But the beauty before me was not a matter for my mind alone, for it also invited my will, through an appeal in the mode of love I knew so well and so distrusted; and, for that to happen, it was necessary that what my mind knew as true must also appear as good to my will. Surely it was one and the same thing, which showed a different aspect, according to which of the soul’s powers were considering it. However, just as I had not uncovered the intimate nature of her truth, neither had the inner nature of her goodness been revealed to me: I only knew that, faced with her image, my mind operated through light, my will through love; and that they did so in a simultaneous act, such that, in contemplating her image, I knew not whether I loved her now because I knew her, or whether I knew her now because I loved her.
Nevertheless, prudence still clamoured within my being, telling me that an equivalent beauty with similar effects had many times inclined me toward deceptive love. But upon evoking my former loves, I recalled that they had been precipitate, lunging headlong toward creatures, whereas now my soul seemed to move with another rhythm in which I observed two movements: one of transport in slow revolutions around the exceedingly sweet woman, my soul surveying and studying the woman with loving care; the other of rotation on my soul’s axis, thanks to which my soul continued in her self-observation, studying herself in the mode and effects of her contemplation.
IX
The next day and the two or three that followed are vivid in my memory, thanks to the delight I experienced, as if I’d just woken up from a frightening dream. I’ve already described, in another part of my Notebook, the desolation my soul had come to know and the sterile flight of my intelligence above its own ruin. I’ll say now that, under the sole influence of the creature revealed in Saavedra, my whole being seemed to surrender to the rhythm of a nascent life and to a feeling of astonishment, a rising-up from ashes. I remember the brand new emotions, the old wariness, and the conflicting ideas; feeling cooped up in my room, I felt driven to go out in search of light and the open air, and took long walks which, far from pacifying the tumult in my heart, only accentuated it. I’ve already said that springtime in Buenos Aires and the woman of my sleepless nights had manifested themselves at the same time; so, during my walks it happened that my soul’s inward euphoria joined the outward elation of the earth, whose fervent awakening goaded creatures onto paths of exaltation. I preferred to walk in humble neighbourhoods, especially the sun-drenched streets of my Villa Crespo. There, the springtime sky, clear and moist, shone like a look of great tenderness. In the foliage of the trees along the streets, a green light heralded the sprouting buds. A prelude of incipient flowers played in intimate gardens and cordial patios. And my eyes, open like never before, devoured the signs of springtime and feasted on the sky’s blueness, round and smooth as a fruit. Everything had meaning: the hot laughter of the children, a woman’s voice in the distance, a bird swaying on a branch, the colour of a stone. Sympathy of some unknown lineage overflowed in my breast before all that was humble and silent: a delicious intelligence of love was one with a desire to press the living sheaf of creatures tightly to my soul.
One night (the third after the encounter), when I was out wandering, either chance or my longing for the woman of my adventure – I still don’t know which – led me to Saavedra. Never had the weight of any night seemed so light as it fell upon my shoulders; nor had Saavedra ever seemed so close to heaven. I was ambling along nocturnal streets, by grates and walls plumed with wisteria, their blossoms caressing my brow and bringing to mind the familiar taste of springtimes that had arisen and fallen back there, in Maipú, or perhaps yonder, in an orchard where angels now stand watch. The night air, sweet as wine, and the silence, disturbed only by rustling leaves or a bird stirring and singing between dreams, made me experience a serenity I had never known before. In that atmosphere my mind no longer worked with a tiresome web of inner words, but rather through a sure intuition of things, arrived at – it seemed – solely by opening the eyes and ears of my soul. I exercised that delicious form of knowing for the first time. And since all that light came to me through the mirror of The One, I began to suspect that a mystery was both hiding her and revealing her: she was hidden in its essence and revealed in its operation.
I cannot say if it was the glimpse of her mystery that made my heart beat faster and slowed my steps as I approached her place of residence. All I know is that when I got close to her garden my knees wobbled and I had to rest against a tree. The garden of The One was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence; among its bars heavy with years, the honeysuckle had woven its thick tangle and built up a fragrant wall between the privacy of the house and the indiscretion of outside eyes. I remember that my hands, plunging into the denseness, managed to break through the wall of leaves and open up a hole, which allowed me to take in the garden cloaked in darkness, in the centre of which rose the solid architecture of the house. I stood watching for a long time: agile silhouettes crossed the luminous rectangular windows; to my ears came the murmur of family conversations that now and then were cut into by the blade of youthful laughter or by abrupt gaps of silence swooping down on the house like birds of prey. If the air circulating round the house seemed lighter, it was no doubt crowned by a more benign sky. At that moment, all my vitality was concentrated in my eyes and ears. They tried to pick up the subtlest pulse of the house, in their desire to catch even a trace of the admirable woman who had been revealed to me in that same garden. How long I stood thus, clinging to the bars like a thief in the night, I do not know: little by little the intimate voices fell silent; one after another the lights in the windows went out. A deep chord was still resonating in the dark, as if some careless hand had suddenly fallen upon the keys of a piano and its vibrations were wandering away into the silence until they were finally lost.
