Adam Buenosayres: A Novel

by Leopoldo Marechal

  With his ears peeled, Adam Buenosayres stops in front of the Izmir. Past the half-drawn metal blinds, in the murky interior, he can see hazy human figures standing still or gesturing sleepily. From within come the strains of an Asian song; accompanied by a lute or zither, a plangent voice is tearing at throaty gutturals and wringing a sob from each and every ah. Adam can smell sweet anisette, as well as strong tobacco smouldering no doubt in four-tubed hookahs.

  “Another cloistered world. They, too, have traced their hermetic circle, and now they sail away, escaping in song. I saw them yesterday – their greenish faces and heavy-lashed eyes – cruel witnesses of the battle. What landscapes or scenes will they be recalling now, enclosed in their circle, sailors in music? Faces, perhaps. Countenances of men, women, or children whose voices once sang this same song of torn gutturals and sobbed ah’s beneath a different sky – oh, but one infinitely more beautiful! Why more beautiful? For being far off. An ancient song, no doubt. And all the other tongues that sang it before: thousands of lips undone and faces dispelled, back there in the sad graveyards of Asia Minor: mouths full of dirt and eyes full of lime. All have stolen away!”

  Adam takes off his broad-brimmed hat. Two or three withered little leaves fall from it. His hand wipes away the raindrops streaming down his face. Then he starts to walk again, up the street.

  – And the days used to begin with my mother’s song:

  Four white doves,

  four blue . . .

  Or that other song, in Maipú, a chorus of kids beside Grandma at the rain-lashed window:

  Good Friday, Good Friday,

  day of great Passion . . .4

  And the one at Teachers’ College, adolescent voices, salt and pepper eyes in the big music room:

  Eternal page of Argentine glory,

  melancholy image of the fatherland . . .5

  Or the one we liked to sing in the basement of the Royal Keller, we longhaired poets and passionate avant-gardists in the Santos Vega group, to the tune of “La donna è mobile”:

  One automobile, two automobiles,

  three automobiles, four automobiles . . .6

  And that one in Madrid, amid the fervent twang of guitars and arguments:

  Looks like snowflakes

  are falling on your face . . .7

  Or the one in Paris, in Atanasio’s studio, the table laid among figures of clay, the sacrifice of a white hen on the altar of the Muses, an army of bottles:

  In a tower in Nantes

  there was a prisoner . . .8

  And that other one in Sanary, or the one in Italy . . . Songs! They come back now to put me face to face with a day’s pleasure or a night’s shame: remorse for having sung and for having heard others sing. Silence – how I sought and cherished it when a child! Voyage to silence, through the forest of nighttime sounds. And the way I’d walk on tiptoe with reverential stealth, my urge to silently open doors and drawers: liturgies of silence. Because I already knew, without being told, that silence is not music’s negation but all music in its infinite possibility and in its blissful indifferentiation. Yes, the musical chaos in which all the undifferentiated songs still form a single canticle, without mutually excluding each other, without committing this injustice in the order of time. Anaximander,9 old and dark, I salute you on this final night! And your disciple Anaximenes, as well, with his sacred pneuma: the breath of creative inspiration and expiration!10 The theory I expounded yesterday at Ciro’s – when quite sloshed. Shouldn’t have spoken, no one understood a thing. Yes, Schultz did, good old Schultz. Ah, all in One! Sadness is born in the multiple.

  Sad and brooding, Adam Buenosayres looks at the manifestation of diversity around him. He caresses the trunks of trees, as though feeling for some heartbeat beneath the moist bark. Then he crouches down, picks up a handful of dead leaves, breathes in their bitter aroma, and lets them slowly fall. Afterward he moves on, touching wet walls, cold thresholds, the wood of doors, the iron of balconies.

  – Smooth or rough, hot or cold, wet or dry: news from the realm of the external, vague news. Touch is not an intellectual sense. Could you attain awareness of the splendor formae of the rose by touching it? And yet, no other sense aspires so vigorously to the direct possession of creatures – to touch them, apprehend them, squeeze them, get them under one’s skin. Yes, the blindest, most fumbling, most disillusioned of the senses. And the least culpable. Would your hand reach out for a rose, without prior awareness of its splendor formae, a perception that only the intellectual senses can deliver? If only one hadn’t looked, heard, touched . . . Whoa! What apparition have we got here?

