Adam Buenosayres: A Novel

by Leopoldo Marechal

  . . . And time was when the days began with your mother’s song:

  Four white doves,

  four blue ones,

  four little red ones,

  death gives to me.1

  You passed through your days and nights as through a series of black and white rooms. The wolf-coloured pony was devilishly skittish; he would use a hitching post to tear off his bit and halter, then open the gate with his muzzle. And Casiano, the Pampa Indian, who with consummate skill could kill a partridge with a blow of the whip!2

  Or the commotion of mad bells waking you at dawn: the pilgrimages of Maipú! It would still be early morning, but already the house was buzzing in anticipation of the fiesta. The men looked rather stiff in their Sunday clothes. The young aunts, in great excitement, unfurled bright fabrics, shook bottles of scent, whispered among themselves or suddenly blazed up in laughter. Cursing in sonorous Basque phrases, Uncle Francisco struggled with a recalcitrant boot. Later, Grandfather Sebastián would enter the church, plunge his gigantic hand wholly into the font, and pull it out dripping wet. You touched his gnarled fingers and, on your knees, you crossed yourself. Afterwards, the men took you to Olariaga’s general store. Outside, several handsome horses were tethered in a row along an immense hitchrack. Inside, by the counter, men exchanged loud greetings and detonated peals of laughter amid odours of Tarragona wine, saddles, medicines. All of a sudden, the student minstrel group, in the Spanish tradition, came in strumming guitars and plucking violins. Decked out in spangled suits, short pants, white socks, and feathered hats, they were escorted by a horde of boisterous kids. Your gaze, however, wouldn’t linger there, but on the three or four motionless figures who, glass in hand, stood smiling behind the group, apart from the fray. Like Grandfather Sebastián, those countrymen might have come from the time of Rosas, judging by their fleece-white beards and leathery faces more wrinkled than ancient paper. They still wore the black chiripá, colt-leather boots and obsolete spurs on their heels. In childish astonishment, you stared at them as though into the very face of adventure, for you associated them with the famous cattle-drives down Chubut way, with those legendary crossings among sand dunes and storms, with the epic exploits of the old cowboys, whose praises you’d heard sung so many times in smoke-filled kitchens by strangers who came and went, inexplicably, like the wind.3 Later, at noon, the roasts of meat, laid out over hot coals, were smoking beneath a rain of spiced brine. And then the dance got underway under the open sky, until the southern night fell upon musicians and dancers.

  Now you find yourself on the road from Maipú to Las Armas, a line traced across the prairie from horizon to horizon. The last days of summer and the first of your adolescence. You’re astride a horse, riding behind a hundred red steers, enveloped in the dustcloud raised by four hundred hooves. You’ve been allowed to wear the black boots which, along with the vicuña poncho and the silver-tipped facón, constitute your sole inheritance from Grandfather Sebastián. To you, wearing those boots means you’re entering manhood. Mounted on his memorable buckskin horse, Uncle Francisco, on your right, is chewing black tobacco, Hija del Toro brand, which he always carried in his ostrich-throat tobacco pouch. Looking at him now in these peaceful conditions, you recall in imagination that stormy night when a drove of semi-wild horses broke up and scattered on him for the third time in a row: Uncle Francisco leapt from his horse to the ground, unsheathed his knife, and raised his eyes heavenward to challenge God himself, shouting: “Come on down here, if you’re man enough!” Leading the current cattle-drive are Justino and Casiano the Pampa, one riding to the right, the other to the left. Inside every man’s hat is a fresh-cut switch of white smartweed, because it is now nearly noon and the sun’s rays fall vertical like arrows from a maddened archer. Sure, sweat drips from your forehead, leaving a salt taste on your lips; the dust-cloud blinds your eyes and dries your nostrils; and your ears are deafened by the beasts’ bellowing and the yippee-yi-ay of the cowhands. But your heart is ringing like a little bell at a fiesta, and you wish no grander lot in life than to follow a road traced across the prairie from horizon to horizon, behind a hundred red steers burning like coals at noon.

  Since when had the resplendent forms of creatures been speaking to you thus? Since when had they spoken to you in a language you didn’t yet clearly understand, but which gave you an inkling of the certitudes of beauty, truth, and goodness; and which brought tears to your eyes, and wakened on your tongue a painful longing to respond in the same language? To be sure, one morning, reading your schoolboy composition, Don Bruno had said in class: “Adam Buenosayres is a poet.” And the other kids stared hard at you, as if they didn’t know you. But, since when? Lord! A child who shies away from games and slinks off to a corner to weave a warp of musical words: “Oh, the rose, the sad rose, the emaciated rose!”

