Adam Buenosayres: A Novel

by Leopoldo Marechal

  17 “El primer cuidao del hombre / es defender el pellejo.” The two lines are from stanza 2,313 of La vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879) [The Return of Martín Fierro], by José Hernández, sequel to his narrative poem Martín Fierro (1872). In the poem, the speech is pronounced by the Viejo Vizcacha, a wily and unscrupulous character named after a rodent, considered to be a pest, indigenous to the Southern Cone.

  18 Ricardo Rojas (1882–1957): a writer of the Novecentista generation, notable for its celebration of the 1910 centenary of Argentine independence. Rojas wrote an eight-volume history of Argentine literature and culture, La literatura argentina: Ensayo filosófico sobre la evolución de la cultura en el Plata (1917–1922). In this passage Samuel pokes fun at one of Rojas’s literary ticks.

  19 Gloria Videla (174), discussing the intertextuality between Ortega y Gasset, Eduardo Mallea, and Marechal, relates Samuel’s contrasting cities of the chicken and the owl to Mallea’s thesis of the two Argentinas, one visible and vulgar, the other invisible and spiritually superior. Residents of the former enjoy “an eminently bourgeois satisfaction . . . a state of comfort . . . a contentment without glory”; the latter are “profound, subterranean, called to a tragic existence.” The former, “garrulous and happy,” are merely play-acting or faking [representando]; the latter are creating (Mallea 365).

  20 Samuel spoofs the conventions and stereotypes of the sainete, the popular, melodramatic theatrical form that in 1920s reflected the dramas of the lower classes, many of whom were immigrants (Navascués, AB 142n).

  21 Perhaps a parodic allusion to the angel with whom Jacob wrestles in Genesis 32:23–32.

  22 The bucolic project is surely a reference to the East-European Jewish settlement in the Argentine pampas in the late nineteenth century, a project sponsored by the Jewish-Belgian Baron Maurice de Hirsch, as well as to that settlement’s literary consecration in Alberto Gerchunoff’s book Los gauchos judíos (1910) [The Jewish Gauchos]. The redemptive vision of Jewish farming was part of the same European Jewish ideology that gave birth to Zionism. Gerchunoff aimed to achieve Jewish assimilation and acceptance by Argentine society by rhetorically marrying Jewishness to gaucho-ness, the latter being a contemporary symbol of Argentine authenticity. As Edna Aizenberg observes (20), Gerchunoff deliberately employed linguistic archaisms, quoting medieval Sephardic texts and paraphrasing Don Quixote, in an attempt to reaffirm the Jews’ historical roots in the Hispanic world and thus legitimate their presence in Argentina. The book, along with its assimilationist project, was enormously successful among Argentine Jews and Gentiles alike, spawning imitations and movie versions. It effectively founded the lineage of Argentine-Jewish literature.

  23 An allusion to Count Hermann Keyserling’s South American Meditations (1932), which devotes an entire chapter to “Sorrow.” Keyserling’s rather patronizing thesis is that South American humanity is stuck in the “Third Day of Creation,” a vegetative, chthonic reality imbued with a passive, suffering sadness. In a dialectical twist, however, he praises this condition: “South American sadness is worth more than all North American optimism and all Neo-European idealism” (310; Keyserling’s italics). Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz (real-life model for Bernini) took up the notion of Argentine sadness in his famous essay “El hombre que está solo y espera” (1931) [The Man Who Is Alone and Waits/Hopes]. Keyserling was one of many prominent European thinkers and writers who were attracted to visit Buenos Aires in the 1920s and 1930s: among them were Spanish literary critic Guillermo de Torre, Spanish avant-garde writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, French Fascist intellectual Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, French Catholic intellectual Jacques Maritain, and Italian Futurist poet Filippo Tomasso Marinetti.

  24 Macedonio Fernández (see 637n9). The original phrase, from his experimental metaphysical essay “No toda es vigilia la de los ojos abiertos” (1928) [Not All Consciousness Is of the Waking Kind] is a poetic formulation of his doctrine of “absolute subjectivism or idealism.” Being, writes Maedonio, is “un almismo ayoico” (25), literally: a non-selfish soul-ism or soulishness. One of Macedonio’s chapter titles is “El mundo es un almismo.” Marechal has combined the two phrases: “El mundo es un almismo ayoico.” This neologism is consonant with Macedonio’s assertion that the Yo [the “I,” the Self] is an invention of our “grammatical genius,” but that it lacks all substance or content. Samuel Tesler’s reply is: “El mundo es un yoísmo al pedo,” which more literally translated would be: “The world is a vain egoism, useless as a fart.”

