Adam Buenosayres: A Novel

by Leopoldo Marechal

  7 Schultz is based on Xul Solar (1887–1963), avant-garde painter, musician and musicologist, writer, astrologer, and “visionary” aesthetician. His biographer, Álvaro Abós (173), finds that Schultz, unlike the caricatures of other notable cultural figures in the novel, is a fairly accurate reflection of Xul and of the way he was regarded in his milieu. Cintia Cristiá, in her musicological study of Xul Solar, appears to share this view. Schultz’s distaste for Beethoven and Grieg, Cristiá observes (62), indicates that Marechal would have been aware of Xul Solar’s indifference toward nineteenth-century music (with the exception of Wagner) and his preference for Bach and twentieth-century avant-garde composers.

  8 Cristiá’s comment on this passage: “This hyperbole, consistent with the parodic tone of the novel, is not so hyperbolic if one considers that on the traditional pentagram, without alterations or additional lines, it is posible to write only eleven notes, whereas Xul Solar’s hexagram . . . accommodates twenty-six distinct pitches” (69).

  9 As early as 1929, Xul Solar was attempting to redesign the piano keyboard. See Cristiá (76–84).

  10 In an autobiographical note penned by Xul Solar, he claims that he is a “recreator, not an inventor” (qtd. in Artundo 43).

  11 Norah Lange in a 1934 speech attributes the flower-eating gesture to the poet Amado Villar (1889–1954) (Estimados congéneres, 11–12).

  12 A covered fruit-and-vegetable market, inaugurated in 1893, on the avenida Corrientes in Buenos Aires. Since 1999 it as been a mall, el Abasto Shopping.

  13 Xul Solar did indeed invent a new language named neo-criollo [sic], a streamlined composite of Spanish and Portuguese. Later he abandoned neocriollo and concentrated on inventing the panlengua, which was to incorporate features of several languages (Lindstrom 244). Xul also spoke, however, about his plans for certain “anatomical improvements” in the human type to produce a “Homo Novus” (Artundo 49). Schultz’s discourse conflates in the Neocriollo these several notions of Xul Solar. Both Barcia and Navascués reproduce, in their respective editions of Adán, Marechal’s pencilled sketch of Schultz’s Neocriollo.

  14 George Brummel (1778–1840): an Englishman, the most famous dandy of the nineteenth century, who created the rules of etiquette in his era.

  15 Schultz’s notions are not much more fantastical than those proposed by Xul Solar in his 1957 article “Propuestas para más vida futura” [Proposals for More Life in the Future] (in Artundo 146–51). These include: (1) communal wetnurses (col-nursas, in the panlengua) endowed with mammaries the size of demijohns, which in turn would be equipped with multiple retractable ducts designed to feed the population; (2) a long, prehensile tail to serve the human body as a third arm; (3) a skin-sack inflatable at will by hydrogen-generating glands, its purpose being to offset the force of gravity on the human body; (4) extremely long arms like wings or the suspension lines of a parachute meant for human flight. Oscar Svanascini (9) mentions in addition to these “improvements” the following: suppression of the human stomach; a swivel-neck allowing the head to turn 360 degrees; eyes on the tips of horns like those of snails.

  16 “¡Ven, triste amigo! / En la penumbra del invernadero, / junto a las rosas fraternales.” I have not been able to locate the source of these verses, but they appear to refer to Book Six, chapter XII.

  17 In the original: “para que le hiciese compañía”; in Toulat’s French translation: “pour lui tenir compagnie.” To keep whom (or what) company? The poetic phantom? I suspect a typographical error: le should be the reflexive pronoun se: “para que se hiciese compañía.”

  18 This group of three verses, as well as the next two tercets, are quoted almost verbatim from Marechal’s poem “Canción del ídolo” from his book Días como flechas (1926) (OC I, 92). First tercet: “Yo, alfarero sentado en el tapiz de los días, / ¿con qué barro modelé tu garganta de ídolo / y tus piernas que se tuercen como arroyos?” Second tercet: “Mi pulgar afinó tu vientre / más liso que la piel de los tambores nupciales, / y puso cuerdas al arco nuevo de tu sonrisa.” Third tercet: “Haz que maduren los frutos / y que la lluvia deje su país de llanto, / ídolo de los alfareros.” Translations mine.