  Now you are eighteen years old, back there, in the fields of Santa Marta, and you’re standing beside Liberato Farías, the horsebreaker. Beneath your feet, the earth is a great wheat-coloured circle. Overhead, the sky’s complexion is hyacinth – dome or flower, who knows? Liberato’s shock of straight hair is tied back with a coloured kerchief. Now he adjusts his spurs, happy and painstaking as a wrestler getting ready for another fight. Twenty paces ahead, biting the bit for the first time, with the lasso still around its neck and its nervous legs bound by the strap, the black colt stirs and frets, flashing like a drop of mercury. Almirón the foreman holds fast the colt’s muzzle using the handle of his whip. Uncle Francisco, without letting go of the lasso, keeps a careful eye on the animal’s rippling movement. Your admiring gaze passes from image to image, pausing now on the horsebreaker kneeling to put on his boots; now on the horse, a machine steaming with pent-up rage; now on the hyacinth-complexioned sky and the wheaten earth. Liberato has got to his feet. The tack slung over his shoulder, he walks phlegmatically over toward the waiting group. When he gets there, he checks that the components of the tack are all in order. Then he approaches the colt and runs his broad hand from neck to tail, much like the musician who, before playing his guitar, first touches the strings and gets the feel of them. The tack’s various components now slip over the animal: saddlecloth, horse blanket, saddle padding, the cinch drawn tight with nails and teeth, sheepskin saddle blanket, bellystrap. The colt, all this while hesitating between shock and anger, finally comes to a decision and tries to break free of its ties. The operation concluded, Liberato cautiously mounts, stepping ever so lightly on the stirrup, and settles himself on the skins. Only then does he wave off his padrinos with a friendly gesture, asking to be left alone for his single combat. Uncle Francisco unhobbles the colt and undoes the lasso. Almirón releases the animal’s muzzle. Both men summon their horses so as to accompany the horsebreaker, in accord with the laws of comradeship. The colt, however, is not yet moving, as if its hooves were nailed to the ground. So Liberato puts his whip in front of its eyes. The beast rears up and stands vertical for a moment, sits down abruptly on its hindquarters, regains its balance, spins violently to the left and then to the right – torn between taking flight and rolling on the ground with rider and all. Meanwhile, the horsebreaker tugs ferociously at the reins, forcing the horse’s neck one way and then the other. The bronco puts its muzzle down between its knees, thrusts its back up like a mountain, and finally begins to buck in earnest, struggling to throw the rider, who clings to the colt’s flanks with the double arc of his legs. Its arsenal of tricks and violence exhausted, the colt takes off in a mad career toward the horizon, helped by its rider, who slackens or tightens the reins. Your eyes followed him in that flight, and your ears heard the hooves beat upon the earth, resonant as a drum. And then you saw how rider and horse returned from the horizon, in harmony now. And how the horsebreaker, after dismounting and removing the skins from the horse, patted the animal on the head, as if to seal an unbreakable pact with it. You had approached the sweat-cloaked horse and you were looking at its dilated, noisily panting nostrils, its mouth filled with blood and spume, i
ts eyes wet and flowing with hot drops that mimed human tears. When you carressed its sore mouth, your nose caught the colt’s vegetal breath, a sweet and pure breath of innocence. Afterward, you went with Liberato to the well, with its fresh scents of water and moss. Leaning back against the parapet, the horsebreaker had the judicious placidity of the combatant who has purified himself in another battle. As he gulped down his overflowing pitcher of water, you saw his blue eyes moisten with delight as they looked up to the zenith. Then you went off across the wheaten earth, beneath a hyacinth sky, your heart filled with praise and pondering the promise of a song you had yet to write.