  25 Twice Samuel insists on giving Adam Buenosayres a lesson in frankness, the second time assuming the mantle of the European master. This looks like a satirical allusion to Ortega y Gasset’s contention in “El hombre a la defensiva” that “in normal social intercourse the Argentine [man] does not let himself go; on the contrary, at the approach of another, he locks up his soul and goes on the defensive . . . Whereas we [Europeans] let ourselves go and lose ourselves with complete sincerity in the theme required by the conversation, our [Argentine] interlocutor adopts an attitude” of petulant self-importance (Ortega 643). Ortega goes on to develop at length the metaphor of the mask behind which the insincere Argentine defensively hides. But in a sly manoeuvre, Marechal has Samuel, master of the masks, impersonate the “sincere” European.

  26 Philography (Sp. Filografía): a term denoting the Neoplatonic Renaissance genre of “writing about love” initiated by the exiled Iberian Jew León Hebreo in his Dialogues of Love (1535), which take the form of allegorical conversations between Sofía (Wisdom) and Filón (Lover). León Hebreo was forcibly exiled from Portugal in 1483 and then from Spain in 1492. His work was published posthumously in the Tuscan dialect in Rome in 1535. The best (re)translation to Spanish is Diálogos de amor (1587), by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca princess, Garcilaso remains in the Latin American imaginary as a powerful figure of racial and cultural mestizaje. León Hebreo’s book and its various translations ended up on the index of books prohibited by the Inquisition.

  27 Besides the appropriation of Ortega y Gasset’s mask metaphor in this episode (641n25), at this juncture there is likely a more respectful allusion to the same leitmotif in Jacobo Fijman’s best-known book of poetry, Molino rojo (1926). The figure of masks, always in the plural, is key in the poem thus titled, “Máscaras” [Masks], as well as in “Feria” [Fair], but perhaps most significantly in the famous first poem of the collection, “Canto del cisne” [Swan Song]: “Oficios de las máscaras absurdas; pero tan humanas” (Poesía completa 36) [Offices {in the sense of liturgical offices} of masks that are absurd but so human]. This line follows upon the first two verses of the poem, the most oft-quoted of Fijman’s poetry: “Demencia: / el camino más alto y desierto” [Dementia: the highest and most deserted road]. For a perceptive commentary on this poem, see Melanie Nicholson (105–8).

  28 Ombú or Phytolacca dioica: a large tree of immense girth (up to fifteen metres) and luxuriant foliage. Considered to be the only tree native to the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay, it has thus become their symbol. The tree’s sap is poisonous; hence the folk wisdom, alluded to by Adam, about the unhealthy quality of the ombú’s shadow.

  29 Federico Lacroze (1838–1899): owner of Tramway Central, the company that established the first streetcar line in Buenos Aires in 1870.

  30 In the neo-colonial economy of Argentina during the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, the large market share enjoyed by English woollen products, in detriment to locally produced woollens, was an especially sensitive issue.

  31 Natura naturata (nature as created entity or system) and natura naturans (nature as creative force or process): medieval Latin terms, the latter attributed by the OED to a translator of Averroes and later associated with Spinoza.

  32 Sofrosyne: ancient Greek term for healthy-mindedness and serenity through moderation.

  33 This invented name is a Rabelais-style joke
: Asinus (Latin “ass”); Paleologos (Greek, “versed in things ancient”).

  BOOK TWO, CHAPTER 1

  1 “Argentine epic,” for argentinopeya in the original (see 642n9).

  2 Antaeus, in Greek mythology, was son of Poseidon and Gaia, and of gigantic strength.

  3 Saint Vitalis, whose feast day is 28 April, was martyred in Bologna in the third century. Titular saint of the basilica at Ravenna.

  4 Teatro Colón. Magnificent opera house and theatre in downtown Buenos Aires, inaugurated in 1908, two years before the centenary celebration of Argentina’s nationhood. A proud symbol of Argentina’s wealth and success in its project of liberal modernization.

  5 The quote from Hamlet is in English in the original Spanish text.

  6 Quia tempus erit amplius (Vulgate Bible, Apocalypsis 10:6), phrase spoken by an angel to the seer of Patmos. In the NSRV: “there will be no more delay” (Rev 10:6); the angel continues: “but in the days when the seventh angel is to blow his trumpet, the mystery of God will be fulfilled” (Rev 10:7).

