Adam Buenosayres: A Novel

by Leopoldo Marechal

  ”For you mustn’t think that the discovery of such an uncommon metamorphosis caused me the slightest hint of panic. True, I was concerned at first about what I imagined to be the awkward aspects of my new constitution. But when I crawled comfortably, and not without elegance, across the carpet; when I dared scale the walls with the same aplomb; when I crawled across the ceiling upside down, disdaining the daunting old laws of gravity; when I looked at things from hitherto unknown perspectives and measured the wealth of my new possibilities, then a joyous exultation came over me, lasting throughout the night until the break of day. But then, seeing daylight filtering through the skylight, I remembered the Librarian: would the blind man notice my scandalous transformation? There lay my clothing in a heap on the floor, the discarded garments recovering their original colours now that they’d left me. Inevitably, the Librarian would have to see them when he came to Room Number Three! Fortunately, I had a renewed attack of what I described earlier as infinite voracity, except that now it wasn’t for intellectual substances: I hungered for material solids, stuff I could gnaw on and swallow. So I ate up all my clothes. Then, returning to my leather armchair, I watched for the Librarian’s arrival. He came in at last, looked around vacantly, and left. Deo gratias!

  ”After that I devoted myself to the pleasant work of gnawing and physically devouring the volumes in the room, the luxurious bindings, the delicious gilt, the papers from Japan, Flanders, and Italy. I chomped away and surfeited myself as before, but now I did so at a bestial pace, given over to the rudimentary laws of hunger and sleep. Springtime went by, and the ravages to Room Number Three became alarming even to me. The Librarian, however, showed no sign of concern. At first his indifference reassured me at first, but it soon caused me a dull anger. That man or devil was trying to ignore me, or was pretending to ignore me! I decided to provoke him somehow: one day I crawled furtively into Room Number Two, climbed the hat rack, and ate the Librarian’s pearl-grey Stetson, which had no doubt cost him an arm and a leg. Returning to my domain, I awaited, not without emotion, the surely inevitable reprisals. But the Librarian acted as if nothing had happened; and so, going back to my feasting, I forgot all about him.

  ”I gorged myself and slept, my abdominal rings grew dangerously fat, and as I lay collapsed in the friar’s armchair I sensed that my periods of sluggishness were growing longer. The day finally arrived when I could no longer get out of the chair. I fought against lethargy, managed to wake up for a moment, then soon succumbed once again to my terrible drowsiness. My ringed body began to break out in cold sweats, and the sweat immediately hardened, until finally it formed a secure crust around me, a closed cocoon, an inviolable sleeping chamber. And I slept in my cocoon for a long time. Until one day I woke up, in the grip of unfamiliar impulses and a kind of mad strength. I turned within my narrow prison and at last scratched through the hard shell encircling me. I emerged fluttering, drunk on light, avid for heights. How ridiculously tiny was Room Number Three! I beat my wings, took flight, and bumped head first into the walls, the bookshelves, the ceiling, the closed skylight, as though the room were another cocoon and I had to break out of it, too. Then appeared the Librarian Who Peered Out from Hazy Distances: distracted as ever, draped in silence, with his vegetal indifference, his terrible apathy, that man, if indeed he was such, opened wide the skylight. And out I flew to the open air, only to descend into this Inferno.

  Don Ecuménico had finished telling his story. He looked at each of our faces, fixedly, anxiously, as if waiting for an objection, perhaps a question, or even a look of consolation. But Schultz and Tesler maintained their distant air, and I couldn’t find a thing to say to him. Seeing which, Don Ecuménico flapped his wings, managed to achieve lift-off, and flew away heavily, flitting among monstrous flowers.

  XIII

  A big, plain iron door led from the eighth to the ninth and final circle of hell. There we took our leave of Samuel Tesler who, after a rather cold handshake, turned his back on us and returned to the City of Pride. Schultz bade me enter through the open door. One after the other, we descended a spiral staircase that took us to the very edge of the Great Pit yawning at the end of Schultz’s Inferno. I peered over the edge into the maw. Deep down I saw a great shuddering mass of something like gelatin, which gave the impression of being a gigantic mollusc, though it wasn’t.

