Adam Buenosayres: A Novel

by Leopoldo Marechal

  – Well, gentlemen, I later called that episode the Swan Song of My Sensibility. From then on, I no longer lived in human time but in Personage Time, a nebulous chronology I’d be hard put to account for here. Let me just recall that I gradually surrendered to the mechanism of the Directorate; its fascinating regularity subjugated me little by little until I was definitively hypnotized. If at first I read in the face of each postulant a vital problem, an unfolding destiny, a suffering microcosm, I was later able to jettison all sentimental ballast, to the point where every postulant was reduced to a mere face. Later, no longer interested even in faces, I saw each postulant as an arm outstretched and bearing a letter. Finally, I didn’t even see the arm but the letter alone, independent of its phantasmagorical messenger. In a parallel process, the upper echelons to whom I was beholden gradually granted me their trust, and I was allowed to do without the Secretary – free at last! – and to administer on my own the blue pencil’s benevolence and the red pencil’s despair.

  “Then, and only then – alas! – did I notice the incredible metamorphosis the Secretary was undergoing. The man of iron was being humanized in inverse proportion as I was being dehumanized! As my Personage carapace hardened, his shell was cracking up and falling to pieces, revealing a raw flesh that bled at the slightest touch. While my clothes were becoming darker and darker, his were actually taking on tones suggestive of springtime. By virtue of a monstrous inversion, we arrived at an absurd juncture: he was rebelling against me for the sake of mercy, and I was bringing him to heel with his old weapons! And to complete this situational reversal, the man had his own crisis. One day, as though unable to hold it in any longer, he put his hands on my shoulders and, teary-eyed, accused himself of having methodically destroyed all that was human in me. And so saying, he displayed a contrition painful enough to melt a heart of stone. I listened to him as if to the ravings of a madman, then turned my back and walked away, leaving him to sob in silence with his arms around a typewriter.

  ”Now, gentlemen, you may think the Invention of the Personage would have been complete by now. Not so, unfortunately; one final turn of the screw was yet to come. Despite my transformation, I still retained a certain animal dynamism that made me hold my head high, walk tall, and speak in full voice – motes of imperfection which certainly did not escape the expert eye of my inventors. Jose Antonio and Raphael warned me about it one day: we were in a country where no man was allowed to exercise government who did not have one foot already in the grave. Their advice, therefore, was that I should simulate an attack of gout when walking, an asthma attack when breathing, and a worrisome hoarseness of voice when talking. Once again I obeyed, and with astounding results: my visible decrepitude and my oratorical triumphs allowed me, step by step, to scale the Olympian heights of officialdom. Henceforth, the Personage was a masterpiece. One time I tried smiling in front of the mirror; like Lautréamont’s hero,91 I understood it was impossible, even if I were to take a penknife to my face and carve it. My inner dessication was so complete that, when Victoria later came from La Rosada to show me her firstborn son, I didn’t even raise my eyes from the Record of Parliamentary Proceedings. A copy of Germán’s book arrived one day: Song in the Blood had just been published to great acclaim. I fell asleep on the second page. Finally, in an attempt at physical exertion, I discovered the gout and asthma had become real and taken me in their grip.

  ”I’ve forgotten the rest; everything gets hazy and confused when I try to recall the nebulous chronology of my Personage Time – everything, that is, except the circumstances of my final demise. Pay attention now, gentlemen, because the Death of the Personage is drawing nigh! One night, while I was waiting at home for some guests who were going with me to an official ceremony, I fell sound asleep in an armchair. I was dressed in tails and, inadvertently, I’d pulled my top hat down over my face before nodding off; and so, from the vantage point of the doorway, all that could be seen were my shoulders and hat. When the Secretary came in, heading up the delegation, he assumed I was asleep. Creeping up to me on tiptoe, he touched my shoulder. Then, before his startled eyes, tuxedo and top hat collapsed into the armchair – empty, completely empty! At the end of the long process of obliteration, the Personage had crossed the frontier between being and non-being, disappearing into the void. Slowly picking up my clothes, the Secretary turned to the delegation and announced in a cold voice: “The Personage has died.” On his way out the door, he paused, angrily pushed away a few wayward tears, and repeated: “The Personage has died.”

  With these words, the Personage fell into a silence that seemed final, as though he considered his tale concluded.

