Adam Buenosayres: A Novel

by Leopoldo Marechal

  – At your orders, sir, I acquiesced. But I’d like to take a snapshot of you and hear a word or two about your current state.

  – Not a word! he refused. Absolute discretion! Let me remind you, however, that mythology records an extramarital relationship between Venus and Mars. In fact, right now, just around the corner – and I tell you this in soldierly fraternity – I’m having a whale of a time with a certain nymph from Palermo. Sex appeal, the gringos call it. An old fox, I say.

  – But, colonel . . .

  – Silence, conscript! About-face! Forward, march!

  I mechanically obeyed and went to join Schultz, who was waiting for me unfazed.

  – Fine, the astrologer said. Now let’s go over and look at that slime-covered Wall.

  Schultz unceremoniously led me into a fourth infernal sector called the Wall of Dirty Old Men. Among Schultz’s inventions, this one struck me as the most noteworthy (of course, I hadn’t yet seen the Meadow of the Ultras or the Canefield of the Sodomites). As its name suggested, this scenario featured a high, smooth wall. Countless old men in the form of slugs were trying, with extreme difficulty, to crawl their way to the top of the wall, leaving behind a shiny, gelatinous trail. But once they reached a certain height, the old men hesitated a moment, then fell straight back down to the bottom. Over and over again, they climbed up and fell back down, as obstinate as the creatures they resembled.

  When we got close to the wall, Schultz spoke:

  – Among the scourges afflicting Buenos Aires, one finds these shitty fossils. Having failed to become “mature young men,” they are condemned in perpetuity to be “dirty old men.” I’m quite aware that porteños have a tendency to Venusmania, either because of the climate or the aphrodisiac virtues of our River, or for some other unknown reason. The Italian monk Sergi, who visited Buenos Aires in 1640,37 as well as the English tourist Vidal in 1815,38 both point out in their memoirs the unbridled obsession among our men for the demotic or popular Venus (and I’m surprised that our friend Bernini, sociologist of indisputable merit, has not used this argument in support of his sadly famous doctrines). But, in other times, aided by a religion that admonished him from the cradle, the porteño male prudently submitted his ardour to the holy yoke of matrimony; or, after sacrificing the calf of his youth on the goddess’s altar, put on the slippers of wisdom and honourably redefined himself in his old age. Those were the elderly gentlemen of yesteryear, handsome and strong as carob trees, whose company one could not keep without gathering the well-seasoned fruit of experience! How different from the picture offered by the fossils of our time! With one foot in La Recoleta Cemetery39 and the other in a private booth at the Tabarís, the old crocks nowadays stubbornly cling to a false virility based on orthopedics and cosmetics. There you have them, slobbering all over my wall and leaving it a filthy mess! Fathers of our homeland who for half a century sat broody in a ministerial armchair hatching nothingness, and who now celebrate their jubilee years in bachelor pads reeking of perfume; directors of companies and managers of magazines who play the satyr with office girls and shopgirls; retirees and investors, chasers of typists; professors and academics . . .

  – Splat!

  That “splat” interrupted Schultz’s metaphorical speech, and the astrologer looked with displeasure at the slug who’d just tumbled down at our feet.

  – Ah! said Schultz. It’s the senator.

  – Hee, hee! laughed the slug. A slip isn’t the same as a fall. We good old boys are like that!

  – Bah! said the astrologer. I can still see you standing at the door of the Jockey Club:40 you’d just had your facial massage, and you were dressed in natty white stockings bordered in black, a tie fit for an adolescent, and a corset cinching you like a pot-bellied donkey.

  – It wasn’t that tight, rejoined the slug, trying to adhere once again to the wall.

  – And perfumed like a rake! insisted Schultz. You’d watch the girls walking by and drool like a turkey, your watery little eyes examining their every detail, as if they were racing fillies.

  – Can’t a fellow forget his grey hairs once in a while?

  – That’s how you went bald, no matter how hard your toupee tries to cover it up. You were as luxuriously tricked out as a mummified fop. But what really made my blood boil was your urgent expression and that mysterious look you affected, as if you were trying tell the world you had what it takes to pull off an amorous exploit.