  And now you have just arrived in Buenos Aires, a stranger eager to observe the big city, bearing a message of freshness you still don’t know how to express, except through stammered exclamations:

  In the red corymb of morning your

  bumblebees buzz, Wonder.4

  What strange wind (providence or chance) has gathered the phalanx of men to which you now belong, that sheaf of musical men come, like you, from different climates and diverse bloods? Some of them return from across the sea and bring enthusiastic missives from another world.5 Others have left their provinces, ambassadors of a particular land and its light. Still others arrive from the city itself, nervous and lively and nocturnal. And no sooner have all those voices gathered together than the battle is joined; they fight among themselves, brothers in their fervour, but already enemies in direction and in language. The very name of the phalanx, Santos Vega, has a symbolic value yet to be defined.6 Is it a matter of recovering a stolen music, a noble canticle being held captive? Yes. But music and canticle alike must emerge the richer for their imprisonment, if Juan Sin Ropa, the conqueror, has indeed triumphed under the sign of the universal. Do you remember the nights in the Royal Keller,7 the passionate arguments at the riverside, after which you would go home at dawn, your mind overexcited and eyes sleepless? You listen to the voices of friends in combat, but you do not speak yet, for silence and reserve are the stigmata one acquires on the prairie, where the human voice feels intimidated before the vastness of the earth and the gravitation of the sky. And when at last you manage to speak, you do so in an idiom that people find barbarous, in a throng of images they find confused. Your supporters shower praise: “A virgin poetics, without number or measure, like the great rivers of our country, like her plains and mountains.” And already, right from the start, there is clearly disagreement between your partisans and your soul. They don’t realize that when you build your poem as an incoherent string of images, you do so to overcome Time, its sad successiveness, so that all things may live a joyful present in your song. People are not aware that when you put two vastly different forms together in a single image, you want to defeat Space and distance, so that what is distant may be rejoined in the joyful unity of your poem. They don’t know this, and you dare not tell them, because silence and reserve are the stigmata one acquires on the prairie. You don’t dare tell them, because they may not have heard as children the admonishment of Time gnawing at the house and withering the sweet faces of family members; nor will they have wept at night in anguish, their gaze lost in the tremendous distance of the constellations above the pampas.

  At last you realize how crazy your ambition is! Unhinged from its metaphysical yearning, your poetics is basically just a musical chaos; and that chaos is painful to you. Yes, a call to order, which no doubt comes from your blood.8 You will need to look for the code that can construct order. Contrary to what your supporters affirm, the creative cipher will not come from the earth, which itself has no code. You know well that the earth, far from giving, receives its measure from the human, because humankind is the true form of the earth. And it is in your blood that you will seek that measure, the one your grandparents brought from the other side of the ocean. You need to rediscover that measure, and to do so, you must see it incarnate in the works of your lineage, beyond the great waters. And so the elation of travel comes over your being.

  You had crossed the sea, and your eyes, freshened by bitter waters and naval winds, had witnessed the mutation of the sky. A deep sense of absent constellations that no longer vault over the southern horizon, and the advent of new forms in the firmament, there in the frozen north, at nightfall. You were in a Galician port, and your solitude was already opening to embrace the forms and colours of another world. The winter day was barely dawning against an iron-grey horizon. Opposite, the three islands were like iron, too; and molten iron were the waves that crashed against the breakwater and set the ships dancing around their anchors. Above the boats, the seagulls wheeled, skimming the water’s surface or pecking at the surf, squalling like a single hunger broken into a thousand pieces. At your back, the city had not yet shaken off sleep, but along the seawall a few motionless figures stood waiting. Only their eyes showed any sign of life as they stared out over the still-dark sea. Then, walking along the seawall, you came upon a fishermen’s cove. Great, taciturn females were mending nets spread over a beach slick and shiny with fish scales. At the women’s side, drowsy children were baiting hooks with tuna liver. There, wind and sea sustained a turbulent dialogue; through its occasional pauses could be heard the terrestrial bugle of an early-rising rooster. Suddenly, the rigid figures, numb bodies, and stone faces came alive and started shouting in the direction of the sea; gruff voices from the water called back in the gloom. They were the harvesters of the sea, returning to the quay. Against the murky background of dawn, you could make out sharp prows, spare masts, and men who clung to the rigging and shouted a greeting or a lament. And, almost as if those men had caught the day on their lines and were towing it behind them, the light increased all around, and the earth lit up like a lamp. Then, before your eyes, rustic hands displayed the sea’s wealth, its splendid fruits: a universe of writhing tentacles, multi-coloured shells, mother-of-pearl and scales, inky pulp still bleeding and beating like the eviscerated entrails of the sea. And as in its prairie past, your soul at that moment could only voice praise: praise for so many pure forms, paean to the heroic life, encomium to the Maker who gives fruits. If those fruits are difficult to pluck, on an out-of-reach branch, it is by His design: the human hand that reaps them will also have harvested the beautiful and sorrowful flower of penitence.

