The Personage became silent and withdrawn for a moment, as though fondly remembering his youth.
– I wasn’t a good student, he continued. My baccalaureat and the few subjects in Law I managed to pass (by who knows what miracle) didn’t inspire much hope in the old patrician of La Rosada. On the other hand, the bustle of the city stimulated in me certain literary inclinations, whose first inklings I’d noticed out on the prairie and which now began to take form. I read anything and everything, frequented intellectual circles, expounded upon ideas, and made arguments that attracted attention. But later I noticed that, when it came to putting pen to paper, all the talent I displayed so ardently at tertulias would peter out and vanish, like a ghost refusing incarnation. In irritable discontent, I told myself, as so many others have done, that my sterility might be due to the lack of a “propitious environment.” Determined to find such a milieu in Europe, I wrote to my father asking for his opinion and his consent. That magnanimous man, generous and open to any eventuality, responded laconically with a word or two of encouragement, a bill of exchange, and a fare-thee-well. So it was that a fortnight later I left the harbour of Buenos Aires with the emotion of a second and final rupture: little did I know that twenty-five years would pass before I was to return, having nothing to show for my absence, only to be subjected to a process of abominable alchemy! But I mustn’t get ahead of my story. You gentlemen may have heard stories about early-twentieth-century Paris. It was a marvellous decade for its colour, the free play of its vital energies, its madcap dreams, a sort of chaotic beauty that people thought was the dawn of something but in fact was a nightfall. Thrown into such a world, submerged body and soul in its drunkenness, I soon forgot about everything and gave myself entirely over to that great human comedy, believing I was an actor when I was really only a stunned onlooker. The creative atmosphere one breathed in that unique city, the presence of the period’s great talents, spurred on my artistic bent, which again failed in a hundred sorry skirmishes. But then life was a mighty river sweeping me along, and it consoled me for my failures by insinuating, deceitfully, not the ars longa, vita brevis of the ancients, but the notion of vita longa versus art’s brevity. In my befuddled state, all thought of my country and family faded further and further away. One day a telegram informed me of my father’s death, and I belatedly wept in remembrance. Another telegram detailed the dispositions of his will; I was to inherit the farmhouse and outbuildings of La Rosada, with its half-league of land, as well as the thousand hectares out back. Without budging from Paris, I dealt with an administrator in Buenos Aires; in his cold letters I learned that faceless tenants were working the land of my grandparents.
”Ten years went by. And one day the great sham of my existence suddenly became visible to me. Until then I had believed that, like the men and women around me, I was sharing in the hustle and bustle of life, that we were all riding the same wave. Now, however, it was clear each of them was steering a course and building a destiny, whereas I was like a cork aimlessly adrift. Each had his place in the great “living fresco,” his natural attitude, his necessary landscape, whereas I lurked outside the fresco, tolerated as an innocuous spectator. I remember my frustrated attempts, my futile struggles to enter the tableau of others, until the dreadful realization dawned that I, too, had my place and my landscape, back there, far away; but I had abandoned them, and now lacked the necessary courage and vigour to go back and start afresh. I resigned myself, then, to my uselessness, a cog flown off its gearbox, without purpose. I found out that my two brothers both had families, and both had mortgaged and sold their lands to finance successful election campaigns. I had seen them two or three times when they came to Paris on brief diplomatic missions, or when, as advocates for the interests of English capital, they passed through en route to London; thus I caught an early glimpse of how much moral distance was to separate us later on. To bring to a close these necessary preliminaries to my real story, I’ll say that I lived through the war of 1914 and the postwar reconstruction as an ideal spectator who, though “compassionate,” did not suffer the passion of the drama. Twenty-five years had gone by, and I was nearly fifty years old. It was then that I undertook the return journey – whether out of late-blooming nostalgia, or in hope of a miracle and eventual self-recovery, I still don’t know.
At this point, a bilious laugh rippled over the Personage’s inflated casing, and we had the impression his story was about to get livelier. His tale continued:
– As soon as I got off the boat in Buenos Aires, I went straight to the prairie. I had the mad hope of recovering at a single gallop my lost familiarity with the land, thinking to revive flavours and imaginary wells of freshness lying dormant. But when I got to La Rosada, my heart sank. The latest tenants had left, like so many others, in pursuit of new horizons, and the deserted countryside was dotted with cow skeletons blanching under the sun. Dismounting in front of the house, and not finding the military stockade my grandfather had set up by sticking six cannons upright into the ground, I tethered my horse to an abandoned wagon wheel. Quietly sobbing in anguish, I entered the house at last and wandered through its desolate rooms. Gone were the family weaponry and furniture (they had been put aside for a museum), and the big old house had the sad, cheap feeling of rented things and people. I went out to the park, searched for traces, invoked ghosts, stroked the odd tree, and chewed blades of grass in my desire to reconstitute my childhood – if only for a moment! But sources of freshness and flavours had died, and they refused to come back to life for me. I hastened to leave La Rosada, as one flees from remorse.