  7 “¡Melpómene, la musa de la tragedia viene!” First verse of “Pórtico de Melpómene” from Melpómene (1912) by Arturo Capdevila (1889–1967), whose romantic poetry appealed to a wide public.

  8 Berta Singerman (1901–1998), singer, reciter, and stage and film actress. A Russian immigrant to Argentina, she was famous for her recitations throughout Spanish America (Barcia 242n). She starred in the silent film La vendedora de Harrods (1920 or 1921) [The Salesgirl at Harrods].

  9 Chrysopæia means, etymologically, the “making of gold.” The term comes from the medieval science of alchemy, the source of Adam’s metaphor. The Spanish crisopeya echoes the neologism argentinopeya, coined in Adam’s interior monologue above, which etymologically means the “making of silver,” though the term in its context further suggests a combination of the words Argentina and epopeya (“epic”) or the Argentine epic that will fuse the many disparate ethnicities into the noble metal of a national identity. Later, Marechal will didactically distill this metal symbolism in a poem (“Didáctica de la Patria” in Heptámeron [1966]): “El nombre de tu Patria viene de argentum [. . .] En su metal simbólico la plata / es el noble reflejo del oro principial. / Hazte de plata y espejea el oro / que se da en las alturas, / y verdaderamente serás un argentino” (OC I, 311; Marechal’s italics) [The name of your Nation comes from argentum [. . .] In its symbolic metal, silver / is the noble reflexion of the original gold. / Make yourself silver and mirror / the gold of the heavens, / and truly you will be an Argentine].

  10 The allusion is to Arturo Capdevila, native of Córdoba, who had a doctorate in Law and Social Sciences. Capdevila’s poem “Pórtico de Melpómene” (see 642n7) allegorizes the poet’s pursuit of the tragic muse (Melpomene) as a chase through the woods at midnight ending in erotic violence: “Después, junto a la margen de una fuente, / cayó . . . ¡Caíste! ¡Puesto que eras tú misma! Estabas / pálida como ahora . . . Temblabas . . . ¡Oh, temblabas / como ahora! . . . Caíste vencida, agonizante . . . / Y yo rodé por tierra, demelenado, hipante, / y comencé a besarte, y comencé a morderte, / como quien va a matarte, por fin, o a poseerte! . . . (Primera antología 30) [Later, by the side of a fountain, / she fell . . . You fell! . . . Because it was you! You were / pale as now . . . Trembling . . . Oh, you were trembling / as now! . . . You fell in defeat, agonizing . . . / And I tumbled to the ground, dishevelled, gasping, / and I started to kiss you, and to bite you, / like someone about to kill you, finally, or to possess you! . . . ]. In his next comment, Adam parodies this episode. Capdevila’s poem alludes to Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon in the tragedy by Aeschylus, from which Ruth will presently recite a few lines.

  11 Allusion to the 1928 tango “Duelo criollo,” a ballad recounting the duel between a payador and a card shark over a suburban girl known as the “flor del barrio” [flower of the barrio]. Both men get killed, and out of grief the pretty girl opens her wings and flies up to heaven.

  12 Free translation from the original: “– ¿Quién se comió el puchero?” [Who ate the stew?] / “– El del sombrero” [The one with the hat].

  13 “Entre San Pedro y San Juan / hicieron un barco nuevo.”

  14 El Hogar, El Gráfico, Mundo Argentino. Popular magazines in 1920s and 1930s Buenos Aires.

  15 Carmen (1875), opera by Georges Bizet. Cavalleria rusticana [Rustic Chivalry] (1890), by Pietro Mascagni.

  16 Río Negro. A fertile region of Patagonia (southern Argentina), famous for its fruit. Ironic transposition to Argentina of the legendary apple that started the Trojan war.

  17 Which-from-a-metal-takes-its-name. Reference to Argentina, derived from the Latin argentum “silver.”

  18 Maldonado Creek. The arroyo Maldonado was originally one of several large ditches that drained excess rainwater into the Río de la Plata. Urban development has covered over most of them. Since 1937 the Maldonado has been running through pipes beneath Juan B. Justo Avenue. Marechal’s characterization is obviously ironic.

  19 La Paternal. A barrio or neighbourhood adjoining and to the west of Villa Crespo.

  20 “All is quiet for half an hour.” Curious allusion, passed over by most of Marechal’s commentators, to the Book of Revelation (8:1): “When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was a silence in heaven for about half an hour.” This is one of many other, more obvious allusions in the novel to the New Testament Apocalypse.