  – It’s the Paleogogue, Schultz gravely informed me.

  I turned again to contemplate the monster, and although I noted no particular evil, it seemed that all forms of wickedness were synthetically united in its undulating mass, and that the abominations of Schultz’s hell found both their origin and their meaning in the gelatinous beast writhing in the Great Pit.

  – What do you think? Schultz asked me, pointing at the Paleogogue.

  I answered:

  – Nastier than a fright at midnight. Got more gills than a dorado. Serious as a monk’s codpiece. More ingratiating than a rich man’s dog. Sharp-pointed, like an old man’s knife. More puckered than an immigrant’s tobacco pouch. Shit-smeared, like the boot of a Basque dairyman. More ornery than a draw-wheel nag. Uglier than a pig’s somersault. Tougher than a vizcacha’s paw. Skittish as a washerwoman’s pony. Solemn as the fart of an Englishman.

  Glossary

  balín (< bala, “bullet”) – small-bore bullet; argot term for penis; by metonymy, homosexual.

  bandoneón – musical instrument like a small accordion, typically used for tango music.

  bombilla – a short metallic tube used as a straw to drink the mate infusion from the mate (gourd). The lower end is fitted with a sieve to prevent the mate leaves being drawn in.

  café con leche – coffee with milk.

  caften – pimp.

  camoatí (Guarani, “wasp”) – a kind of wasp found in the river valleys of the Paraná, the Paraguay, and the Uruguay.

  caña quemada – caña is liquor made from cane sugar; caña quemada is from burnt sugar.

  carcelera (< cárcel, “jail”) – an old flamenco song-form whose lyrics sing the tribulations of life in Andalusian jails.

  chajá – bird native to north and eastern Argentina; crested screamer.

  che! – informal interjection that adds emphasis to a statement, whose meaning changes according to the context: hey!; come on!; brrr!; phew!; etc.

  china (< Quechua, “female”) – in gaucho language, an affectionate term for girl or woman; in other social contexts, pejorative for girlfriend or mistress.

  chiripá (< Quechua) – a kind of blanket that gauchos wore over their pants, which they passed between the legs and wrapped around the waist.

  chorizo – seasoned pork sausage.

  churros y chocolate – fritters and hot chocolate. Roughly, the cultural equivalent of coffee and doughnuts.

  ciruja – garbage-picker; down-and-outer, tramp.

  comadre – godmother; in colloquial usage, friend and neighbour.

  compadre – in standard Spanish, the godfather of one’s child. On being absorbed into the city, the gauchos living on the outskirts called one another compadre in a friendly way. Later, the term came to designate a braggart and brawler, a tough-guy.

  compadrito (dim. of compadre) – young man who imitates the compadres; well-dressed tough-guy, dude, dandy, pretty-boy.

  confitería – originally, a cake shop; in Argentina, a tearoom or café.

  conventillo – boardinghouse where poor immigrants lived, usually in overcrowded squalor.

  criollo – in colonial times, Spanish colonials born in the Americas; after Independence, their modern-day descendants; native-born Argentines.

  dientudo (“big-toothed,” “toothy”) – a voracious fish of the Oligarsarcus species, native to the River Plate region.

  dorado – a long spindle-shaped fish with a large mouth, indigenous to the Paraná River.

  facón – a large knife with a straight blade ending in a point, used by gauchos for butchering cattle, but also as a weapon, especially in duels.

&n
bsp; franelero (argot) – someone who goes to the brothel to hang out, drink, and converse, without paying for sexual services. In early twentieth-century Buenos Aires, large numbers of lonely men had no other social life than the café or the brothel.

  gallego – a native of Galicia, the northwestern province of Spain. Gallegos were the most numerous contingent of Spanish immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Argentina, the gallego was stereotyped as hardworking and honest, but gullible and unsophisticated.

  gringo – foreigner, usually referring to the very numerous Italian immigrants.

  linyera – in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Argentina, a poor itinerant farm labourer (usually Italian); by extension, tramp or hobo.

  malambo – a folk dance in northern Argentina, executed by single men who compete in footwork.

  malevo (< abrev. of malevolente, “malevolent”) – bad guy, bully, thug.

