Adam Buenosayres: A Novel

by Leopoldo Marechal

  17 The version of this quasi-mythical incident best known in North America is Emir Rodríguez Monegal’s tendentious take on it (Jorge Luis Borges 392). Martín Lafforgue (49–50) neatly summarizes the story’s variants and the historical context. Jorge B. Rivera, examining thoroughly the extant documentation, concludes that the incident in fact occurred before Perón’s presidency (29, 39) and does a good deal to separate propagandistic fiction from the facts of the case. In any case, when Perón was overthrown and exiled in 1955, the triumphant military regime assuaged the affront by appointing Borges director of the Argentine National Library (Rodríguez Monegal 429).

  18 A front-page article of Martín Fierro (5 May 1925) complains that in Argentina “the railways are English, the banks Yankee, and the electrical companies German” . . . “Nothing is ours; those who own Argentina are throughout the world. But the only thing these owners know is that Argentina is the source of a very good thing called dividends” . . . “A friend of mine who studied at Oxford was asked by the young Englishmen there if Argentina was an English colony” (Revista Martín Fierro 103–4). Here the anti-English sentiment is still fairly muted in comparison with what it would become in the 1930s and 1940s in both right- and left-wing Argentine nationalism, but the indignation is already evident.

  19 Words spoken in Gustavo Fontán’s documentary film Marechal, o la batalla de los ángeles (2002). Horacio González was appointed director of the Argentine National Library in 2005.

  20 The terms “traditionalist” and “metaphysical,” as well as “initiate,” are continually used by Marechal’s characters (and ironically by the novel’s narrator) in the special sense given them by René Guénon (1886–1951). The French author believed in an ageless esoteric tradition that underlies all exoteric religions. The alleged tradition bears a single, unified metaphysical doctrine available only to initiates. The same terms crop up in the literature of occultism, theosophy, etc., though Guénon tends to distance himself from such cultural movements.

  21 Although his article is titled “Antisemitism in Modern Argentine Fiction,” Schwartz does not even mention Adán, either because he considers the novel unremarkable in this regard or because he was not aware of its existence – a distinct possibility, given that most of the North American academy scrupulously ignored it. The Argentine-Israeli critic Leonardo Senkman, however, did consider the question: “Obviously, it is not our intention to include Marechal among that fanatical and militant fraction of Catholic intellectuals who at that time raged as much against the capitalism-of-Jewish-gold as against its mythical inversion, the Bolchevik-Jew” (10), though he does point out that the sin of avarice, in the Plutobarrio of Cacodelphia, is satirically condemned less harshly in the Italian capitalist Don Francisco Lombardi than in the Jewish capitalist Don Moisés Rosenbaum (11–13). Susana Bianchi, in her study of the complex relations between the Catholic Church and Peronism, traces the gamut of positions among Catholics in the thirties and forties, from integristas [authoritarian fundamentalists] to the católicos democráticos, inspired by Jacques Maritain’s Humanisme intégral (1939); the former tended toward varying degrees of anti-Semitism, the latter conscientiously rejected the prejudice (Bianchi 39–51; see also Cheadle, “Twentieth-Century homo bonaerense,” 19–21).

  22 Sur published Kahn’s article in February 1948, a few months before Marechal’s novel came out in August. Eduardo González Lanuza’s attack appeared in the November issue of Sur 169 (1948): 87–93.

  23 For example, Juan José Sebreli gleefully celebrates a provocation he attributes to Borges, who once “dared to proclaim over Christmas that he didn’t celebrate it because he wasn’t religious, and if he were religious he wouldn’t be Christian, and if he were Christian he wouldn’t be Catholic” (341). Sebreli quotes Borges indirectly, and I have not been able to track down the original comment.

  24 Samuel Tesler is perhaps Marechal’s most engaging character. Abelardo Castillo, in his novel El que tiene sed (1985) [He Who Is Thirsty], named his protagonist Jacobo Fiksler, thus honouring both the real-life poet Jacobo Fijman and the philosopher of Adán Buenosayres. Rodolfo Fogwill, in his novel Vivir afuera (1998) [Life Outside], invents for Samuel Tesler a fictional nephew, a Jewish doctor from Villa Crespo called Saúl Schonfeld, who wonders whether or not his crazy uncle was a Peronist (172).

  25 Late in life, when discussing the evolution of his novel, Marechal pointed to Don Quixote as his model for Adán and recalled reading it even as a child: “Ever since that time I thought that the paradigm of the novelist was Cervantes, and the paradigm of the novel was, of course, Don Quixote” (Autobiografía 63).

