Adam Buenosayres: A Novel

by Leopoldo Marechal

  She moved slowly forward, beneath a sun perpendicular to the earth: her body, without shadow, had the firm fragility of a branch, a sort of combative force in her lightness, a terrible audacity in her decorum. She wore a sky-blue dress wrapped round her like a whisp of mist; but the garden, the light, the air, all heaven and earth joined forces and worked to clothe her, so much to be feared was her nakedness. With her face turned to the sun, she showed the two violets of her eyes and the slight arc of her smile; a bee buzzed in circles around her hair. As she walked, her small feet crushed golden sand, seashells, and the carapaces of blue beetles. Her arrival seemed to last an eternity, as if The One came from very far off, across a hundred days and a hundred nights.

  Ah, well did I recognize her power in the faintness suffered by my heart at every step she took! And I recognized too the admirable virtue with which she remedied that effect on me, when she finally came up to us and extended the double bridge of her voice and her hand. I was hearing her for the first time, and to my ears her words took on a resonance that was new and nonetheless ancient: hers was a morning voice, of the same family as other morning voices that once upon a time, back in Maipú, had spirited me out of childish frights and nightmares. And, certainly, it was a joyous awakening after the phantasmagoria of dreams possessing me, thanks to the charm of her voice and the brush of her hand – warm, dry and golden as a spike of wheat: a rekindled strength, boldness trying its wings, allowed me to face without flinching the Woman so long contemplated in my mind.

  Then, beginning to walk, The One led us into her resplendent vegetal domain. In the time of my childhood, when I came upon a colour print or read some novelistic episode, I would long for the miracle of inhabiting those luminous realms invented by art. I recall having approached that ideal on a few memorable days, later, during my youth. But never, as on that afternoon, had I so felt the strange beatitude of living in poetry. And never had reality been so exalted before my eyes, to the point of becoming a set of pure forms and graceful, singing numbers. The three of us chatted in the garden, the glowing noonday sun burnishing our skin like a strong ointment, and made our way through the dense legions of flowers, bathed in an ecstatic light flecked now and then by a bird’s wing or the volatile gold of a butterfly. We walked next to the wall clothed in honeysuckle, where iridescent-throated doves cooed with no trace of fear: theirs was the music of the garden, and along with the elytron beetles hidden amid the herbs and the bumblebees, their chant filled our ears. The realm of The One was a world in lasting harmony: the death of a single insect would have upset its delicate balance. The One, pausing frequently, spoke to us of her garden, without looking at us, as though in an intimate soliloquy. It was like learning everything anew, but with no effort at all and with the living certainty of music. For the Woman guiding us through the garden had her own way of naming things: she would say “bird” and the essence of the bird appeared in the mind of her listener in a hitherto unknown light, as if The One somehow had the virtue of recreating the bird merely by saying its name.

  Who, then, spoke of love? It was Friend.10 We were sitting, the three of us, on a rustic bench, in the shade of a willow whose verdant fronds grazed our hair: the strong aroma of heliotropes beneath the sun induced in us an inchoate inebriation more of the mind than of the body; and ever since that afternoon I occasionally tell myself that if the mind had a scent it would be comparable to the dry, ardent, chaste perfume of heliotropes. But who, then, spoke of love? It was Friend. The first thing he pointed out was the loving virtue thanks to which the Lover, with eyes turned toward the Beloved, forgets himself, exchanges his form for the form of what is loved, dies by degrees to his own life, and comes to life again in the life of the Other; until finally the Lover transforms into the Beloved. As the Friend spoke, my eyes looked into The One’s eyes, with an easy boldness I cannot explain. Then it was my turn to speak, but rather than talk about my own feelings, I related the drama of the Lover converted to the Beloved who hides or flees or ignores the Lover. With a vehemence that must have seemed strange in that garden setting, I depicted the anguish of the Lover who, dying within himself, finds no resurrection in the life of the Other. The One remained silent, although her eyes, looking into mine, emitted the clearest light, indefinable for me then, but whose true value I understood later.

