Adam Buenosayres: A Novel

by Leopoldo Marechal

  21 The name of Adam’s pipe, connoting the poetry of courtly love (Eleanor of Aquitaine was the patroness of several famous twelfth-century poets), is most likely taken from the short story “Eleonora” by Edgar Allan Poe, to whom Adam refers a few pages later. The standard Spanish version of the name Eleanor is Leonor, but Marechal uses a Hispanicized spelling of the French Éléonore, since he would have read the story in Baudelaire’s translation (though Baudelaire tries to conserve Poe’s spelling: Éléonora). In Poe’s story, the first-person narrator-protagonist swears to his beloved as she approaches death that he will remain faithful to her and “never bind [him] self in marriage to any daughter of Earth” (The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Vol. 2 of The Raven edition. Project Gutenberg online). Adam, for his part, will desert the “earthly” Solveig in favour of her “heavenly” form. Moreover, Poe cites words of the thirteenth-century Catalan mystic Ramón Lull as an epigraph to his story: Sub conservatione formae specificae salva anima [“The salvation of the soul depends on the conservation of the specific form”]; Lull’s sentence might well serve Adam in his project to conserve the form of Solveig in his poetry and thus “save” her from mortality.

  22 “Cuatro palomas blancas, / cuatro celestes, / cuatro coloraditas / me dan la muerte.” This traditional folksong appears as the epigraph to Marechal’s poem “Elegía del Sur” [Elegy for the South] in Poemas australes (1937) (OC I, 195).

  23 “Cucú, cucú / cantaba la rana, / cucú, cucú, / debajo del agua.” A traditional lullaby.

  24 Manitou has usually been translated by Europeans as the Creator or Great Spirit; Barcia (164n) perpetuates the missionary spirit by equating the term with the Hebreo-Christian Dios (God). Manitou, or Manitú, as Marechal writes it in Spanish, is the European deformation of a term currently transliterated as Mnidoo, according to Mary Ann Noakwegijig-Corbiere, translator and native speaker of Nishnaabemwin (Ojibwe). This word is specific to the Nishnaabemwin, one of the languages in the Algonkian language group spoken in most of Ontario and parts of Quebec. Barcia assumes that Oppavoc means tobacco, which seems logical. The word does appear to be a variant of uppovac, “tobacco” in the language spoken by the Virginia tribes (Dixon 24), but it is not even close to the Nishnaabe word for tobacco, semaa. However, the Nishnaabe were great travellers who worked a continental web of trade connections in the pre-Columbian era and afterwards; the Nishnaabe word for pipe, opwaagan, is not too far removed form the Virginia tribes’ uhpoocan, in turn related to uppovac (Dixon 24), a similarity that would be explained by the northward transfer of the pipe technology through trade relations. Thus, it seems a happy accident that Adam’s flight of fancy not only personifies his pipe Eleonore, but also metonymically conflates a gift of nature (tobacco) with the human artifact devised for its consumption (pipe). [My thanks to Dr Noakwegijig-Corbiere (University of Sudbury) and linguist J. Randoph Valentine (University of Wisconsin at Madison) for generously sharing their expertise on this point.]

  25 paraíso – literally “paradise,” but here referring concretely to the bead-tree.

  26 The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) wrote: “[Through the sexual impulse] the will of the individual appears at a higher power as the will of the species . . . But what appears in consciousness as a sexual impulse directed to a definite individual is in itself the will to live as a definitely determined individual. Now in this case the sexual impulse, although in itself a subjective need, knows how to assume very skilfully the mask of an objective admiration, and thus to deceive our consciousness; for nature requires this strategem to attain its ends” (Schopenhauer, The World 340–1). The theme is a constant in Schopenhauer. In his late work, Parerga and Paralipomena, he writes that “sexual desire, especially when through fixation on a definite woman it is concentrated to amorous infatuation, is the quintessence of the whole fraud of this noble world; for it promises so unspeakably, infinitely, and excessively much, and then performs so contemptibly little” (Parerga 316). Elsewhere, Marechal chastises Schopenhauer for his misogynistic “grosería” (“Victoria Ocampo y la literatura femenina,” OC V, 296).

  27 Rose of Lima (1586–1617) was the first canonized saint to have been born in the Americas. Lines from Marechal’s hagiographic Vida de Santa Rosa de Lima (1943) appear in Adam’s discourse on poetics in Book Four. As María de los Angeles Marechal notes (126), Adán came out on 30 August in honour of Santa Rosa’s liturgical feast day.