  BOOK TWO, CHAPTER 2

  1 Captain Amundsen (see 631n15). The tertulia at the Amundsen house recreates the ambience of the Lange tertulia, famous in the annals of Argentine cultural history. After the death of her Norwegian husband, Mrs Lange held weekly social gatherings at 1756 Tronador Street with her five beautiful daughters in attendance: Irma, Haydée, María Cristina, Norah, and Ruth (Ruti). (A younger son, Juan Carlos, died young.) In the novel, the five sisters are reduced to three – Ethel, Haydée, and Solveig – Haydée Lange corresponding to Haydée Amundsen. In real life, the very beautiful Haydée Lange enamoured many of the tertulia’s male vistors – including Borges and Xul Solar, according to at least one biographer of Norah Lange. Ruth Lange is novelistically transposed to Ruty Johansen; Irma, the reader will recall, is the name of the cleaning girl who seduces Adam at his rooming house. It has been conjectured that Solveig Amundsen corresponds to Norah Lange (1905–1972), the sole female martinfierrista and dubbed in those years the “Muse of Martín Fierro.” But the passive Solveig bears scant resemblance to the real-life Norah, who was outgoing, exuberant, and highly articulate. Franky Amundsen does not correspond to any male Lange, but bears some resemblance to Oliverio Girondo (1891–1967), who later married Norah Lange to form one of the most storied couples in Argentine literary history (see http://www.girondo-lange.com.ar/, website maintained by Susana Lange).

  2 Maimonides (1138–1204) was a Spanish Jew born in Córdoba. A great rabbinical authority and physician, prolific writer and scholar, in his philosophical masterwork, the Guide of the Perplexed, he attempts to reconcile religion with secular knowledge. Samuel’s boutade is not entirely such: Maimonides in his Guide claims that “before Plato and Aristotle introduced science and philosophy to the Greeks, the patriarchs introduced it to Israel” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [online]).

  3 “El estado actual de la doctrina de las secreciones internas” (1922) [The Current Status of the Doctrine of Internal Secretions] was the title of a lengthy address given by the prestigious Gregorio Marañón (1887–1960), both a humanistic intellectual/writer and a medical doctor/researcher who pioneered the science of endocrinology. But Marechal might have left the phrase alone, had not José Ortega y Gasset, citing a 1915 article by Marañón, glorified it in his 1921 essay “El Quijote en la escuela” [Don Quixote in the School Curriculum]: “No other chapter of contemporary science, perhaps, is more revolutionary of old ideas than the doctrine of internal secretions” (Ortega 279), a sentence apparently echoed by Lucio Negri.

  4 Santos Vega: a gaucho legendary for his talent as a p
ayador whose historical existence (still debated) dates to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century in the Province of Buenos Aires. The young Bartolomé Mitre was the first to make him a symbolic figure of the newly independent Argentine nation in his 1838 poem “A Santos Vega.” Toward 1850 Hilario Ascasubi wrote a novel in verse titled Santos Vega, o Los mellizos de La Flor. Eduardo Gutiérrez’s serial novel Santos Vega (1880) and its sequel Una amistad hasta la muerte (1881) [A Die-Hard Friendship] make the character an outlaw gaucho like his own character, Juan Moreira (see 645n28). With this moreirización of the legendary payador, Santos Vega enters the imaginary of populist criollismo (see 649n27) much to the chagrin of the cultural elite represented in gentlemen-writers such as Rafael Obligado, who published his four-part poem Santos Vega in 1885.

  5 Perhaps a veiled reference de José Ingenieros (1887–1925), famous psychologist, criminologist, and socialist intellectual who wrote a “Scientific Interpretation and Therapeutic Value of Hypnotism” (1903). (The Spanish ingeniero means engineer.) But Navascués (AB 211n) has found a manuscript note indicating that Valdez corresponds to the ingeniero Acevedo, a maternal uncle of J.L. Borges.

  6 Barcia (293n) points out that this passage cites two lines from Marechal’s poem “De la Patria joven” (from Odas para el Hombre y la Mujer [1929]): “Un pie arraigado en la tierra en la niñez y el otro / ya tendido en los bailes de la tierra.” In the poem, the youthful Argentine nation is thus figured as a young girl; the transposition of these verses may suggest a national-allegorical dimension in the character Solveig.