  I don’t know how long that unique dialogue went on between two voices and one gaze; nor is it my purpose to divulge all that was said on that midday occasion beneath a willow in Saavedra. I shall only say that, all of a sudden, the laughter and shouting of young men erupted into the garden. The frightened doves scattered in a flutter of wings. It seemed to me some magic circle was being broken, or the doorway to a secret was stealthily closing.

  XII

  There followed more light-filled days during which I visited the woman of Saavedra so many times that I believed myself arrived at the pinnacle of happiness. But one afternoon, when care seemed as far away as can be, I clearly realized that my repose was nearing its end and the dawn of anxiety was nigh. We were walking in the garden, at the hour when the shadows lengthen, and we chanced upon the greenhouse where sun-shy flowers resided: the white roses there intoxicated us with their perfume, and she too was a white rose, a rose of damp velvet. Her voice must have had some intimate affinity with water, for it was liquid, diaphanously resonant, like the well-water back in Maipú, when a stone fell in and aroused recondite music. Being alone in the floral nursery brought us closer together than ever. It was my great opportunity and my inevitable risk, because at her side I suddenly felt the birth of an anguish that would never leave me, as if at the moment of our greatest closeness there was already opening between us an irremediable distance, just as two heavenly bodies, as they reach their maximum degree of proximity, simultaneously touch the first degree of their separation. The grotto-like light, eroding shapes and forms, managed to exalt them miraculously; and the form of The One assumed for me a painful relief, a plenitude which, once glimpsed, made me shake with anguish, as if so much grace, so slightly supported, suddenly revealed to me how perilous her fragility was. And again the admonitory drums of the night began to beat in my soul, and before my terrified eyes I watched as The One withered and fell among the roses, she as mortal as they.

  And baleful voices began to cry from within me: “Look at the fragility of what you love!” A fit of weeping overcame me then, which I desperately tried to stifle, not only because it betrayed, in the presence of The One, a side of my being that no one, not even I, could look at without trembling; but also because I was frightened by the absolute impossibility of giving her an explanation for my weeping. But she hadn’t missed the advent of my tears, and she said to me: “Adam Buenosayres, why are you crying?” Here, at the risk of seeming otiose, I need to express the effect those two little words had upon me: for the first time, I was hearing from her lips the letters of my name. When she encunciated “Adam Buenosayres,” I felt myself named as never before, as though witnessing for the first time the complete revelation of my being and the exact colour of my destiny. And when she then asked me, “Why are you crying?” she did so as though for all eternity she had known why, but with such sweetness that I wept all the harder and, without a word of reply, ran out of the greenhouse and fled through the crowd of flowers.

  The voice of alarm raised within me that afternoon would never again fall silent. It sounded two or three times more, when I came into contact with the woman of Saavedra. But it arose so urgently, so distressing was its cry, that I could not bear to hear it and stopped my visits to the garden, clinging to the circle of my much-wept-over solitude. Distancing myself, I was losing her in the garden, but at the same time, it turned out, I was recovering her in thought, and more frequently, with more precision, with more dangerous intimacy. In those days, I admired no grace, assessed no perfection, discerned no truth that did not take me back in memory to The One and to the inevitable meditation on her death. And though such mournful ideas were interrupted when s
leep overcame my body, I would then descend into a world of phantoms where the same funereal liturgy was rendered in terrible visions, the same grief rehearsed which, while awake, I felt only in premonitions.

  Then I conceived of the incredible enterprise. Perhaps it was the venerable terror, or the fecundity of my lament, or the cry of never-extinguished hope. In any case, I was moved to undertake the difficult labour of enchantment, the strange work of alchemy – the transmutation of the woman of Saavedra. No doubt it was that: the heroic desire to put up a dike against the ineluctable, and to preserve in spirit what in matter was already flowing unstoppably deathward. Such was the extraordinary, prudential labour initiated by my cares in those days: seeing how vulnerable her resplendent beauty was in mortal clay, I set about extracting from that woman all the durable lines, volumes, and colours, all the grace of her form; and with these same elements (though now rescued from matter) I recontructed her in my soul according to weight, number, and measure. And I forged her form such that henceforth it would be free of all contingency and emancipated from all grief. I recall describing the details of such an astonishing operation in a necessarily obscure poem written at about that time; my friends didn’t understand the poem’s true scope and spun the most diverse conjectures. My hope is that, should their eyes chance upon these lines some day, my friends will remember the poem and finally discern its obscure meaning; I hope they’ll see why in the last phase I called the transmuted woman: Niña-que-ya-no-puede-suceder, “Girl-who-can-no-longer-happen.”11