  Adam takes another ten paces before the figure becomes clear; with a start he sees a motionless rider on his mount. Drawing nearer, Adam recognizes Corporal Antúnez of Precinct 27, sleeping in the rain, solidly placed in the stirrups, while his horse, reins drooping from its neck, picks at the blades of grass sprouting at the foot of trees. When Adam approaches, the horse raises its head and studies him nervously. But Adam strokes its wet neck, brow and muzzle, and the animal grows calm, rests its nose on Adam’s shoulder, snorts happily. Like a horseman of iron or steel, Corporal Antúnez sleeps on through the rain and wind. Before going away, Adam rubs his face up against the horse’s muzzle, the only warm thing available in the night, and smells its breath: a pure aroma of crushed grass.

  – Uncle Francisco’s yellow horse. I liked the smell of horses. An odour of vegetable breath and farm sweat. This Corporal Antúnez must be a criollo. He has the soul of a cowhand. Like the fellows who would show up now and then at the ranch in Maipú, toward nightfuall. By the green-black tethering post, they’d ask: “Permission to unsaddle?” “Unsaddle, friend, and go on into the kitchen.” Hospitality without borders. Oh, such serious faces, alight with an almost terrible dignity (now I realize); little by little they grew indistinct in the smoke of the wood fire, as the china Encarnación watched over the meat roasting on the brazier, her big eyes eternally watering. “Pretty eyes attract the smoke.” Discreet laughter from another age! And then tales of trips and nighttime roundups out on the plain, in storms: Bahía Blanca, Río Negro, el Chubut, praiseworthy names that tasted of distance. Uncle Francisco assuring me a person could sleep well on horseback. Unsung heroic lives on the prairie: unsung heroic deaths. The death of that calf, for instance, muzzle in the dust, panting its last; before it was even dead, a hawk had perched on its head to peck out its eyes and devour them. And I probably shouldn’t have killed that chajá. I was fifteen years old and had a rusty musket. Nobody knew I was looking for a chajá so I could make toothpicks out of its feathers. A very bad omen. Aunt Martina cried beside the remains of the bird – a pile of grey feathers! – because she knew that when a chajá loses its mate, it loses its desire to live, it dies of hunger and grief. Immediately afterward, that dreadful summer, like a telluric damnation! The enraged sun beat down upon the flooded plain, raising steamy emanations and poisonous breath that seemed to corrupt everything, heaven and earth, men and animals. Uncle Francisco and I rode around on horseback inspecting the desolation; we skinned dead cattle, watched over the handful of sheep eking out their survival up on the hill, rounded up the cows marooned in gullies and reedbeds. A scene of misery, haunted, I sensed, by the vengeful shade of a dead chajá. And yet, a wildly rich, wingèd world was thriving there: flamingos and storks, herons and seagulls, crows and swans, all content in that paradise of still waters and vibrant reeds. And the mosquitos, in late afternoon, mobilized in ravenous clouds. Or that invasion of toads that got in everywhere, even our bedrooms, spitting like enraged cats; day and night we killed them, skewering them with the pitchfork. Everyone left, women and men alike, all driven away by flood, hunger, and sickness. Only Uncle Francisco, Aunt Martina, and I stayed on in the house, now too big for us. We had to start over from scratch: remake buildings and gardens, and save what little livestock was still alive. We were reduced to eating seagulls, tough meat; when they followed the plough, swooping, we’d knock them out of