  – And why not? said the slug trying to feign modesty.

  – Don’t make me laugh! exclaimed Schultz. I know how you used to trot after dressmakers and accost the young women taking tea at Harrods, offering them everything from a Renault sports car to a professorship in literature.

  – My lips are sealed! the slug insinuated.

  – Of course! added Schultz. Then you used to try to dribble the ball past the goddess of Death by stuffing yourself with pills and enemas. I can just see you swaddled in your garish dressing-gown, feeble and farting around in your bachelor pad, your fur-piece resting on the wig stand, your glass eye in one cup and your false teeth in another. But whenever the voice summoning you to the mausoleum let up a bit, you’d gather your rickety skeleton together and turn your bones over to those restorative hands that keep on prolonging your enormous ridicule.

  – Tra-la-la, tra-la-la! sang the slug, now creeping up the wall.

  Then the astrologer turned to me:

  – Let’s leave him here to climb the wall and bust a gut, he growled. Now I’ll show you the fifth sector.

  An autumnal, saffron-coloured meadow beneath an opaque, ashen sky. To the north, a line of copperish trees, hugging themselves and shivering. To the south, a volcano dead from the cold. To the east, a non-descript swatch of sea. To the west, a mossy medieval castle; on its battlements, grave and alert, men in red hunting tunics, each grasping a horn not as yet blown. And running across the meadow, women both young and mature, dressed as Asiatic goddesses or as prostitutes of ancient, lavish fiefdoms; coiffed in the style of Ceres, Mithra, Astarte; adorned with pearls snatched by the Malay diver from the ocean depths, with gems brought forth by the unhappy miner, with gold and platinum stolen from the bowels of the earth, with tropical feathers of all sorts, and with the pelt of every beast, fierce or meek, ever to have been stalked by hunters, from the snows of Mongolia to the torrid zone of Africa. That is what I saw when I entered the fifth scene.

  – Who are those luxurious women? I asked Schultz.

  – The Ultras, he answered. Ultra-courtesans, ultra-poetesses, ultraintellectuals: super-females, as finely tuned as lutes.

  – What?

  – They are the ones who, by dint of sighs, ruined the varnish of hours. The ones who twisted and spun the fleece of melancholy. Who got tipsy on ineffable nostalgias every Tuesday afternoon between six and seven. Who stood before luxurious mirrors and parodied the thirty-two postures of the rational soul. Who tried with their fallopian horns to produce the pure sound of the intellect. The ones who . . .

  – Enough, already! I interrupted. And what are they doing in this inferno?

  – Alas! sighed Schultz. There you see them, trying to look like Sappho and imitating the pose of Lysistrata. If you draw near, you’ll hear them debating arduous problems in philosophy, art, or economics. But it’s easy to see they speak only through their sex.

  – What is their punishment?

  – You’ll see when the huntsmen sound their horns.

  As I waited for events to unfold, I turned my attention back to the superfemales. Some were walking with a kind of measured step, crunching dead leaves underfoot, and with the austere aspect of women who drag fatality on a leash behind them (I can’t swear to it, but I thought I saw among them Marta Ruiz, that fire amid ashes!). Others (and I clearly saw Ruth of The Golden Ant) hugged their lyres of gilded cardboard and seemed to be intoning sublime odes to the water in the east, to the volcano in the south. The rest of the women, their voluminous dresses sweeping behind them, went running a
fter pink, yellow, and green flags, and harangued one another (wasn’t that Ethel Amundsen?) or belligerently brandished toy popguns. Only then did I notice the excessive theatricality of both scenario and actors – a hyperbolic falseness that seemed intentional. I was just thinking about this when one of the women approached. Astonished and confused, I was about to cry out her name, but the astrologer Schultz, in the nick of time, covered my mouth with his hand and prevented my indiscretion. Meanwhile, the Ultra had planted herself in front of us with that majesty I’d admired so many times in the visible Buenos Aires. She was as tall as Schultz, opulent in curves, and lean of face; her jet-black hair was adorned with artificial sprigs of cedron, poppy, and laurel; two silver snails nibbled at the pink lobes of her ears; and she was dressed, or undressed, in a close-fitting nightgown down to her feet, which were shod in some indefinable shade of saffron or autumn. But most noteworthy of all was that she bore, like Themis, a balance-scale made of gold; and on each of its plates was a human brain.