  19 Luis Pereda: clearly a caricature of Jorge Luis Borges, the only send-up in the roman-à-clef to have aroused serious indignation in Argentine literary circles. Franky Amundsen: associated with several historical personajes, including Oliverio Girondo (1891–1967); Marechal’s close friend and canonical poet, Francisco Luis Bernárdez (1900–1978); and a lesser known martinfierrista and M.’s childhood friend, Ilka Krupkin. As Navascués (AB 227n) judiciously concludes, Franky Amundsen is best understood as a composite of traits drawn from various martinfierristas. Arturo Del Solar: this least vivid of the caricatures probably corresponds to Borges’s cousin Guillermo Juan (“Willie”) Borges. The pipsqueak Bernini [el petizo Bernini]: clearly a parodic version of writer Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz (1898–1959).

  20 Gath y Chaves was a department store founded in 1883 by the Englishman Alfred Gath and the Argentine Lorenzo Chaves. Merging with Harrods Buenos Aires in 1922, the store became a symbol of foreign-dominated commerce. As Barcia (316n) points out, the irony of this passage lies in the circumstance that a foreign business is packaging and selling back to Argentines the “exotic” culture of the local suburbs. The Anglophile, European-educated Borges, real-life model for Luis Pereda, is the particular butt of this joke.

  21 Franky Amundsen’s penchant for all things pirate-related seems to be a cartoonish send-up of a facet of Oliverio Girondo’s character and life. In 1936 Girondo bought a brigantine, a sailing vessel traditionally favoured by pirates (brigantine < It. brigantino “brigand”). Earlier, to celebrate the publication of Norah Lange’s book Forty-Five Days and Thiry Sailors (1933), he organized a costume party in which Norah appeared as a mermaid, the male guests in sailor suits, and he in a captain’s uniform. They all posed for a famous publicity photo. On the other hand, in his 1938 review of Girondo’s Interlunio (OC V, 421–4), Marechal admired his Rabelaisian “gigantism” and his outlandish humour. Cf. Norah Lange’s salute to the boat’s launch in Estimados congéneres (26ff); she refers to it both as a bergantín and as a paylebot (Hispanicized version of “pilot boat”).

  22 Original lyrics for all three stanzas: “Venía por la barranca / un tranguay angloargentina / cuando a mitad de camino / encuentra un carro encajao / ‘¡Compañero, hágase a un lao!’ / dice el del coche al carrero. ‘Si no vienen a poner / una cuarta, ¡todo el día / estará el carro en la vía!’ / Y el cochero, ya enojao, / le contesta: ‘¡Dos biabazos / te daría por pesao!’ / El carrero / se ataja la puñalada, / y a las dos o tres paradas / le larga un viaje al cochero / que si éste no es tan ligero / y en el aire lo abaraja / media barriga le raja, / como sandía campera.”

  Marechal, late in life, recalled learning this song by heart in childhood from an early twentieth-century gramophone recording made by Alfredo Eusebio Gobbi (1877–1938) for Gath y Chaves (Andrés 14). Gobbi and his wife, Flora, started out in the circus and were active in popular criollista culture; their songs are considered precursors to the tango. Their son Alfredo Julio Floro Gobbi (1912–1965) became a famous tango composer.

  23 In the original: “listo para entrar en la de San Quintín”; literally, ready to enter the Battle of Saint-Quentin (1557), in which the Spanish forces trounced the French in a decisive event marking a high point in the power of the Spanish Empire under the Habsburg dynasty.

  24 To break someone’s soul, romperle el alma a alguien, is an old Argentine expression whose approximate equivalent would be “to thrash someone within an inch of his life.”

  25 This passage considerably exaggerates a statistic adduced in the famous essay El hombre que está solo y espera (1931) by Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz (real-life model for Bernini). In his chapter “La ciudad sin amor,” Scalabrini Ortiz alleged that, of the million or so inhabitants of Buenos Aires, there were 120,000 fewer women than men (60).

  26 In the original: Aventura crioll
i-malevi-fúnebri-putani-arrabalera. Franky parodies the neocriollo language invented by Xul Solar (real-life model for Schultz).

  27 This paragraph sets up Marechal’s hyperbolic satire of criollismo, a popular cultural and literary movement that flourished approximately between the 1870s and the 1920s, and whose final, moribund stage is hilariously parodied in Book Three. In El discurso criollista en la formación de la Argentina moderna (1988 and 2008), a classic of Argentine cultural history, Adolfo Prieto points out that, in reaction to the burgeoning cultural phenomenon of the popular criollista literature being consumed by the semi-literate masses, both native and immigrant, the cultural elite “seemed to oscillate between fascination and anger.” By the turn of the nineteenth century, however, they had formed a “veritable program of cultural politics meant to contain the advance of popular literature of criollista stamp” (20). This reactionary cultural attitude is mockingly invested in the voice of the narrator of this passage, a technique that Marechal no doubt owes to his reading of Joyce’s Ulysses.