”Then I went to visit Uribe the Basque, who was now in possession of my brother Raphael’s land and leasing from me the fields adjacent to his. He welcomed me to his wattle-and-daub house, clean as a whistle and alive with fresh-faced lasses. His sons, halters hidden behind their backs, were moving around inside the corral among a whirlwind of skittish, snorting horses. When they had finally chosen mounts, they approached me, shy and cordial, their stiff handshakes like dagger-thrusts. Then they butchered their best lamb, and the dogs celebrated a festive tug-of-war with the offal. They set the meat to roast, wine flowed, faces lit up and tongues loosened. Later, finding myself ensconced in that patriarchal circle of men and women, their every word bringing alive some colourful being, with the prairie in my eyes and the smell of dripping fat in my nostrils, I told myself that the land, whether it were mine or the Basque’s, was always true to itself, above and beyond all infidelities. In the evening Uribe and I rode over the leased fields. Stroking the stout haunch of his honey-coloured horse, the Basque suddenly announced that his son Tomás was getting married and would soon be setting up house on my land. There was a moment’s silence during which his hard hands rubbed the rawhide strip of his riding whip, once, twice; then he offered to buy my thousand hectares. Devil of a man!
”I won’t recount the details of my move to the city, nor my newcomer’s impressions, nor my glowing fits of nostalgia. I promised you an account of the Invention and Death of the Personage, and by now you must be about to send me to the devil for all my digressions, whose sole purpose is to let you understand how alive I had been before my dreadful transformation. My only additional comment is that I gladly approached the hearth of my brothers, seeking from kith and kin the warmth I was missing.
”Raphael’s home was sumptuous and stiff. I didn’t understand the character of his wife, a sad, insipid lady who noiselessly inhabited their glacial residence, mechanically going through the motions, slowly fading away like a dead star. Raphael’s children, educated by English governesses and Anglo-Saxon schools, had a standardized air about them – neutral, athletic, happy. “A generation quite without grandeur or lyricism,” I told myself, “eager to follow their father along the road of calculation and sensuality, but innocently, somehow untouched by guilt, because they’re unaware even of their self-betrayal.” There was one exception, however: my nephew Germán. From my first visit, it was clear to me that this bo
y was the only one who sang a different tune from the rest of the ensemble. His energetic face, a certain desperation in his look, and his sullen silences suddenly shattered by utterances crisp as the crack of a whip, allowed me to sense the tension between him and his family, a silent war that had been going on a long time, perhaps since his early childhood. At first, he treated me with the same militant disdain as he did the rest. After all (and one day he said it to my face), for him I was nothing but a deserter who had fled our native land for France, there to live off the sweat of tenants’ labour. I almost laughed at that, calling to mind Uribe the Basque and the thousand hectares. But I held back and expressed instead a sincere mea culpa, which improved my relationship with Germán. One night at the dinner table, Raphael was boasting about how he had decisively intervened in a matter of public business favouring foreign capital and scandalously harming the nation’s interests. Suddenly, we saw Germán throw down his knife and fork: “In this family – he said, shaking like a leaf – there are men of action and men of betrayal.” My brother looked at him coldly: “What do you mean by that?” But Germán had got to his feet and, without another word, was already on his way out of the dining room. “An intellectual!” was Raphael’s comment as he applied himself to his strawberry shortcake. When supper was over, I looked for Germán in his room. “Your father called you an intellectual, I told him. Is there any truth in it?” Furious, he shot back: “That’s slander! I am – or at least I want to be – a writer.” Kiss your money goodbye! I exclaimed to myself inwardly, thinking the poor boy was a second edition of myself. After much persuasion on my part, and hesitation on his, he read aloud several remarkable passages. There were lively portraits, vividly rendered scenes, fresh views of our native landscape, and ideas of astonishing maturity, all expressed in intense waves, as when a river overflows its banks. Not hiding my amazement, I told him: “It all sounds more like singing than writing.” My observation seemed to please him more than any praise: “That’s what it is – he said – a song.” He went on to reveal that his sketches belonged to a future novel, Song in the Blood;86 it was to cover five generations of Argentines, depicted in their lives as men of action, men of betrayal, and men of reparation. Without his spelling it out, I knew Germán was trying to write a story of our family, and I enthusiastically extolled the project. From that moment on, I became his collaborator, made suggestions, brought back memories, initiated him into the true archives of La Rosada. As a failed writer, I drew life for a while from his creative fire, its glow indirectly touching me and warming, as it were, the old bones of illusions grown cold. But it didn’t last long. Germán’s situation in his father’s house became untenable; the roof now weighed too heavily on his shoulders. One Sunday, at midday, the crisis struck. We were in the dining room, engaged in bland conversation. Raphael, as I’d noticed, had lately taken to baiting the “intellectual” and again he managed to bring the conversation round to the sensitive topic, holding forth with belligerent cynicism. At first, Germán remained silent and aloof. But