  28 Koriskos or Coriscus was one of Plato’s disciples in the Academy. However, as becomes evident in the second chapter of Book One, Adam is likely recalling a passage in Aristotle’s disquisition On Dreams. To illustrate the case of a dreamer who is aware that he or she is dreaming, Aristotle writes that “something within him speaks to this effect: ‘the image of Koriskos presents itself, but the real Koriskos is not present’ ” (Aristotle 734). Adam decontextualizes the Aristotelian passage and (mis) applies it to his own situation: in the next chapter, he will see Samuel’s sleeping body and note that Samuel, being asleep, is not really present. Barcia (166n), in what seems rather a stretch, proposes to conflate Koriskos with Choricus, king of Arcadia and father of the inventors of the art of wrestling and the palaestra. [I am grateful to Dr Louis L’Allier of Thorneloe University in Sudbury for sharing his expertise on this point.]

  29 Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938), modernist poet of the generation prior to the 1920s avant-garde that included Marechal. The image of a “telepathic cock” is from Lugones’s poem “Claro de luna” [Moonlight], in Lunario sentimental (1909). In his “Retrueque a Lugones” (Martín Fierro 26, December 1925), Marechal famously, and cheekily, polemicized with Lugones on the issue of traditional rhyme and metre (defended by Lugones) versus free verse, championed by the avant-gardists.

  30 General José de San Martín (1778–1850), a hero of the South American wars of independence. From Buenos Aires he led the Expedición de los Andes, crossing the mountains to liberate Chile in 1817 and proceeding north to meet Simón Bolívar finally in Guayaquil in 1822. Known as the Santo de la Espada [Saint of the Sword] for his honourable conduct as a revolutionary military hero, he apparently harboured no personal political ambitions. He is commemorated in public monuments throughout South America. In Buenos Aires, the Plaza de San Martín, a large, beautiful park in the heart of the city, features an immense statue of the general on horseback. In his essay “Narrar a San Martín” (2005) [Narrating San Martín], Martín Kohan looks at the mythification of San Martín as a founding father of Argentina.

  31 Spanish translation of Cuore (1886) [Heart], a sentimental children’s novel by the Italian Edmondo de Amicis. Barcia (171n) notes its great popularity in Argentina. Navascués (AB 113n) notes that part of the plot takes place in Argentina.

  32 “Viernes Santo, Viernes Santo, / día de grande Pasión, / cuando lo crucificaron / al Divino Redentor.”

  33 Juan de Garay, the Spanish explorer who founded Buenos Aires in 1580. (A failed attempt to found the city had been made by Pedro de Mendoza in 1536.)

  34 Juan Manuel de Rozas (or Rosas), a Federalist with rural and popular support, upon assuming power named himself the Ilustre Restaurador de las Leyes [Illustrious Restorer of Law and Order] and ruled his Santa Federación [Holy Federation] with an iron fist from 1829 to 1852. The Mazorca (so called because their emblem was a mazorca or ear of corn) was his ferocious police force. The political enemies of the populist-nationalist Federalists, allied with the Catholic Church, were the Unitarians – urban, liberal, Europhile.

  35 Amalia, by José Mármol (see 628n3). A few elements of Grampa Sebastián’s story seem to be taken from Mármol’s novel. Mármol always characterizes Rosas’s people as ferocious and bestial, like the two Mazorca agents in Sebastián’s story; Mármol describes one Federalist soldier, for example, as having “a physiognomy in which one could not distinguish where the beast ended and the human began” (Mármol 65b). At the outset of Marmol’s novel an initial group of six Unitarians are attempting to cross the river in a wh
aleboat to reach Uruguay and join the army of General Lavalle, who was preparing to attack Rosas in Buenos Aires; hence, Rosas’s suspicion that Sebastián has been smuggling “savage Unitarians.” The latter insult is endlessly repeated by the Federalists in Amalia. Manuelita, daughter of Rosas, is portrayed by Mármol sympathetically as a victim of her paranoid and despotic father; her task was to guard his person and “keep watch over the house, the doors, and even his food” (Mármol 291a). Sebastián’s passage through an entrance hall or zaguán to a patio where a mulatta mashes corn recalls the episode in Amalia set at the house of Rosas’s sister-in-law, María Josefa Ezcurra (an important figure in Rosas’s police apparatus); the zaguán and patio of the house were swarming with a “multitude of negresses, mulattas, chinas, ducks, hens, and every other animal created by God,” as well as a group of men condemned to the gallows (64b), the fate that Adam Buenosayres’s Grampa Sebastián escapes.