  (Note: The following chapters bring the Blue-Bound Notebook to a close. They were written, no doubt, by Adam Buenosayres after his definitive tertulia in Saavedra. The manuscript lies before me now, awaiting transcription. But before continuing, I contemplate its tormented lines, full of scratched-out phrases and corrected words, altogether different from the handwriting in the first part of the Notebook, whose exquisiteness speaks of an artist’s slow, painstaking work. This last part begins with an extravagant fable or apologue. It goes like this:)

  XIII

  It comes to pass – not every year – that Springtime, tired perhaps of lying dormant in the sap of trees or the blood of animals, shakes off the vapours of sleep and says to herself that it’s now time to dance upon the earth. In vain the heads of astronomers swivel in denial; in vain the almanacs, perturbed, warn her the time to dance is not yet come. Mindless of such wholesome counsel, Springtime sallies forth into the world: her bugle plays reveille for the flowers, her dance arouses a profusion of prematurely sprouting leaves. This does come to pass, but not every year; and in the orchard of Maipú a certain young peach tree did not know this (I was a child then, and spy of hidden gestures). It happened once that – while the elderly peach trees, experienced in the exercise of prudence, were still asleep and ignoring the deceitful song of spring – the young peach tree opened its blossoms (thus did my love misjudge time!) and exposed them to the benevolent critique of the sparrow. But it wasn’t long before the frost returned (silly little fable); and that year the young peach tree, its blossoms whimpering, learned the exact date of its springtime. Thus does my love, weeping, learn its lesson.

  In the last part of the Notebook, I gave an account of the alchemical work I’d initiated with the virtues of that laudable woman, redeeming them from the devastation I perceived already in progress and translating them to the intimate retreat of my soul, where they might acquire the stability of things spiritual. I say now that no sooner had I begun than the inevitable doubling of The One took place, producing the necessary opposition between the earthly woman, who was being reduced to nothing, and the celestial woman, whom my soul was building up in her secret workshop. And since the construction of one was being done with the remains of the other, it was not long before I noticed that as the spiritual creature grew in size and virtue, the terrestrial creature diminished in inverse proportion, until it arrived at its limit of nothingness. Thus did “the death of The One” impose itself upon my mind with the rigour of a necessity. And its date must have been, in my eyes, as foreseeable as that of an event in the heavens.

  Nevertheless, no sooner had I received this news than a deep chord detonated in my being and something vital was left forever wounded. I’ll never forget the nocturnal hour when, crossing the threshold of Saavedra and wending my way among the throng of astonished faces filling the vestibule, I came, as in a dream, upon the narrow box containing the remains of The One; yes, the coffin of walnut wood whose edges marked for her an unbreachable limit. She was swathed in the brightest of linens. Her sisters had combed her flaxen hair, crowned her brow with a ring of little white flowers, and placed between her stiff hands an ivory rosary and the book of her first communion, just as they would have adorned her for her wedding. Yet the whole of her spoke of such appalling distance that, when I looked at her, my being became unhinged and its inner voices began their woeful lament, to the point of nearly bursting out loud, finally finding an outlet in sweet avenues of tears. Afterward, I remember an all-night wake whose infinity seemed to deny any new dawn; and a whirlwind of bare faces sobbing in the candlelight, unsightly yet beautiful in the terrible shamelessness of their grief; and the house full of weeping or – what amounted to the same thing – fraught silences; and then a lassitude of limbs, a hunkering down of lights and a drowsiness of tired animal; and at last the break of day, insisted upon by imbecile roosters, but indecisive and apathetic, as though fearing that not enough pain remained in humankind to fill another day on earth. And I’ll not speak now of the stupor experienced by eyes before the dawn light no one had summoned; nor of the brilliance of the funeral procession of lacquered coaches and horses’ hooves; nor of that unbearably slow journey through Buenos Aires whose indifference stung like an insult; nor of the cradle of red clay which lovelessly received that vanquished body of a girl; nor of the return trip without her, from solitude, amid solitude, unto solitude.