  26 See Mario Boido’s interesting discussion of these pieces (42–8).

  27 Solanas’ road movie El viaje (1992) [The Trip] has a strong Marechal flavour. His best-known film outside Argentina (aside from his 1968 agitprop documentary La hora de hornos) is Sur (1988), with original music by Astor Piazzolla. In an interview with Horacio González, he allows that Adán Buenosayres could have influenced this film, since he is “a great admirer of Marechal” and “likes to tell stories the way [Marechal] does” (Solanas 93–4). Eliseo Subiela gave the name Leopoldo to the protagonist of his film No te mueras sin decirme adónde vas (1995) [Don’t Die Without Telling Me Where You’re Going], in homage to the author of “the great adventure of Adán Buenosayres” (Subiela 48).

  28 Fernando J. Varea. Entrevista a Manuel Antín. Espacio Cine. 6 Dec. 2009. Accessed 7 Dec. 2009. http://espaciocine.wordpress.com/.

  29 I am particularly grateful to Nicola for having dissuaded me from rendering the euphonious title “El Cuaderno de Tapas Azules” (as difficult to do in Italian, apparently, as in English) as The Blue Notebook. The Wittgensteinian association, as Nicola pointed out, is quite inappropriate, especially since Marechal was surely unaware of the Cambridge philosopher’s work.

  THE “INDISPENSABLE PROLOGUE”

  1 Martín Fierro (1924–1927) was a brilliant avant-garde literary journal in Buenos Aires in the 1920s, where many subsequently famous writers intervened, among them Jorge Luis Borges, Oliverio Girondo, Francisco Luis Bernárdez, Jacobo Fijman, Raúl González Tuñón, Norah Lange, Marechal himself, the legendary Macedonio Fernández, and others. Caricatures of some of these writers appear in Adán (see note 647n19). Marechal suppressed this note in the 1966 edition of Adán.

  2 The Cementerio del Oeste (the Western Cemetery), or La Chacarita, was traditionally the cemetery of the common people, as opposed to the upper-class Cementario del Norte (the Northern Cemetery), or the La Recoleta. My thanks for this information to Alberto Piñeiro of the Museo Histórico de Buenos Aires Cornelio Saavedra.

  3 The first sentence of the novel uncannily echoes the first sentence of José Mármol’s novel Amalia (1851): “The fourth of May, 1840, at half past ten at night, six men crossed the patio of a small house on Belgrano Street, in the city of Buenos Aires” (Mármol 3). Both sentences begin by specifying the date and the hour; both introduce in media res narrative action protagonized by a group of six men. The latter element is slightly obscured in English translation. In Marechal: “seis hombres nos internábamos”; in Mármol: “seis hombres cruzaban.” Thus the first sentence of Adán seems to signal Marechal’s parodic intent; Adán can be read, on one level, as a counter-Amalia, an earnest Manichean melodrama serving as a vehicle for an extended diatribe against the regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas (see 635n34). Amalia became a canonical text for the culture informing the modern liberal Argentine nation-state, politically consolidated under the presidency of Bartolomé Mitre (1862–68); a silent movie version of the novel was made in 1914 and a feature-length sound version in 1936 (dir. Luis José Moglia Barth).

  4 “Tobiano” refers to the light-and-dark colouring of certain pinto horses. Barcia (144n) reads this allegorically: Buenos Aires is both light and dark, spiritual and material.

  5 Villa Crespo is a barrio located in the geographical centre of Buenos Aires. Marechal’s family lived at 280 Monte Egmont Stre
et (now called Tres Arroyos). The Church of San Bernardo still stands at 171 Gurruchaga Street, but the statue of Christ has been repaired.