  malón (< Mapuche) – an attack by group of aboriginals on white settlers.

  mate (< Quechua mati, “little gourd”) – (1) the gourd in which the tea-like infusion yerba mate is prepared and then drunk; (2) the drink itself.

  mazamorra – a traditional Argentine dish made of corn mashed and boiled in water.

  milonga – a popular dancehall or party where people dance tango.

  nene – literally, a small boy; in Buenos Aires argot, by antiphrasis, a fearsome tough-guy.

  padrinos (plural of padrino, “godfather”) – in rural Argentina, horsemen who assist the horsebreaker.

  pampero – a wind that blows across the pampa or plain in Argentina that brings fine weather.

  paraíso (“paradise”) – bead-tree.

  parrillada (< parrilla, “grill”) – barbecue; an assortment of cuts of beef, including internal organs, from the grill.

  payar (verb) – to improvise verses in counterpoint with another in a kind of poetic duel.

  payador – gaucho troubadour; popular country-style singer.

  pesado (“heavy”) – a man who acts tough and walks with a swagger.

  pompier (French, “fireman”) – a codeword coined by the French avant-garde to denote vulgar, emphatic, or pompous conventionality in art; the 1920s Buenos Aires avant-garde used it pejoratively against the preceding generation of poets and artists.

  porteño (adj. or noun) – refers to a person or thing from the port city; that is, Buenos Aires.

  pulpería – an all-purpose general store / liquor store / pub, prevalent in rural Argentina and elsewhere in Spanish America until the early twentieth century.

  puna (< Quechua) – a high Andean plateau.

  ranchera (< rancho, a rural hut of mud and straw with a peaked roof) – in Argentina, the ranchera is a dance and song form, in 3/4 time, dating from the late nineteenth century in the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

  sainete – a theatrical genre, usually a one-act comic or melodramatic sketch, very popular in early twentieth-century Buenos Aires.

  taita (< tata “Dad”) – a gaucho term, then suburban argot: a man respected for his courage and audacity, especially in knife fights.

  tertulia – a group gathered in a café or private salon for informal discussion.

  tano – slightly pejorative term for Italian immigrant.

  truco – a traditional Argentine card game played with a Spanish deck in which three cards are dealt to each player; the points won by betting are added together with the points won in each hand.

  tuna – a group of strolling student musicians, in a Spanish university tradition dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

  vizcacha – a large rodent with a tough hide which lives in underground colonies on the pampa; considered a pest by country folk.

  yerba (mate) – see mate

  zaguán – in Hispanic architecture, a kind of vestibule serving as an intermediary space between the street door and the interior of a building or house.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1 Marechal, poet and playwright, wrote only three novels. Adán, his chef d’oeuvre, was his first; it was followed by El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo (1965) [Severo Arcángelo’s Banquet] and the posthumously published Megafón, o la guerra (1970) [Megafón, or War]. A comprehensive biography of Leopoldo Marechal (1900–1970) has yet to be written. The most complete chronology of his life, compiled by María de los Ángeles Marechal, is available at the website of the Fundación Leopoldo Marechal http://www.marechal.org.ar/Vida/Vida/cronologia.html (English version accessible).

  2 Unless otherwise indicated, I quote from the English translation of Cortázar’s review.

  3 Respectively, Leo Ou-fan Lee’s reading of Midnight (1932) by Mao Dun (in Moretti 687–92); and Ernest Emenyonu’s reading of People of the City (1954) by Cyprian Ekwensi (in Moretti 700–5].

  4 James Scobie’s Buenos Aires: Plaza to Suburb, 1870–1910 is a classic English-language social history of Buenos Aires. A good sequel is Richard Walter’s Politics and Urban Growth in Buenos Aires: 1910–1942.

  5 European visitors, especially French and Spanish, praised Buenos Aires as the most important Latin city after Paris. In Adrián Gorelik’s view, this enthusiasm was due in part to their anxiety to find an equivalent to anglophone New York, and in part to a view to assuring a place of continuing importance for their own old-world “Latin” cultures in a world whose future looked to be increasingly American (Gorelik 86–8).