Only then did I abandon my observation post and sit down at the threshold of the house. There I began to think about the feelings my nocturnal espionage had aroused. And above all it amazed me to think that The One moved within a family circle whose eyes beheld her at all hours; they had seen her birth, given her a name by which they called her; they followed her every gesture, but were unaware of her inner essence, such as it had been revealed to me in a brief instant of contemplation. And I asked myself then, in that soliloquy on the threshold: What was it that I saw in The One and others could not see? My answer, as at the first encounter, was that I saw her in her harmonious number, or better, in the set of singing numbers that formed her from head to foot and exalted her above nothingness through the creative virtue of numbers, in the same way that through numbers a piece of music is constructed and sustained within silence. And here I experienced a sudden start: that womanly cipher, that harmonious number, had not sprung from nothingness. How, then, to think about that number without thinking about the mind that had formed it and about the voice that had proferred it?
This return to metaphysics, on a night like that and on such an occasion, provoked a painful movement of rebellion in my spirit: to deduce the First Cause from its effects had always seemed to me a cold and sterile result of logic, incapable of moving the soul according to love. More precisely, the irruption of The One into my dark night had seemed to be announcing to my soul a bright day of liberation, a recompense for my soul’s tribulations. And just at the point when, in thinking about The One, I touched or believed I was touching the ultimate depths of my being, lo and behold, I stopped thinking about her in order to think about an Other, as though the woman of Saavedra were no more than a bridge of silver offered to I knew not what new pilgrimage of my mind. Rebellion and fatigue – that is what I experienced upon finding myself again at the beginning of a journey, just when I thought I’d arrived at quietude through love and at happiness through quietude. But I immediately noticed that the notion of the Other, suggested by the woman of Saavedra, occurred to me not as a result of a laborious process of reasoning but with the ease of an image that is reflected in water, which enamours the eyes of the one who look
s at it, and that makes him8 feel the desire to raise his eyes and look around for the original of the copy.
I stood up from the doorstep, my soul filled with an inexpressible commotion. I began to walk slowly down the solitary street, under the canopy of leaves rustling in the breath of the night. Again I raised my eyes to contemplate the immense troop of stars moving slowly across the sky in a sacred adagio; and for the first time my tenderness turned, not to the visible flock, but to the hidden shepherd who guided it from on high. There was in the night a correspondence of signs, or a concert of voices calling one another in recognition, happy just to be, to float for an instant above nothingness. But my heart, which so many times before had savoured such music solely for its musical delight, now refused to hear it and seemed to rise higher, as though, in abstraction from the music, my heart sought the face of the invisible Strummer. And when I understood that this unknown rapture was due only to the virtue of The One, my soul burned like a fragrant leaf and, become smoke, ascended above its own fire.
X
The story of my life is a succession of endings and rebeginnings, of rises and falls alternating with rigorous precision. Since childhood, I have learned to quail, at my peak moments of joy, for the pain whose advent I know to be imminent; every happy Sunday I’ve ever known has been overshadowed by a threatening Monday. Many have been the moments of marvellous rapture, when my soul, like a sharp sparrowhawk, has savoured the atmosphere of great heights; but the hawk has always come back to earth, its beak empty of any living prey. So it is that the soul, between rising and falling, has begun to dream of a flight without return; and that is why, ever since childhood, there is within her an aching voice that cries out for a never-ending Sunday.
The next day, when the euphoria of that night had dissipated, my spirit began to flag and my mind to doubt the value of its conquest. Withdrawing into myself as so many times before, I noticed that poverty and solitude reigned in my being more than ever. Suspecting that perhaps it had all been a game in my imagination, I rebelled against myself and decided to punish my own madness. Then, carefully reviewing the details of my first encounter with the woman of Saavedra, it seemed to me that something substantial remained. Then I became aware of my urgent need to seek her out and to measure in her presence the precise worth of my turmoil. Truth be told, a second encounter did not seem likely: the friend who had taken me to the house in Saavedra was away from Buenos Aires, and I dared not show up there alone, for fear of revealing my secret. Mulling over schemes, which I promptly rejected, and feeling more and more profoundly the need to see her, I finally resolved to provoke a meeting in Barrancas de Belgrano;9 I knew that The One walked through the park with classmates every afternoon on her way home from school.
I got there in plenty of time and sat down on a stone bench beside a giant magnolia tree. Suddenly, I recall, a vague dread came over me as I imagined the woman of Saavedra soon coming along that very path, its sand crunching beneath her feet. The effects of her first revelation were too present in my memory for me not to fear now the effects of a second revelation. When I imagined her recognizing me, even talking to me, my turmoil reached such a pitch that I got up and took a few steps in flight. But I returned to my bench of stone and, from that moment forward, oblivious of my surroundings, I kept my eyes on the path’s most distant point where she would rise like the dawn. My heart had begun to beat frantically, its drumbeats intensifying as the moment of truth approached. All of a sudden, the magnificent dawn broke. A youthful horde came up the sun-drenched earthen steps of the slope: bright girlish eyes, hair blowing in the breeze, mercurial bodies beneath dresses, tinkling laughter, voices hoisted aloft, the whole spring-like avalanche passed vertiginously before me. In vain did I seek the face of The One amid the flushed faces, her body among the bodies, her voice among the voices: The One was not there, she had not come.