  The neutral evocation of the mulatta in Marechal’s text contrasts with the overtly scornful racism in Mármol’s novel. Rosas did indeed enjoy the support of the lower classes, including Afro-Argentines, and his plebeian support-base only served to disqualify Rosas’s legitimacy in the eyes of the cultivated and patrician Unitarians. That Sebastián declares himself a good Federalist is an index of Marechal’s sympathy with the historical revisionism of Catholic nationalism, first given expression in Julio Irazusta’s Ensayo sobre Rosas (1935).

  36 In the original: tocarle el violín [play the violin on him]. As Navascués (AB 115n) explains, this was a torture called la refalosa in which a knife is slowly drawn back and forth, like a violin bow, across the victim’s throat. Hilario Ascasubi immortalized the practice in his poem “La refalosa” (1839), in which one of Rosas’s mazorqueros describes this torture in detail.

  37 Rosas insisted that his followers and partisans wear a red insignia in the form of a tie or ribbon to indicate their Federalist allegiance. The Unitarian colour was blue.

  38 According to rural custom, a gaucho who arrived at a ranch would ask for permission to dismount. Permission granted would usually mean that the stranger would be fed and lodged among the ranch-hands for the night, and his horse allowed to graze.

  39 Navascués (AB 116n) reads in this phrase, which Adam will repeat in Book Five, a nod to Joyce’s Ulysses. In “Telemachus” (chapter 2), Stephen Dedalus says inwardly, “Weave, weaver of the wind” (30). In J. Salas Subirat’s 1945 translation: “Teje, tejedor del viento” (56).

  40 Boethius (480–524), author of De Consolatione Philosophiae [The Consolation of Philosophy], a Neoplatonic dialogue between Philosophy and himself (OCD).

  41 Reference to Río de la Plata, literally “River of Silver,” traditionally (mis)translated by the English as the “River Plate.”

  BOOK ONE, CHAPTER 2

  1 General José de San Martín (see 634n30). According to Argentine tradition, the Sargeant Juan Bautista Cabral saved the life of his leader, San Martín, in the Battle of San Lorenzo (Feb. 3, 1813) against royalist forces. In his Historia de San Martín y de la emancipación americana (1887–88), Bartolomé Mitre immortalized the scene in which Cabral, after freeing San Martín from beneath his fallen horse, was mortally wounded by the enemy and died saying: “Muero contento! Hemos batido al enemigo!” [I die happy! We have beaten the enemy!].

  2 The poet Jacobo Fijman (1898–1970), on whom Samuel Tesler is based, was born in Uriff in Russian Bessarabia (Bajarlía 11). In the parenthetical passages throughout this chapter, Marechal deliberately parodies Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, by Diogenes Laërtius (Marechal, Claves 14).

  3 Santos Vega: a legendary gaucho and payador (cowboy minstrel), immortalized in nineteenth-century Argentine gauchesque poetry, where he becomes a Romantic icon of the spirit of life on the pampa.

  4 Otium poeticum: leisure for poetic contemplation (Navascués, AB 127n). Incorrectly rendered in the original as ocius poeticus due to inference from the Spanish ocio poético.

  5 Galician Spanish immigration accounted for 17 percent of the total number of immigrants to Argentina between 1857 and the 1930. The gallegos, in popular culture, came to be known by several stereotypical features, both positive and negative. According to María Rosa Lojo, they were seen as honest and hard-working, but also as gullible and unsophisticated (Los “gallegos” 34–5).

  6 Quo usque tandem, Catalina, abutere patientia nostra? [How long will you abuse our patience?] The sentence is from Cicero’s first speech against Catiline, who proposed his candidacy for the Roman Senate after having been implicated in a political plot.

  7 Samuel’s note is lifted almost straight from René Guénon’s book Le symbolisme de la Croix (1931): “ ‘When this yod has been produced’, says the Sepher Yetsirah, ‘that which remained of the mystery of the hidden Avir (ether) was aor (light),’ and in fact, if yod is removed from the word Avir, what is left is Aor.” According to Guénon, following the ancient Kabbalistic text Sepher Yetsirah, the yod “hieroglyphically represents the Principle, and all the other letters of the Hebrew alphabet are said to be formed from it, a formation which, according to the Sepher Yetsirah, symbolizes that of the manifested world itself” (Guénon, Symbolism 25). Marechal was an avid reader of Guénon’s books (Coulson 8, 97). Cf. 626n20, 628n6, and 677n70.