  6 Berg disagrees with the classification of Adán as a Großstadtroman. Although he agrees that it offers a “ ‘total’ panorama” of Buenos Aires in terms of scriptural and discursive space (99), he feels it is a mistake to compare Marechal’s novel with those of Joyce, Dos Passos, or Döblin, opining instead that Adán affords a “non-modern” vision of the well-ordered, familiar barrio, or at most – Berg concedes to the peril of his argument – of the arrabal [suburb] (101–2). But barrio and arrabal, it must be noted, are two very different spaces, whose agglomeration adds up to the modern big city. Navascués’s view of the matter, though expressed in an article concerned with Marechal’s “mythical cartography” rather than his treatment of urban space, tends toward the same position as Berg (Cartografías 111–12).

  7 Given the quasi-autobiographical nature of Gamboa’s novel, it seems plausible that Salim may be based on Abdellatif Limami.

  8 Borges never forgave Marechal for his caricature as Luis Pereda and refused even to acknowledge the novel’s existence.

  9 For English-language treatments of Adán vis-à-vis Ulysses, see Fiddian (29–31), Gordon, and Gerald Martin’s brief but useful contextualization (138–9). Martin finds Adán Buenosayres particularly notable because “the book was scarcely read until the 1960s, by which time the so-called New Novel had retrospectively rendered it legible, thereby underlining its extraordinary pathbreaking achievement” (139).

  10 “Books this incoherent are rare” (20). And yet, just over a decade later, Cortázar in his great novel Rayuela [Hopscotch] would experiment with textual fragmentation to a far greater degree than did Marechal. In both Adán and Rayuela, fragmentation, displacement, and centrifugality take place under the author’s sure artistic control; in neither case does incoherence result.

  11 For Vicente Cervera Salinas, for example, there is no doubt that Adam’s Notebook “traces the novel’s centre of articulation” (202). Cervera Salinas’s very erudite gloss on Marechal’s version of “the Beatrice Syndrome” (chapter 7, “La estirpe de Solveig Buenosayres”) is the rare, thorough-going “metaphysical” reading of the novel that takes on board the lessons of modern theory, rather than evading or outright shunning them.

  12 Marechal presents his second novel, El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo (1965) [The Banquet of Severo Archángelo] by noting that he left his hero Adán Buenosayres stranded in the last circle of Hell and proposes to show with his new novel a way out (Banquete 9).

  13 Marechal wrote in 1941 that future novelists would see in Joyce “an enlightened precursor and . . . approa
ch Ulysses as a strange and beautiful monument” (James Joyce 302). In an interview in Spain shortly after Adán was published in 1948, Marechal said of his novel: “It is a gigantic autobiography linked to the life of the city. I consider it a key novel, its architecture Mediterranean and Latin, free in its language, [based] on the Aristotelian canons of the epic form. The Mediterranean novel is the modern epic and must continue in this line. Perhaps the only one who may be considered an interpreter of this way of feeling is James Joyce” (qtd. in Andrés 81).

  14 See also Javier de Navascués, “Marechal frente a Joyce y Cortázar.”

  15 By virtue of a curious textual juxtaposition in the same issue of Sur (November 1949), Lanuza’s screed against Marechal and his novel immediately follows Arturo Sánchez Riva’s celebratory review of Ernesto Sábato’s first novel, El túnel (1948) [The Tunnel], a short cogent tale attuned to postwar French existentialism. The novels are utterly dissimilar in tone, narrative technique, and length. To his credit, however, Sábato always defended Marechal.

  16 The violent animus of Marechal’s contemporaries gave way to the more serene assessment of Adán in the 1950s by the Contorno writers Noé Jitrik, David Viñas, and Adolfo Prieto (the latter frankly admiring of the novel). In the sixties Marechal was partially rehabilitated thanks to the success of his second novel, El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo (1965) and his public support of Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba. Abelardo Castillo (b. 1935) has always championed Marechal; when awarded the Grand Prize of Honour by SADE in 2011, he again denounced the injustice done to Marechal (Silvina Friera, “Abelardo Castillo, Gran Premio de Honor de la SADE.” Página 12. Cultura & Espectáculos. 16 Dec. 2011).