  – Here I have the two brains, the Ultra informed us. This one, the man’s, weighs 1,160 grams. The other one, the woman’s, weighs 1,000. Do you gentlemen think that a measly 160 grams of grey matter justifies the odious condition of inferiority men impose on us?

  – Now, Titania, don’t get yourself into a flap, responded Schultz condescendingly.

  The black eyes of the Ultra flashed in fury:

  – That’s just what I can’t stand in you men! she shouted. That way you have of listening to us with patronizing indulgence. Are women not intellectual creatures?

  – Hmm, said the astrologer. Metaphysics doubts it.

  – Loathsome wretch! whined the Ultra, shaking her fist in Schultz’s face. A man who thinks nothing of eating flowers out of the vases on the table.

  But the astrologer looked at her with the severity of a judge and said:

  – Let the accused maintain decorum! Renounce your intellectual urges

  – they probably won’t impress the jury anyway – and tell the truth. Victim of a fervour not at all intellectual, did you or did you not outrageously troll the American continent?

  – So what? rejoined the Ultra defiantly.

  – Is it true that local production wasn’t enough for you, so you went fishing in other continents and managed to attract numerous male specimens, all of them refined in the use and abuse of intelligence?41

  – I had to do my research, objected the Ultra.

  – And something else, insisted Schultz. Let the accused declare whether or not she persisted, on her return to Argentina, in the ridiculous, dangerous, and fortunately useless task of trying to refine the peons of her estancia, forcing upon them Honneger’s concertos, novels by D.H. Lawrence and André Gide, as well as Freudian doctrine.42

  – Brutish peasants! muttered the Ultra. They used to fall asleep at the first chord or sentence. Impossible to get a single line of Mallarmé into their thick skulls.

  Schultz clucked his disapproval and then said to me:

  – What I find hardest to take about Titania is her detestable mania for subordinating things of the spirit to the vague, exquisite, ineffable titillations of her “sensibility.” There isn’t a single piece of music, not a metaphysical idea or psychological observation, that she doesn’t immediately refer to her all-embracing sympathetic nervous system.

  – Ah, monster! shrieked the Ultra in a splendid fit of anger. A man who goes out at night and sniffs the tramps asleep on the street.

  She said no more, for the huntsmen in the battlements unexpectedly blew their horns in a spirited call to arms. It was just one blast, but when the super-females heard it they stopped dead in their tracks for an instant. Dropping their lyres and banners, they all ran toward the woods and waited in front of the copperish trees. No less hastily ran Titania, abandoning – alas! – her illustrious scales, the train of her long dress sweeping along dead foliage. A second trumpet blast sounded, but deeper this time, as though calling for the kill. Forthwith, a drove of white, black, and pink unicorns came galloping out from among the trees, manes flying in the breeze, horns poised at the ready. Whinnying feverishly, they charged the super-females and bored them up to the hilt.43 The melee of women and beasts, of shrieks and neighs, was soon shrouded in a reddish dust-cloud, the details of the encounter obscured. Then from the battlements another blast of the huntsmen’s horns signalled retreat. The unicorns returned to their forest glade, their horns reddened. The Ultras got to their feet, adjusted their dresses, and again took up their banners and lyres. In the moss-green castle the huntsmen dozed off.

  – That’s about all there is to see here, said the astrologer then, leading me away by the hand.

  Like a man who leaves one nightmare to embark upon another, I followed Schultz to the sixth infernal sector. The new scene looked a lot like the “mazes” one finds in amusement parks, with their twists and turns, their distorting mirrors, and the way their design, no matter how childish, insinuates a promise of getting inevitably lost. Although Schultz had let me know we were now in the Labyrinth of Solitary Souls, no human presence could be seen in the corridors. Two or three times I thought I saw either a furtive shadow slipping through some narrow passage or a heel disappearing round a corner of the maze. But I didn’t see a single complete image – not so much as a profile fleetingly glimpsed in some mirror. Later, when recapitulating the whole adventure, the astrologer confessed to me that the circulation system of this labyrinthine sector, whose discreet orderliness I couldn’t get over, had been entirely inspired by a certain establishment non sancta, located on the rue de Provence in Paris, which in his youth he had frequented no less studiously than passionately.