  – And then? I asked, not hiding from him my sympathy.

  – Then, he answered, I felt my pneuma coming down into this circle of hell and heading irresistibly for the Sector of the Personages. Here I am. How long it’s been, I don’t know. Lately, an accidental leak gave me hope for a second death. Ah, gentlemen, I give you no thanks for inflating me a third time!

  He stood staring at us, his eyes sad and reproachful. Visibly hesitant, Schultz consulted me with a look. And sensing in my return look some strange form of pity, he performed an act that would later earn him a good deal of praise: he untied the string around the homoglobe’s nozzle and let the air escape from his balloon. As the Personage deflated once and for all, a beatific smile stole across his face.

  – Let his divine pneuma have its freedom back! grumbled Schultz. He bored us long enough with his shaggy-dog story, going over the top, in my opinion, with his “freshnesses” and “flavours.” But he defended his soul, and didn’t go down without a fight. A real son of a gun! Why did he have to go all the way back to his great-grandfather?

  The astrologer dropped the empty husk of the Personage. Then he invited me to follow him through the cloud of homoglobes who, at the mercy of the wind’s caprices, pitched back and forth in the air, tussled with one another, or angrily surged against us. It was an annoying passage. In a few places we had to punch our way through, our fists hitting the spongy bellies, top-hatted heads, or tuxedoed rear-ends of the Personages. And, though we made it out of the homoglobe sector at last, it was only to fall into the no less hostile sector of the homoplumes.

  The new loafers were gliding around at various levels in this other block of atmosphere. Essentially, they were schematic sketches: a human head attached to a large undulating feather – variously of an ostrich, rooster, partridge, swan, or peacock. They had long beards hanging down and away from their necks like pseudopods, amid which some of the wretches displayed the organ of their perdition. Pushed this way and that by gusts of wind, the homoplumes began darting around us, sinuous and slippery as fish in an aquarium. Their quick movements and the tickle of their feathers brushing our faces prevented our recognizing them, until finally one of them, more insistent or less cautious, landed on me, brought his lips close to my ear, and shouted mockingly:

  – Hey, hoser, whatcha up to? Who’s the other suit?

  His words were immediately followed by a wheezing guffaw. When he tried to take flight again, I grabbed hold of his rippling tail and, with Schultz’s help, pulled down the homoplume, who by this time was regaling us with the most colourful expletives known to the lexicon of Villa Crespo. Having wrestled him to the ground, we could see his face, the most bonafide malevo’s mug ever seen either side of the Maldonado: a dull, narrow forehead, eyes glittering beneath the single, solid line of his eyebrows, lips pursed as though around a bag of insults, but an indecisive nose and a jaw without audacity. A little tan-coloured derby was stuffed over his swinish thatch of hair, though without containing its unruly flow, and a white kerchief was classically knotted around his neck at the point where it joined his plume, which in his case was a rooster feather, grey with white stripes. His pseudopods were clutching a faded, patched-up bandoneón, survivor of a hundred milongas that had ended in fisticuffs.

  – It’s the mack from Monte Egmont and Olaya! I exclaimed in recognitio
n.

  – Hosers! yelled the pimp, still struggling to get free. Two against one! If ya wanna go for it, come on over to Rancagua Park and have it out mano a mano, mack-style.

  – Stop playing the taita! I told him. Remember when the sergeant from Precinct 21 sawed off your heels and gave you a brush cut?

  – That wanker! the mack snarled like a dog at the memory.

  – What about the time the gallego from the dairy gave you a black eye?

  – Yeah, but with a sucker punch!

  – And that’s not all, I insisted. What did you do to Catita? La Chacharola, poor old woman, wanders around looking for you, dying to wring your neck with her cold witch’s fingers. She’s a blister of hatred on the skin of the barrio. Where are her four fine linen sheets from Italy? What did you do with the sock full of money?

  The malevo’s mug momentarily clouded over, whether from anger or remorse, I never found out.

  – Catita? he sighed after a pause. Ah, one night, under the lamp-post, a tango . . .