When I came back to myself, night was falling: a chill exhalation from the garden made my body shudder, and I heard the sparrows up in the magnolia tree chattering their goodnight to the fallen sun. I was alone. Around me, the desolation of the earth seemed to well upward as the sky filled out with a multitude of stars. But the solitude of my soul exceeded that of the earth, so much so that I pitied myself; and I would have wept upon the dunes of my own desert, had there remained anything in me capable of crying. I looked into my being for the image of The One, and the desert answered me; I tried to recover at least my mind and my will, but neither responded. To be sure, The One was no longer within me; but neither was I, being outside myself instead. Where? The truth came to me then and there, and I received it with a shudder: until that moment I’d believed the woman of Saavedra, in all the empire of her truth, was within me; as it turned out, however, she did not reside within me, but I within her.
I went home to my room, leaving the Barrancas de Belgrano and crossing the city as it noisily set about its night life. There, between the four walls of my jail cell, the light out, I flopped down fully dressed on my unmade bed, closing the useless eyes of my flesh and the useless eyes of my soul. What my being could not attain in waking consciousness, it found in its other existence, in dreams. For it entered a world of tortured images whose true aspect I shall never remember, but in the midst of which my soul must have suffered terrors so lifelike that they passed into my flesh and jolted my body awake. When I sat up, a deep silence reigned all around, but I was still not free of that phantasmagorical imagery. Then, feeling my way in the dark, I walked over to the window and opened it wide: a spectral dawn light was bathing the rooftops of Villa Crespo as far as the eye could see; the stars were dimming in a sky of nickel; the grey bulk of buildings, the blurry outline of trees, the slow resurrection of colour, the entire old world once again waking up before my eyes exuded at that hour at a vague air of fatigue, an indefinable taste of death. I recall that an early bird, hidden in the paradise trees in the street, croaked two or three broken notes, as if it too were bewailing the fatigue of the world. Then I closed my window and drew the curtains. Having restored my room to nighttime, I went back to bed, longing for silence and oblivion. Upon my eyelids fell a long dreamless sleep, merciful simulacrum of death.
After that afternoon, and for quite a few days, I was in a singular state of absence, severely arid, though without fits or anxieties. Distanced from The One and absent from myself, I was but a double solitude. I felt like someone living in another heart, a heart in exile; and that someone knew not how to revoke his exile along with that of the absent heart. I was looking for the woman of Saavedra, unaware I was seeking for her, because in my being there was no glimmer of understanding. And that search was but an unconscious will to be; for to find The One meant to find myself, and finding her and finding myself would be resolved in a single act. My aimless wandering would sometimes bring me, as though in a dream state, to the house in Saavedra, on whose threshold I would suddenly stir up some inchoate emotion. There, beside the wrought-iron gate, oblivious to the mildness of the season and the evening bliss, I would nevertheless enter a state of unease, which, resembling life, reanimated my being for a few short minutes. Then, clinging to the sweet thought of her closeness, I meditated on The One, mentally associating her with the things of her daily world, with the sidewalk to her house, the little paths through her garden, the threshold of her door, the worn-out brass door-knocker, with everything that still retained, no doubt, the trace of her footstep, the warmth of her hand. In gathering up at least the vestiges of the presence so thoroughly denied me, my heart revived, if only for a moment, until it came time to go back home, when each step I took away from The One was, irremediably, another step away from myself.
XI
But at last came a red-letter afternoon I shall never forget. I still do not know if that friend who inititated me into the Saavedra tertulias had read the secret of my soul. I only know that by his side, one early afternoon, I crossed the threshold of the house, quivering, and stopped short as though stepping into a land both desired and f
eared. True, the grace of the garden had already been revealed to my eyes on their first encounter with The One; but then so great had been the work of my solitude and so deceitful the labour of my fantasy, that now my eyes, turned toward the garden, comtemplated it afresh as if for the first time. Moreover, glimpsed through the fence over the course of many nights, the garden had to my furtive eyes assumed the dimensions of an inaccessible province or the profile of a forbidden coast viewed by a mariner from afar: no wonder, then, my knees wobbled on crossing the threshold and my steps came to a halt before the world newly on display. But the voice of the friend waiting at my side infused me with courage, and we entered the garden on a path passing among new flowers. I walked as in a dream, with no fear or anxiety at all, weak and jubilant like someone recently brought back to life who marvels at all the things of the earth. When a turn in the path took us behind the house, I stopped, holding my friend back with my hand: there lay the garden in its full amplitude; and, mistress of that luminous domain, a Woman was coming to meet us.
Adam Buenosayres: A Novel Page 47