the air with a whip. The new settlement was to be built on the hill with its single tree, safe from the floodwaters. Uncle Francisco framed the outline of the settlement, setting corner posts and beams, ridge boards, wattle and daub, while I directed the mud-stomping operation, circulating on horseback among the mares covered in mud up to the base of their tails, making them knead the mixture of earth and water with their hooves, all beneath a scorching sun, with the humidity, and the drone of the horseflies which, after biting, would fall into a blood-gorged lethargy, until my whip squashed them against the necks of the mares. Uncle Francisco, laughing or humming, chewing his black tobacco, La Hija del Toro brand, mixed straw with mud, and kneaded it all into cobs; setting these in place, he gradually built up the rustic walls. But when the construction was nearly finished, his energy began to flag. That admirable man, who had overcome so many hardships on the plain, became taciturn and sullen. Incredibly, he even gave up his ostrich-throat tobacco pouch. That night, Aunt Martina and I heard him cry out out in his sleep, shouting orders for the roundup, laughing, swearing, as he tossed and turned on his fever-wracked cot, and thousands of cries from the aquatic beasts outside answered his monologue. It was a very long night. The next day the fever worsened. Uncle Francisco waved his earthy hands, as if working on an invisible construction. His throat parched, he kept asking for something to drink, or struggled to get up and go out to the well in the yard. Aunt Martina and I had to lash him to the bed with two large cinches. But the fever abated at nightfall, and Uncle Francisco, apparently lucid, expressed a strange desire for hot chocolate. As there was none in the house, someone had to go to the station, five leagues away across flooded fields, in nearly total darkness, the night black, hot, and humid as an oven. I was fifteen, and my imagination was easily spooked, but without hesitating I mounted the nocturnal horse and rode all the way to Las Armas and back. How I made it, I still don’t know; mucking though dense reed-beds in water up to the horse’s belly, stirring up storms of wings beating in the night, I had to guess at the whereabouts of gates, unwind wire fences on their tourniquet posts. That night, Uncle Francisco had his hot chocolate, and he sank into a childlike slumber. But the next day we found him dead at the foot of the well, his wet face beaming with immense beatitude. I still don’t know how I, hardly more than a boy, managed to get the clothes off the cadaver, its limbs heavy as ingots, then wash it and get it dressed. Meanwhile Aunt Martina, petrified in her pain, stammered incoherent phrases before the image of Our Lady of Luján11 propped on a corner shelf between two burning candles. The wake and funeral rites would take place in Maipú. But before we could set out, horses had to be fetched and chosen, and the wagon hitched. The horses had been confined to a corner of the enclosure, the corral having been destroyed by the floodwaters. But that morning they seemed to have gone crazy – maybe it was the wind. Three times I had them together, and three times the lead mare made them bolt and scatter – I could have skinned her alive! At last, when the sun was already high, we set off for Maipú. Uncle Francisco’s body lay on two mattresses in the back of the wagon, his face uncovered, the smile of his final happiness still beaming. I sat in the driver’s seat, the four reins in my grasp. Beside me sat Aunt Martina, a taut-faced sphinx, tearless, expressionless. As we crossed the lowlands, the air overhead was beaten by white, pink, and black wings; reeds in flower trembled; and the glades gleamed like ferruginous mirrors. But Uncle Francisco’s head, jounced by the bumpy ride, kept on smiling, rocking from side to side as if to say no, no, no. As if Uncle Francisco had taken instruction in a deeper reality and wanted to renounce the visible beauty of this world, for another beauty that only eyes turned inward can see. As the sun rose in the sky, we ascended to higher ground, where the wheatfields laughed yes, where the flowers sang yes, where the flocks and shepherds said yes. But the swaying head said no and smiled: a green butterfly had got caught in his beard.12