  – That’s it! I said. You’ve spent your life trying to be a theme for a tango. While your poor mother supported you, washing clothes day in day out, you – oh, infinite idler! – never got out of the famous sack. Except to go drink mate on the patio and maul the keys of your bandoneón, a martyred virgin. From whose offended breast, by the way, you never managed to squeeze more than a couple of bars from the waltz “El aeroplano.”92

  – More than that! the mack thundered wrathfully. And how ’bout the two bars from “Don Esteban”?93

  – Fine, I conceded grudgingly. Then there’s that way you’d shuffle along the sunny side of the street, dragging your feet, all slow and stiff lest you bust some spring in your precious anatomy – oh, mack! – all the way down to the corner of Monte Egmont and Olaya, where you’d loiter for so long, you looked like a tree taking root, a sorry-looking tree, leafless and fruitless, every now and then deigning to flower in a meagre whistle.

  – Whadda lotta malarkey! the mack interrupted me. Cut it out with the fancy jivin’.

  – Or, I continued implacably, how about your grey nights in Don Nicola’s cantina (his famous one-hundred-percent plonk!), where you used to spend your idle hours (and such were all your hours) conniving with other loutish birds of a feather, or spinning lies about your martial feats, or boring them with false yarns about equally false amorous conquests.

  – False? protested the mack in a clumsy boast.

  I grabbed him by the kerchief and shook him a few times.

  – But one thing’s for sure, I said. Arriving at the milonga, you’d hit the dance floor and your incommensurable inertia would vanish in a thousand cuts and figure-eights and zigzags of the tango. What Dionysian force possessed you then? What Panic wind, what Orphic dementia was it – oh, mack! – that could so shake you up and sublimate your ignoble clay, your indolent architecture?

  – Lemme go! roared the mack, finding himself tugged by the kerchief.

  – What gust of earthy . . . ?

  – Lemme go, ya pair o’ swells! You want trouble, come on over to Rancagua Park. I’ll take you both on with one hand tied behind my back!

  Just then a blast of wind pulled us backward. Suddenly free, the mack let the same gust carry him off; quickly corkscrewing upward, he gained altitude and made the atmosphere ring with his threats, protests, and challenges. The astrologer and I got up off the ground, took hold of the forgotten rope, and set off walking again. The mack’s vociferations, however, must have roused the whole barrio, because the homoplumes, patently aggressive, started swooping down, coiling their prehensile tails around us, shouting confused diatribes into our ears.

  – Place Pigalle,94 whispered a guitarist, coming face to face with the astrologer. You were a young guy who liked to play the intellectual, like the man says, who . . .

  – Silence! Schultz enjoined him. What kind of history did you have, guitar-picker! From the Mercado de Abasto all the way to El Garrón cabaret in Paris!95

  – Now I’m playing on the radio, announced the guitarist, deeply sad. Place Pigalle in Paree! . . . Yeah, you used to talk egghead with those three bearded Germans. Chemists or alkeymists, I think they were called. Looking to make gold, or something like that . . .

  – You patent oaf! cried Schultz, stung by those words. Didn’t you used to walk up and down the rue Fontaine, in dinner jacket and slippers, horking nasty spitballs over the lapdogs of retired whores?

  – Dissolvons, putrifions, sublimons!, parodied the guitarist in execrable French.

  The astrologer Schultz turned every colour in the rainbow:

  – And what was your ridiculous ambition? he urgently asked the guitarist, as though wishing to change the subject.

  – To lay a bouquet of camellias on the tomb of Marguerite Gauthier.96

  – Not that one! said Schultz. I mean the other one. The unmentionable one . . .

  – I . . .

  – Your supreme ambition, the astrologer mercilessly reminded him, was to have yourself photographed sitting in a luxurious vestibule on an armchair covered with a white throw.

  The guitarist turned his eyes away and pretended not to hear:

  – I’m playin’ for radio now, he mused at last in a voice thick with melancholy.

  He prudently moved off, away from us, and Schultz’s face then expressed great relief, as if he had just warded off the risk of an awkward revelation. I looked at him, curious, and was wondering what veil over the astrologer’s secret life had narrowly escaped being drawn aside, when a homoplume came fluttering down and recited these words into my ear:

  – “In their palatial mansions . . .”