  XIV

  Listless days ensued, filing by like automatons in front of my being, every morning bringing their tired old collection of pawed-over junk, every evening taking it away. Indifferent to the play of exterior images, my mind empty and my will paralyzed, I recall how stupid and rigid seemed the chill mechanics of time, the obligatory waking-up and the useless return to sleep, each time the earth emerged from or re-entered its cone of shadow. Night-time, however, brought with sleep the sweet parody of death, and the dark delight of reviving in a subtle world made of images that arose in another space and came into being in another time, witnessed by another awareness in my being. But in my dreamspace The One’s death, too, was reconstructed according to other laws; and it attained a fine-tuned intensity so painful that I would wake up suddenly, still filled with fragments of images and voices. Then, opening my ears and holding my breath, I would listen to the furniture creak, the wind sigh in the paradise trees on Monte Egmont Street, and someone else moaning in dreams in the other room, sounds and whispers of sounds that overwhelmed me with anguish, as if my nerves extended beyond my skin and branched out through the house to pick up its most intimate vibrations.

  But on the last of those nights I had an extraordinary dream whose meaning, impressed upon my defeated mind, opened up a path from which my mind will surely not henceforth swerve. I seemed to be in rickety boat, standing on its poorly fitted planks, and paddling ceaselessly over the waters of a lagoon. The devastated body of The One lay across the bow of the boat, wearing the same clothes and accoutrements as in her final night in Saavedra. Still paddling, I contemplated her womanly form, my soul racked by a tearless pity whose sweetness I cannot now depict, while the paddle, cutting through the dead waters, stirred up terrible odours and sliced into phosphorescent chunks of dead meat that swirled and sank into the depths. Next it seemed the boat came to rest at a jetty as dark as ink. I took up the woman’s body in my arms and went up some sort of stairs until I came to a door that opened soundlessly before me. Then, it seemed, Someone behind the door held his arms outstretched toward m
e and I deposited in them the dead body, which was soon borne away into the interior gloom. When I tried to follow, it seemed, an invincible force pinned my heels at the threshold, and the door slowly closed, separating my heart from those remains I’d brought over the waters. Wounded to the point of deep distress, I seemed to shout out terrible words and beat my fists against the closed door; since there was no echo of a response, my blows and shouts became more violent, until I seemed to feel behind me the presence of someone staring at me fixedly. I turned around then and made out the shape of an old and ragged man whose face seemed not unfamiliar. Looking at me mercifully, he said: “Let death take its own.”12 And since I asked him who he was, the old man answered: “I am he who has moved, moves, and will move your steps.” Then I seemed to recognize the same voice that had spoken to me, both when awake and asleep, so many times before; and, as if the sense of all my actions in this world were owing to that voice, when I heard it issue from the man’s mouth, my eyes shed convulsive tears. Seeing which, he told me: “Pay no more mind to multitudinous images, and seek the single, true face of The One.” Not understanding the meaning of his obscure words, I seemed to hear others from the man’s lips coming into my mind, words ordering me to pursue the work of the heavenly woman, whose praises the man sang so passionately that, caught up in a rare exultation, I suddenly awoke, the flavour of that music in the ears of my soul.13

  Ever since then my life has had a well-defined direction, a well-placed hope in the vision of The One who, redeemed by the work of my loving mind, breathes in my mind and is nourished by my substance,14 rose that eludes death. She not only triumphs in her now immutable springtime, but she continues to transform and grow, according to the dimensions of my soul’s own desire: rose that eludes death, flower without autumn, mirror mine, whose perfect form and unique name I shall know some day, if, as I hope, there is a day when man’s thirst finds the right water and its true spring.15