  28 Samuel is likely referring, not to the universally revered literary figures Martín Fierro or Santos Vega, but to Juan Moreira, the legendary nineteenth-century gaucho outlaw (gaucho malo) who inspired Eduardo Gutiérrez’s eponymous serial novel (1879–1880). Always enormously popular, the novel was adapted in 1886 for the circus stage by Juan Podestá (1858–1937). In the twentieth century the novel has inspired several film versions, notably Leonardo Favio’s in 1973. Juan Moreira is probably the prototype behind the noble-outlaw protagonist of the Adriano Caetano’s movie Un oso rojo (2002) [A Red Bear].

  29 In Xul Solar’s early paintings, angels are often a theme – for example, Dos Anjos (1915), Deities of Soil (1918), Angels (1921). But Franky may be alluding to Xul’s water-colour Mestizos de avión y gente (1936) in which two hybrid airplane-human figures, equipped with wings, propellers, and wheels, fly over a semi-urban landscape, each of them trailing what looks like an anchor.

  30 This bizarre (and jarring) racist penchant in Samuel Tesler appears to originate from an idée fixe in the real-life poet Jacobo Fijman. Navascués cites a 1929 letter from Alfonso Reyes to J. Ortega y Gasset, in which Reyes complains about a Jew called Fijman insulting him not only as “an influential widow [sic] in Argentine literature” but also as a ¡mulato!– that latter insult being obviously the more astonishing (and outrageous?) to the great Mexican author (Navascués, AB 135n; Corral 167).

  In one of Vicente Zito Lema’s rambling interviews with him in the late 1960s, Fijman claims that the Virgin Mary was black. Zito Lema asks him if Jesus Christ, then, was mulatto. Fijman’s reply, though incoherent, is revealing: “La concepción de la virgen es inmaculada. Esto es también secreto de estado. Vía de Cristo. Cristo es rubio. Pero un día fue negro. Y otro verde. Los mulatos son culpables. Se pasan horas y horas tocando el tambor. En Africa ha [sic] visto que sus casas son hornos de barro. Están poseídos por la avaricia” [The Virgin’s conception is immaculate. This too is a state secret. Christ’s Way. Christ is blond. But one day he was black. And another day, green. Mulattos are guilty. They spend hours and hours beating their drums. In Africa I’ve seen that their houses are earthen ovens. They’re possessed by greed] (Zito Lema 68; my emphasis). It seems that for Fijman the mulatto condition denotes or symbolizes a fall from moral purity into impurity and iniquity.

  31 Adam’s words – “estoy solo e inmóvil: soy un argentino en esperanza” – echo the title of Scalabrini Ortiz’s El hombre que está solo y espera (1931) [The Man Who Is Alone and Waits/Hopes]. On the intertextual relations between Scalabrini’s essay and Marechal’s novel, see Cheadle, “Twentieth-Century homo bonaerense.”

  32 El Espíritu de la Tierra, or Spirit of the Earth, is a mythopoetic notion elaborated in Scalabrini Ortiz in his above-cited essay. It is perhaps the last expression of a kind of mystical telluric organicism cultivated by the previous (novecentista) generation of Argentine writers, particularly Ricardo Rojas. Scalabrini’s take on this topos is less earnestly Romantic and more heuristic than that of Rojas, and has nothing of Bernini’s comic bathos.

  33 Probable allusion to a prose-poem by Oliverio Girondo (real-life model for Franky Amundsen) entitled Interlunio (1937). The poem’s protagonist tells his quasi-delirious story. Having taken the streetcar out to the edge of the city at night, he is accosted by a cow who talks to him, maternally scolding him. Marechal reviewed the book, admiringly, in Sur 48 (Sept. 1938). Eliseo Subiela includes a sequence based on this episode in his film El lado oscuro del corazón (1992) [The Dark Side of the Heart].

  34 Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz (real-life model for Bernini) denounced Britain’s economic colonialism in Argentina in his book Política británica en el Río de la Plata (1936). He carried on his battle against British interference for most of the rest of his life.

  35 Variation on the classical saying Carthago delenda est, “Carthage must be destroyed,” traditionally attributed to Cato the Elder, who would have pronounced this opinion prior to the destruction of Carthage by the Romans in 146 BCE.