  I was wondering if any inhabitants at all were to be seen in the sixth sector when, rounding a bend, we came face to face with the Grand Solitary. He was a man of indeterminate age, greenish face, furtive and feverish eyes, and lyrical mane of hair, dressed in a dark suit.

  – Have you seen Valeria around here? he asked without looking at us.

  I said nothing. But the astrologer, quite without curiosity, asked him in turn:

  – Who is Valeria?

  The Grand Solitary looked at us then with a hint of agitation and declaimed:

  – It is she who has looked down upon me from her magnanimity, as the rose bends down to the worm!

  – Nonsense, muttered Schultz. Normally, it’s the worm that climbs up to the rose.

  – I did not rise to the rose! protested the Grand Solitary. The rose came down to me. Besides, who dares suggest that Valeria does not exist?

  He looked at us challengingly, but Schultz stood up to his gaze:

  – If you’d just calm down and forget about those delirious metaphors . . .

  – Look, interrupted the Grand Solitary, those metaphors are now dead to the world, tucked away in the haberdashery El Porvenir,44 necktie section, eighth shelf on the right. I no longer write. What for? Valeria is a reality, and she has leaned down to me as the stem of the hyacinth does to the . . .

  – Enough! the astrologer silenced him. Either you express yourself in plain language, or we won’t listen to you.

  – But Valeria does exist! cried the Solitary. In my long hours at the haberdashery, I myself came to doubt her reality. But then, like the dawn light that treads beatific . . .

  – Sure, sure, Schultz soothed him. You wouldn’t have dreamed it, would you?

  – Sir, said the Solitary, our kisses, that night, could have forced open the lock of jubilation. Do you want details? Valeria is the last, sublime descendant of a ranching family. “New aristocracy,” you’ll say. Bah! The alembics of Argentina distill rapidly. True, her grandfather was an old cowboy from the south, accustomed to spending nights on horseback out on the range – never got used to sleeping in a regular bed; still sleeps on a saddlery horse installed in his luxurious bedroom decorated with prairie landscapes. There the old man dozes on his wooden sorrel horse, his satin pyjama swathing him like a chiripá, while a simulated pampero
blows over him from strategically placed fans, and the lowing of cattle comes from hidden phonographs to lull him.

  Concerned, I looked to Schultz. But the astrologer was cold as an iceberg.

  – And Valeria? he asked.

  – Her bedchamber, explained the Grand Solitary, is neither that of Cleopatra nor Aspasia nor Phryne, but the quintessence of them all. I shan’t enter into intimate details at the moment, for discretion flowers like a carnation within the breast of every lover. But you must know that her bathroom is of porcelain, with illustrations from Ovid, Boccaccio, and other great masters of universal literature.

  – Let’s go, I said to Schultz when I heard those words. He’s quite mad.

  Making our getaway, we continued our journey through the Labyrinth. But the Grand Solitary was following us:

  – Valeria exists! he declaimed fanatically. The wind that sways the lilies of her garden wears slippers of water and whistles the preludes of Debussy.

  Our pace became a frenzied trot.

  – Valeria’s nightshirts, he insisted as he trotted at our side, were woven on the murmuring looms of aurora . . .

  We covered our ears and ran full speed out of the Labyrinth.

  Still running, we entered the seventh and final setting in the Spiral of Lust, of which I got only a sketchy notion, since we flew through it as though running over burning coals. It was a dense cane field, with bundles of very high stalks, hard and sharp as spears. On each of the spears, two or three men were skewered through the sphincter. Adolescents, young and middle-aged men, they flapped their arms as if trying to take flight; their agitation made the cane stalks bump together with a metallic clicking noise. A kind of vague language could be heard in that scenario: anxiety-inducing rumours and whispers and murmurs, which suddenly became louder when the skewerees noticed our presence.

  – Shhh! Shhh! they called to us then, swinging eagerly back and forth up there.

  But the astrologer and I ran like the wind until we reached the end of the spiral.