  6 In the original: “los perfectos.” The perfecti, “perfect ones,” were initiates of the heretical Cathar or Albigensian religion. Denis de Rougement translates the term as “les ‘Parfaits’ ” in his book L’Amour et l’Occident (65), which explores the relations between the Cathar heresy in twelfth-century southern France and the poetic tradition of courtly love. René Guénon, an author much read by Marechal, uses the same term in his L’ésotérisme de Dante (1925), citing [Dante Gabriel] Rossetti (1828–1882) and especially [Eugène] Aroux (1793–1859), author of such provocative titles as Dante hérétique, révolutionnaire et socialiste (1854; republished 1939); La Comédie de Dante, traduite en vers selon la lettre et commentée selon l’esprit, suivie de la Clef du langage symbolique des Fiels d’Amour (1856–57). Octavio Paz, in his essay on love and eroticism (Double Flame 102ff), respectfully disagrees with de Rougemont’s ideas on the Cathar connection to courtly love, but Marechal and his preferred authors – and certainly the quasi-autobiographical Adam Buenosayres – are closer to the former than to the great Mexican essayist. In his “Claves de Adán Buenosayres,” Marechal refers to the secret sect of the Fedeli d’Amore, who practised the courtly-mystical cult of a symbolic Dame, named by Dino Compagni (1255–1324) as the Madonna Intelligenza or transcendent Intellect (Claves 11). Dante himself refers to “los fieles de Amor” [the faithful in Love] in a commentary on one of his sonnets in the Vita nuova (Dante 567). Late in life, in 1968, Marechal quotes, word for word, the verses from Dante’s Divine Comedy which Guénon cites at the outset of L’ésoterisme de Dante: “O voi che avete gl’intelletti sani, / Mirate la dottrina che s’asconde / Sotto il velame delli versi strani!” (Andrés 35) [O you of sound intellect, / Look to the doctrine that hides / Beneath the veil of these strange verses]. Like Guénon, Marechal then refers to the nineteenth-century authors Rossetti and Aroux, before underlining the importance of Luigi Valli’s Il linguaggio segreto di Dante e dei Fedeli d’Amore (1928–30). Thus the two direct sources for Marechal’s notions on Dante – the secret cult rendered by the Fedeli d’Amore to a transcendental Madonna Intelligenza – were Guénon and Valli. In 1969 Marechal averred in a public conference that “Dante belonged to that mysterious sect called the Fedeli d’Amore, along with Guido Cavalcanti, Cino Da Pistoia . . . a whole group of metaphysical poets who belonged to a secret organization. But it seems that they were all members of the heterodox sect of the Albigensians, enemies of the Catholic Church, which in their language they called the chiesa corrotta, that is, the corrupted church” (Autobiografía de un novelista 67). The Cathars/Albigensians, of course, were not just heterodox but outright heretics against whom the Roman Church launched a military Crusade (1209–29). That Dante’s cult of Beatrice may have been heterodox or even heretical is a sensitive issue for Adam Buenosayres, Marechal, and his conservative Catholic critics. Barcia, for example, gives rather short shrift to the subject, preferring to emphasize that very little is known about the alleged Fedeli d’Amore (72). In sum, it is significant that the narrator of the Indispensable Prologue discreetly uses the code-word perfectos, a veiled reference to Adam Buenosayres’s mysticopoetic construction of a transcendental feminine Figure in his “Blue-Bound Notebook”; that the narrator renounces the way of the perfecti amounts to a – perhaps equivocal and reluctant – disavowal of the heterodox doctrine of the Fedeli d’Amore.

  BOOK ONE, CHAPTER 1

  1 “El pañuelito blanco / que te ofrecí / bordado con mi pelo.” “El pañuelito” was a popular tango brought out in 1920 by the famous Juan de Dios Filiberto and his Orchestra. Music by Filiberto (1885–1964). Lyrics by Gabino Coria Peñaloza (1881–1975). Irma will sing two more snippets of the same tango.

  2 In 1536 Pedro de Mendoza named the original settlement Santísima Trinidad [Holy Trinity] and its port Santa María de los Buenos Aires.

  3 The Riachuelo (“brook, small river”) forms the southeastern boundary of the city proper and is an important feature of the port of Buenos Aires.

  4 Avellaneda is an industrial working-class suburb located to the south of the Riachuelo. Belgrano is a well-to-do residential area to the northwest of downtown Buenos Aires.

  5 Bernardo Rivadavia (1780–1845) and Domingo F. Sarmiento (1811–1888), two founding fathers of the modern liberal Argentine nation. Sarmiento’s book Facundo: Civilization or Barbarism (1845) has quasi-official status as a foundational text of Argentine national identity.

  6 La Jove Catalunya (its original name in the Catalonian language) was group of Catalonian nationalist-separatists founded in 1870.

  7 These children would be playing soccer with a ball improvised by stuffing an old sock or stocking with rags.

  8 “Fue para ti, / lo has olvidado / y en llanto empapado / lo tengo ante mí.” In the original: lo has despreciado (scorned) rather than olvidado (forgotten), according to José Gobello (Letras de tango I, 41).

  9 River Plate and Boca Juniors are to this day two rival soccer teams among the many teams in Greater Buenos Aires. The English introduced soccer to Río de Janeiro (Brazil), Montevideo (Uruguay), and Buenos Aires in the late nineteeth century; hence, the English team names, as well as many Hispanicized soccer terms: gol, referí, pénalti, etc.

  10 Evaristo Carriego (1883–1912): Buenos Aires poet whose verses sang of ordinary people and their cares. He helped create a mythology of suburban types. Jorge Luis Borges in turn mythified the poet in his essay Evaristo Carriego (1930) (Borges OC I, 97–172).