  Adam Buenosayres distractedly feels around in his pocket for his pipe and tobacco pouch. In vain. Forgotten at home.

  – Heroic lives without laurels, on the prairie: unsung heroic deaths. Uncle Francisco, Grandfather Sebastián, Aunt Josefa, Casiano the Pampa Indian: all of them have slipped away, out there on the hillside in Maipú. After their battle with the land, they’re laid out and asleep in the fragrant earth; all of them reconciled with the land, in an ultimate embrace. And maybe with heaven too, because they deserved it.

  Adam prolongs his midnight walk home. Slow and doubtful, his gait is that of someone not wanting to arrive. The night is intimate, the street abstract, the rain without beginning or end. And Adam would like to forget, let the wind rock him into forgetfulness of himself; or to dissolve like a chunk of salt in the rainwater as it falls and falls, whispering its ancient flood song. But he is all one sleepless eye that turns upon itself a cold, contemplative gaze. He has stopped now beside Old Lady Clotho’s doorway, as deserted as the night. There, in the shadow of Clotho the spinner, the children played the game of Angel and Devil. Adam touches the frigid marble with a sort of caress.

  – A game of symbols. What are the Angel and the Devil looking for? A flower. What flower? The predestined rose, happy or sad. Yes, the game of games, perhaps. But if the soul receives the name of rose or carnation, before Angel or Devil come to claim their carnation or rose, where does that leave the soul’s free will? Where is the soul’s responsibility? A game of obscure laws: the theologians in suspense. In any case, the kids play the game happily, as if it were a comedy and not a tragedy. And what if it turned out to be not a drama but an ineffable comedy by the great Author? Then it ought to be played as the children play it, innocently and joyfully, with that wonderful whole-heartedness of children and saints. The drama lies in the loss of one’s innocence and joy. That’s why He said: “Become as little children.”13 Difficult! Ah, Old Lady Clotho has played well, no doubt. I believe she was picked by the Angel! We meet once in a while, at dawn, in front of San Bernardo. I’m going home from a night out, not having slept, grubby with ill-spent wakefulness and ashamed before the new light that smites me like remorse. Clotho is leaving the church after hearing early Mass, her capacious patched-up shawl over her head, ancient rosary between her fingers. We look at each other, I unclean and envious, she clear and true. She smiles at me. I think she smiles at me alone, unless the old woman’s smile is universal like the light. And Clotho redeems me with her gaze and her smile. She knows all and she absolves me, maybe because she has recovered the wisdom of children who play Angel and Devil. How good it would be tonight to rest one’s temples against her hard, grandmotherly knees, and to hear from her lips the great secret!

  But Clotho’s doorway is empty, and Adam Buenosayres touches it, in a kind of caress. The limitless night, the murky street, and the infinite rain create around him an abstract ambience, in which he effortlessly divines the soul and himself. Never before has Adam felt so certain of a great divination, but the whole of him is a wakeful eye that turns upon itself, taking in his own unworthiness, and he tells himself it’s too late now to garner the wisdom of Clotho. That’s why, as he continues on his way, he carries within him the notion of his definitive death. He does not know – and it is good he doesn’t know – that he is only wounded and the nature of his wounds is admirable! He thinks he is alone and defeated. And he does not know that invisible armies have just gathered around him and are now fighting for his soul, in a silent clash of angelic swords and demonic tridents! He is unaware of this, and that’s good! But, isn’t that the Flor del Barrio? Yes, Adam recognizes her. Flor del Barrio is huddled in the hollow of a doorway and she waits as always for the Unknown One, gazing toward the end of the street, plastered in makeup and dressed up like a bride doll. A streetlamp, swaying to the rhythm of the wind, alternately bathes her in light and leaves her in the dark. Adam, now in front of the woman, observes her face, slathered in makeup, lifeless; her motionless mascara-stiffened eyelashes; her arms and legs, beneath motley-coloured clothing, more rigid than ever. And he asks her: “F
lor del Barrio, who are you waiting for?” Silence! Flor del Barrio doesn’t answer. Then an unknown terror seizes Adam Buenosayres. He feels now there’s something artificial in those eyes, that mouth, those petrified facial muscles. So strong is the impression, Adam cannot resist the impulse to touch her face. But when he does, his fingers are left holding a cardboard mask. And behind it appears the true countenance of the Flor del Barrio: concave eyes, gnawed-away nose, the toothless mouth of Death.

  – Imagination! Always busy, as now, on its deceitful loom! It wasn’t enough that I violated creatures, demanding of them what they need not give, could not. No, taking possession of their fantasies, I had to force upon them destinies alien to their essence, some of them poetic, others unmentionable. In how many invented postures have I placed myself, weaver of smoke, since childhood! I confess that, way back when, I imagined my mother’s death, suffering it in daydreams as if it were true. I confess to having beaten world champion Jack Dempsey in Madison Square Garden in New York, a hundred thousand frenetic spectators cheering me on. I confess that, one prodigious night, I broke the bank in Monte Carlo and walked away, rich in gold and melancholy, between a double row of polite gamblers and beautiful international prostitutes. I confess to having suffered the fury of Orlando because of jealous love, and to demolishing Villa Crespo armed only with a mace. I confess to having been a pioneer in Patagonia and founded there the port city of Orionopolis, famous for its navy, which was to expand its reign over the seven seas. I confess to having been dictator of my country, which under my iron rule experienced a new Golden Age through the application of Aristotelian political doctrine. I confess to having practised the purest asceticism in the province of Corrientes, where I cured lepers, performed miracles, and attained beatitude. I confess to having lived poetical-philosophical-heroical-licentious lives in the India of Rama, in the Egypt of King Menes, in Plato’s Greece, in Virgil’s Rome, in the Middle Ages of the monk Abelard, in . . . Enough!