  Now you are in Cantabria, the land of your ancestors: it is the mountain where the Globe, celestial animal, recalls its own magnitude; the mountain that rises bare-headed, wraps its flanks in a cloak of earth, draws from the valley a tough elbow of granite and then sanctifies the stone in a cathedral.9 And it is the plot of soil, worked and polished like a jewel. And the wonder of water leaping out to the light and falling at the feet of golden oaks in winter. That landscape, whose nostalgic description you’d heard so many times from your grandparents on the prairie of Maipú, sketches before your eyes a familiar gesture as though of recognition and welcome: familiar are the faces forming a circle around the table, the big hands cutting bread for you and filling your tankard with new cider, the sonorous idiom and songs that, also in exile, rocked your childhood cradle in another world. And that’s it precisely: those voices and faces bring back a taste of infancy, a lost flavour that floods back in all its delight, something like the pleasure you still get from the deeply familiar odour of a plant, an old stick of furniture, a faded piece of cloth.

  But the fervour in your blood will brook no delay, and you now cross the fields of Castille, its arable reds and pleasant greens. It is the same earth that saw a double prodigy in the march of its heroes and the levitation of its saints. In the shadow cast by that shepherd leaning on his crook, Salicio and Nemeroso might yet be intertwining their fluid voices as in Garcilaso’s poem.10 And among those green meadows, it would be no surprise to hear Don Quixote repeating his praise for the Golden Age.11 Wherever you open your eyes, you find the truth, the eternal number, and the just measure written in faithful stone, hard metal, or exalted wood. And, to be sure, when you learn the wisdom of the dead, your spirit does not quail in
final elegies. Ah, how you long to perpetuate those voices, gather up those numbers, and give them another springtime, far from here, in your jubilant fields, beside your native river!

  Wary trees were barely hazarding their first buds, and the light in the frayed willows by the river had a hint of green, when you and Camille first laid eyes on water the colour of weeping. It was the first day of May, and you were in Paris, among those subtle people in whose veins ran blood with a family resemblance to yours and who mirrored a region of your spirit. The dance at La Horde that night would celebrate the matins of springtime so, not surprisingly, you donned a shabby costume, along with Atanasio the Greek,12 Larbaud,13 Van Schilt, and Arredondo from Jujuy.14 The rented costumes retained a rancid odour of sweat from past festivities; a silence compacted from all the dead laughter seemed to fill the hollows of the masks, prostituted many times over. All in all, there was too much noise in everyone’s soul, yours and those of your friends, and when Van Schilt put a red beard on his pirate-like chin, Camille’s laughter tinkled a good while, along with sounds of surgical tape and rusty bells. Night, a parenthesis of madness! What knot had let go within your heart? The immense hall glittered beneath a hundred chandeliers; musicians inspired by ancient barbarity made brass instruments shout and woodwinds wail. A tribe of monkeys outrageously plastered in makeup then dragged you mid-room; you struggled, laughing, among arms and abdomens slick with oil; you gave and received blows to the face; one of your lips was already bleeding, and your fingers clutched shreds of artificial beards and wigs. Then, when the festivities celebrating your baptism of madness were over, you joined the monkey-inititates, and the notion of time evaporated in the dance hall. Hurrah! Foreheads heavy as fruit, alert minds, sleepless wills, and bruised memories broke riotously free of their prisons. Hurrah! Your being had overleapt its frontiers and foundered, a drunken ship on a chaotic sea of absurd forms, brutal nakedness, unspeakable gestures, colours that scraped eyeballs, and words that shattered eardrums. Now you wonder: what knot had let go in your heart? And you think: there was too much noise in our souls. The spell was broken at dawn, when you arrived with your companions at the Café du Dôme: just as the ocean withdraws and leaves the beach strewn with monstrous remains torn from its depths, so the ebb tide of night had deposited on the terrace the cold scraps of a drunken witches’ sabbath. At the threshold of the café, an organ-grinder smiled, glass in hand, an ancient and good-hearted inhabitant of dawn; an exultant chestnut tree on the boulevard was showing off its first leaves to the café terrace. And then Larbaud seized the hurdy-gurdy and began to turn its crank, the organ-grinder looking on benevolently; the ghosts of the Dôme, redeemed in that music, began to dance around the springtime chestnut tree. Later, you returned to your room, a posy of muguets in your lapel. Old Melanie was on her knees, slithering and scrubbing as usual, tiny amid her brooms. You made her stand up and, tearing the posy from your lapel, you made her a gift of those portentous little white flowers. When Melanie, reduced to tears, pressed them to her desiccate lips, you understood how a whole primaveral season can be gifted in a handful of lilies-of-the-valley.