  I recognized the declamatory voice of Prince Charming. But the man was much changed since the last time we’d seen him at Ciro’s restaurant. His erstwhile filthy and dishevelled locks were now impeccably trimmed and well-nigh rhetorically coiffed. It was clear that facial massages and creams had worked wonders on his formerly pimply, sebaceous, pitted face. As always, he was wearing a high wing-collar (though now, marvellously, it was smudged by neither fingerprints nor flyspecks) and a honey-toned cravatte, in the centre of which gleamed a pearl, which may not may not have been oriental but came pretty darn close. In his loud-yellow–gloved hands, the sensitive malevo cradled and strummed a brass harp festooned in gaudy ribbons, whose dull strings of grocer’s twine thudded uselessly. I was glad to see him, for his presence in this circle of hell brought back fond memories of the world we’d imprudently left behind. I ventured to touch his long ostrich plume and said to him:

  – Hail, poet! How go those demands for social justice?

  Prince Charming recoiled from my hand, as if it were leprous.

  – Have some respect! he deigned to warn me. Now I recite on the radio.

  – I know! said I in a pitiful voice. That’s why the Muses of the Arrabal are in mourning.

  Prince Charming gave me a disdainful smile, as if I were talking about Ancient History.

  – Nowadays, he said, my fee is . . .

  – Pesos? I laughed. Look who’s talking about money now! The man who once lashed bourgeois buttocks with the strings of his fulminating lyre; he who troubled the unjust sleep of magnates with naught but the clean blow of a stanza; he who . . .

  – I wasn’t listened to! complained Prince Charming. No one’s a prophet in his own land. For all I care, the tyrants can thrive and multiply. Now I’ve got myself a seat at the banquet of life!

  I looked at him with moist eyes:

  – At the banquet of life! I exclaimed then. And for what? So sensible folks can laugh in your face, mocking your bad taste, so typically nouveau-riche, and your thuggish elegance and luxury. Those over-the-top shirts, those declamatory ties, those suits of impossible architecture, those agressive shoes you now show off at broadcasting sessions – a scourge for the eyes, an outrage against the light. And what to say about your neuralgia-coloured automobile and its calfskin upholstery? Or your apartment stuffed with useless furniture an
d knick-knacks, congested with mirrors, where a person can’t even turn around?

  – Jealousy will get you nowhere! said Prince Charming sententiously.

  – No, Prince, no! I said affectionately. Ever since you left, the soul has gone out of Ciro’s. The barrio moans, the old women whisper, and everyone says in one voice . . .

  – What can they say? crowed the Prince.

  – That some day your luck will turn. Once from the Maldonado, always from the Maldonado.

  Prince Charming squirmed, tried out a disdainful chortle, cast about for a counter-argument. But he was cut off by three buzzing homoplumes who dove down on us in formation.

  – Five times eight is forty! said the three voices in chorus. The pampa has the ombú!

  – When? I asked them, recognizing without much enthusiasm the three members of The Bohemians.

  – From 6 to 6:15 p.m. LX3, Radio Threnody.

  They flew off as swiftly as they had come. And then at my back I heard the melancholy strains of a vihuela. I turned on my heels and faced a homoplume in a gaucho’s hat and chinstrap, whom I recognized as the payador Tissone. Full of a certain bovine melancholy, he contemplated me for a moment. Then, plucking at his guitar, he declared:

  – I’m the hindmost harmony of a race soon to disappear . . .

  – Where? I asked him, disheartened.

  – LY2, Radio Home-on-the-Range, he answered. Every night from 8 to 8:15.

  The wind whisked him away, guitar and all. At this point, Prince Charming, the Mack, the guitarist of Montmartre, the trio of Bohemians, and other homoplumes of similar ilk all came crowding back, apparently with some aggression in mind, judging by their insolent voices and belligerent attitudes. Fortunately, the sound of a xylophone reduced them to silence. Next we heard the nasal voice of a radio announcer:

  – ZZ1, Radio Inferno. A very pleasant evening to you all, dear listeners. And it will be pleasant indeed, I assure you, if you have all heeded the wise counsel of prudence and shaved using the unbeatable Styx-brand razor-blade, the only one that’s as as soft on your chin as the caress of a sylph. Before we begin tonight’s program, allow me a brief philosophical digression, which by activating the not always well-exercised cells in your grey matter, may at this hour perturb the respectable working of your no less respectable small intestine. But fear not, dear listeners, for in the case of an internal revolution you will always have on hand the infallible Marathon, the world’s fastest and gentlest laxative.