  11 “Triste cantaba un ave, / mi dulce bien, / cuando me abandonaste . . .”

  12 In the original, “cada objeto buscó su cifra”: each object sought its cipher or code. Adam’s metaphysical worldview stems from Neopythagoreanism and Neoplatonism and their derivatives. Numbers, codes, logos – in a word, the symbolic order – precede and give form to the manifest, material world. This runs counter to the modern view of the semiotic/symbolic as a set of arbitrary signifiers assigned descriptively to the materially existing world.

  13 Empedocles (c. 493–c. 433 BCE) was an important pre-Socratic philosopher, the first to oppose a pluralistic theory of being to the Eleatic conception of being as unitary and immobile. According to Empedocles, two contrary impulses – Love (Philia) and Strife (Neikos), translated by Marechal and by Barcia (154n) as love and hate – work on the four “roots” of the All (fire, air, water, earth) and make them mingle and separate, thus causing mortal things to arise and perish (Oxford Classical Dictionary [hereafter, OCD] Clarendon, 1961).

  14 Anaximander (c. 610–540 BCE) held that the origin of all things – the Divine Infinite, eternal and ageless – surrounds and governs the innumerable worlds. Each world is the product of a number of pairs of conflicting opposites that separate themselves out from the Infinite and, in his words, “pay due compensation to each other according to the assessment of Time for their injustice” (OCD). Hence, the “guilt” Adam attributes to the differentiated things in existence. Anaximander is the first to conceive the universe as a cosmos subject to the rule of law (OCD).

  15 The name Solveig may be taken from Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt (1876) in which Solveig is the obedient elder daughter, as noted by Navascués (AB 103n) and others. The surname Amundsen evokes the famous Norwegian discoverer of the South Pole; the Amundsen family is based on the Lange family (see 644n1), also of Norwegian provenance.

  16 “El amor más alegre / que un entierro de niños.” Adam’s couplet occurs as single verse in Marechal’s “Poema del sol indio” [Poem of the Indian Sun] from Días como flechas (1926) [Days like Arrows] (OC I, 113). Adam goes on to explain why the burial of a child is a happy occasion. Barcia (158–9n) amplifies Adam’s explanation by referring to a belief in Argentine folk culture that a dead child’s soul, being free of sin, goes directly to heaven, where s/he will intercede in favour of the other family members. However, the original poem by Marechal is a
bitter-sweet ode to the “Indian” sun of America; the poet’s evocation of this folk belief can hardly be construed as a lesson in naive Christian theology, as both Adam and Barcia do.

  17 Maipú is a small rural town in the interior of the Province of Buenos Aires, about 280 kilometres south of Buenos Aires. Marechal spent his childhood summers there.

  18 “Angelito que te vas / con una gota de vino, / Angelito que te vas / con una flor en la mano.” Verses of a traditional folk song sung at funerals in rural northeastern Argentina. In the song, the dead child is asked to pray for his godparents and for his siblings. As Director General of Culture from 1944 to 1950, during the Peronist government (1946–50), Marechal promoted the study and diffusion of Argentine folklore (Barcia 160n).

  19 De profundis (“out of the depths”) are the first words of the Latin Vulgate version of Psalm 130: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!”

  20 Adam is referring to the passage in the Revelation to John of Patmos in which the Lamb (Christ) opens the sixth of the seven seals: “the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree drops its winter fruit when shaken by a gale. The sky vanished like a scroll rolling itself up” (Rev 6:12–14). The last image is rendered in Saint Jerome’s Vulgate version as: “et caelum recessit sicut liber involutus.” Later, in Book Two, Adam will cite another passage from the Latin Apocalypsis. Thus Adam has apparently been reading the medieval Catholic version of the Bible, rather than a modern vernacular translation. The autobiographical basis for this odd circumstance would be Marechal’s “return” to Catholicism and his involvement with the Cursos de Cultura Católica (CCC), a Thomist college or university founded in 1922 and transformed by papal decree in 1947 into the Instituto Católico de Cultura. According to the Argentine Esteban Trento’s erudite and informative webpage Santo Tomás de Aquino, the CCC’s mission was “to teach subjects in philosophy, history of the Church, and the Holy Scriptures to young students” because they were being systematically denied these teachings by the “secularism, positivism, and liberalism prevailing in the Argentine university system” (http://www.geocities.com/tomistas/c_c_c.htm.Accessed10Jan2006). Secularism, positivism, liberalism are what Adam, in Book Two, sums up under the term modernismo.