when Raphael made some pointed and satirical allusions to “neo-idealists,” the boy responded with a few verbal barbs. The general conversation quickly turned into an unusually violent spat between the two; what had started as a technical discussion became frought with irony, then biting sarcasm, and finally insults. At a certain moment, Germán glared hard at his father and shouted a terrible epithet, the popular term of abuse for those selling out the nation.87 A deathly hush fell upon the room, Raphael blanched as if he’d been slapped across the face, the other sons clenched their jaws in anger, and even the phantasmal mother stirred for a moment, as though flaring up one last time from the ashes. But my brother recovered his composure and, addressing Germán, pointed at the door: “This house is too small for the two of us.” Germán left the dining room, I followed him to his room, we packed his bags, and I took him to the apartment where I lived with only my memories for company, rather like Lugones’s “Old Bachelor.”88 But my nephew was unhinged by the crisis. For a week I feared for both him and Song in the Blood. Finally I made a heroic decision. Telling myself his only salvation was to escape to other climes, I telegraphed Uribe the Basque to accept his offer to buy my land. Upon receipt of the funds, I bought a passage and took out a letter of credit in Germán’s name. Then one night, ignoring his protests, I put him aboard the Oceanic. Germán sailed away, and my youth left with him – farewells and waving handkerchiefs! Bah! When the ship’s lights had been swallowed by the night and the river, I went back to the city. I had saved the only being in my family who was still alive. Walking along the street, I suddenly laughed out loud, attracting looks from the nocturnal passers-by. A curious idea had occured to me: Uribe the Basque would never know that his big bucks had bought my hectares for a Song . . .
Sweet bygone memories, lost flavours! The Personage’s chest swelled, and Schultz and I had to hold him down, one on each side, to prevent him flying away on us.
– Needless to say, I was no longer welcome at Raphael’s house. But I still had my brother José Antonio’s home to visit. Let me describe it now in a few words. While economics prevailed at Raphael’s place, political and social ambition found ample accommodation at José Antonio’s. The matron of the house was the proverbial “capable wife,” sharp-faced and calculating, warm or cold as suited her purpose. Consumed by the fever of ambition, she was at once laudable and odious. She had laid out her children’s destinies a priori: from birth, each had been consigned to such-and-such an administrative post and marriage with so-and-so. That lady held in her hands the threads of what-was-to-be, of fortunes, illustrious family names, and testamentary labyrinths; she spun and interwove them wisely, like an inexorable domestic Goddess of Fate. Her home was an incubator of personages whose future held no unknowns, their mother having foreseen every last detail down to their famous dying words. Now, gentlemen, its disconcerting abundance notwithstanding, reality has a certain symmetry; I point this out in advance, lest you hold it against me upon hearing the story of my niece Victoria.
”In that mansion solely inhabited by algebraic destinies, Victoria seemed to be an independent force, a tuft of life disentangled from the maternal distaff: a late sprout from an apparently withered tree . . . Damn it all! This last bit is from Song in the Blood. Excuse me, gentlemen – a reminiscence. As I was saying, Victoria was to her home what Germán had been to his; and if marriage between blood relatives were not abhorrent to me, I would surely have seen them wed. Fool that I am, I actually imagined such a union, forgetting that no one in José Antonio’s family married otherwise than to the “name” assigned him or her in my sister-in-law’s Book of Life! And the name allotted to Victoria was that of Baron Hartz, a character of Semitic features, gold-filled teeth, oily complexion, and receding hairline, whose fortune was as large as it was mysterious. Not without feeling my blood stir in instinctive rebellion, I watched as he set up camp in their house. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do in the drama (which would probably ensue), short of taking a pair of scissors and cutting the thread of sister-in-law Lachesis, an act I judged to be as impossible as snatching someone’s destiny from the Fate Herself. Moreover, Victoria showed no sign of worry. She had my father’s strong chin, my grandfather’s reserved character, and the dangerous self-confidence typical of our blood-line, for good or ill. One night I discovered her secret. I came upon her in a bar accompanied by a strapping young fellow to whom she breezily introduced me. He was an agronomic engineer with a blond brush-cut, green eyes, and an innocent face reminiscent of those facial types in northern Italy, half German and half Latin. The crazy fellow talked to me all night about mineral fertilizers, artificial insemination in cows, and Shorthorn sperm in vacuum flasks to be delivered to zones where the quality of cattle was poor. Listening to his scientific rave, I wondered what the heck Victoria found seductive in that big squarehead. But when I saw them rowing in El Tigre,89 their oarstrokes in unison, united in song, I realized it was serious and began to worry. Without qui
te knowing how, I got caught up in their romantic idyll. Some obscure fatality seemed to link me to those two, the only ones left in my lineage who were still wild at heart! In any event, if they were Love, I was the Elegy who by their side was already weeping the death of their romance. Let the children go ahead and spin their hopelessly frail cobweb! Not far off, in the city, a woman with greedy eyes was turning the symbolic distaff!
Adam Buenosayres: A Novel Page 61