  8 This seems to be a reference to G.K. Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). Chesterton was quite popular in Buenos Aires. Borges wrote about him in “Sobre Chesterton” (OC II, 72–4). Although he respected his style, Borges argues against Chesterton’s views in “De las alegorías a las novelas” [From Allegory to Novel] (OC II, 122–4). César Pico (see 680n102) was known as the “Chesterton porteño.”

  9 Macedonio Fernández (1874–1952): an eccentric personality, witty metaphysician, literary and aesthetic theoretician, brilliant conversationalist, and avant-garde novelist. He corresponded for several years with the American philosopher William James. Macedonio was adopted as a mentor by the literary avant-garde in 1920s Buenos Aires.

  10 Sentence attributed to classical Greek author Menander (341–290 BCE), as noted by Navascués (AB 133n). In the next paragraph, Adam continues in a mock-classical vein by referring to Castor and Pollux, twin sons of Zeus and Leda.

  11 Crítica [Critique] and La Razón [Reason] were two popular daily newspapers in Buenos Aires. Barcia (198n) notes that when Ortega y Gasset visited the city and heard the vendors hawking these papers on the street, he remarked: “It’s the hour of Kant” in reference to The Critique of Pure Reason. But in his article “La Pampa . . . promesas” written in Buenos Aires in 1928, Ortega qualifies his verbal association as a comical accident, a calembour (Ortega 630) whose absurdity underlines what he had written in 1924 in his “Carta a un joven argentino que estudia filosofía” [Letter to a Young Argentine Student of Philosophy]: “You Argentines are more sensitive than precise, and as long as that doesn’t change, you will be entirely dependent on Europe in the intellectual realm” (340). In a second article written in 1928, “El hombre a la defensiva,” he is even more sharply critical of Argentine men (he carefully distinguishes them from the women). Gloria Videla, discussing Ortega y Gasset’s intertextual presence in Marechal’s novel, aptly proposes that Marechal “co-elaborates” Ortega’s ideas, accepting them, refuting them, recreating them (Videla 166). The theme deserves more study, but it would seem that Marechal also turns Ortega’s ideas against him (see 641n25 and 645n3). In any case, the two were hardly friends; when Marechal visited the Spanish philosopher in Madrid in 1926, he was given a “glacial” reception (Andrés 26). In 1927, the “Madrid meridian affair” – occasioned by Guillermo de Torre’s claim that Madrid was the intellectual meridian of the Spanish-speaking world – provoked the collective ire of the martinfierristas; but Marechal directed his retort specifically against “Ortega y Gasset and his tribe” (Andrés 23).

  12 Mulattos: Samuel Tesler’s favourite insult (see 649n30).

  13 The coat-of-arms of the city of Buenos Aires indeed shows a
dove symbolizing the Holy Spirit, which hovers above two ships at anchor, signifying the city’s twofold founding, first by Pedro de Mendoza (1516) and definitively by Juan de Garay (1580) (website of Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires). Barcia (200n) notes that the cover illustration of the second edition of Adán Buenosayres (1966) reproduces the city’s coat-of-arms, but in Samuel’s satirical version with the dove replaced by a hen.

  14 Catamarca is a province in the northwest of Argentina, bordering on Chile. Irma would likely be an internal migrant, having left her economically depressed home in search of employment in Buenos Aires.

  15 In the original, Samuel ironically addresses Adam with the honorific Musajeta, a term correctly spelled in Spanish as musageta (< Greek and Latin, musgetes “guide of the Muses,” one of Apollo’s epithets). The orthographic change is sly: jeta in Spanish means “snout” and is used as a jocular term for nose.

  16 The Amundsen tertulia is a fictional version of the Lange family tertulia, which was held every Saturday afternoon, not Thursday. Besides the liturgical resonance of (Holy) Thursday, Marechal may have chosen Thursday rather than Saturday in homage to his admired nineteenth-century writer Lucio V. Mansilla (1831–1913), whose weekly newpaper column Causeries del jueves [Thursday Chats] was bound and published in five volumes under the title Entre nos (1889–90).