. And now? The end of an act, probably: “And the sky shall be rolled up like a scroll.” For some time now he’d been intuiting within himself the gravitation of four ages; it was a fatigue that grew from somewhere beyond his infancy and was assuaged by the promise of a death defined as a return to the original stillness and the blessed beginning of beginnings. And (he now realized) it was a longing to return that informed the plaintive pages of the Blue-Bound Notebook which Solveig’s hands were now torturing. Moreover, his nocturnal nostalgia sighed and brooded over the delightful images of the distant Golden Age that Samuel Tesler evoked with more erudition than sadness – the morning of humanity, when man was newborn and already dying as he contemplated his Cause! And the creatures as radiant as the letters of a book that spoke with wonderful transparency! Yes, why have I not “died before or been born after”? Above all, why is human happiness possible only in a garden in whose centre grows the tree of mortal fruit? Lucio Negri was wrong: the Golden Age had left a monument, not here on earth where things change, but in the soul of man. It was the mutilated statue of a happiness that we’ve been vainly trying to reconstruct ever since.
Adam Buenosayres: A Novel Page 17