  36 Britain invaded Buenos Aires twice, in 1806 and 1807. It has been argued that this repulsion of British military might was one factor that inspired enough confidence in the porteños to declare independence from Spain in 1810, making Buenos Aires the first Spanish American colony to do so.

  37 Las Islas Malvinas: in English known as the Falkland Islands. A group of islands off the Argentine coast, claimed by Argentina against Britain’s de facto possession. Esteban Gómez, Portuguese navigator in the service of Spain, discovered the islands in 1522. However, in 1690 the British claimed the islands. In 1982, the Argentine military dictatorship went to war against Margaret Thatcher’s Britain in a disastrous attempt to recuperate the Malvinas.

  38 Lucio alludes to Jacobo Fijman’s version of his first internment in the Hospicio de las Mercedes, a mental asylum in Buenos Aires, which eventually became the Hospital Nacional José T. Borda – known as el Borda, for short. Fijman recounted his hallucinatory experience in “Dos días” [Two Days], a short text first published in the daily newspaper Crítica on 3 January 1927: “I’m perceiving aromas, incense. My body exudes, pore by pore, diverse and penetrating aromas” (San Julián y otros relatos 28). But in this text he calls himself the Cristo rojo – the Red Christ, not the Black Christ as in Lucio’s version. (The image of a “yellow christ” occurs in “Poema V” of Fijman’s Hecho de estampas [1930]). Fijman surely picked up the phrase “Red Christ” from A. Capdevila’s apocalyptic poem titled “Cristo rojo” (in Melpómene [1912]). In “Dos días” Fijman assumes the identity of the Red Christ while conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony before the multitude, an event he envisioned as heralding “the great work: the Social Revolution” (San Julián 26). This episode later inspired a similar sequence in Eliseo Subiela’s movie Man Facing Southeast (1986), partly filmed on-site at the Borda. Also on-site at the Borda, Gustavo Fontán, with the Frente de Artistas del Borda, filmed a creative evocation of Jacobo Fijman; a voice-over recites Fijman’s poetry.

  39 Jean-Martin Charcot, considered the founder of modern neurology, founded in the late nineteenth century the École de la Salpêtrière, where he followed his particular interest in hypnosis and hysteria. Sigmund Freud was one of his students.

  40 Founded in 1876, the Buenos Aires Herald began as a single sheet carrying the shipping news and a few advertisements, but it later became the weekly and then daily newpaper serving Argentina’s English-speaking community. It is published to this day both in print and online.

  41 Orlando furioso, by Italian author Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533). A novel of chivalry wildly popular in its time, and one of Don Quixote’s favourites. The Immortal Knight imitates Orlando (among other literary models) when he feigns madness in the Sierra Morena over the cruelty of his ladylove (Don Quixote, I, chap. 25).

  BOOK THREE, CHAPTER 1

  1 Aside from the reference to Ricardo Rojas (see 639n18), Barcia (355n6) detects an allusion to the Argentine poet M
anuel de Lavardén (1754–1810) and the well-known opening lines of his “Oda al Paraná” (1801) [Ode to the Paraná]: “Augusto Paraná, sagrado río, / promogénito ilustre del Océano, / que en el carro de nácar refulgente / tirado de caimanes, recamados / de verde y oro, vas de clima en clima, / de región en región, vertiendo franco / suave frescor y pródiga abundancia” [August Paraná, sacred river, / illustrious first-born of the Ocean, / who in the wagon of refulgent mother-of-pearl / drawn by alligators embroidered / in green and gold, you go from climate to climate, / region to region, generously pouring / mild freshness and prodigal abundance].

  2 An allusion to Hermann Keyserling’s South American Meditations (see 640n23).

  3 An allusion to the misadventures of Don Quixote.

  4 As Barcia (360n) observes, Samuel mocks not only Adam’s effusions, but also the opening line of Borges’s famous poem “Fundación mitológica de Buenos Aires” (in Cuaderno San Martín, 1929; later revised as “Fundación mítica de Buenos Aires”) and its evocation of the River Plate: “¿Y fue por este río de sueñera y de barro / que las proas vinieron a fundarme la patria?” (Borges OC I, 81). In Alistair Reid’s translation: “And was it along this torpid muddy river / that the prows came to found my native city?” (Borges, Selected Poems 49).

  5 Pereda uses the language of the nineteenth-century frontier in Argentina, where the term cristiano [Christian] is used in opposition to indio [Indian]. In gauchesque literature, cristianos e indios would be roughly the equivalent of Cowboys-and-Indians.

  6 “La Chacarita”: lyrics by Iván Diez (1897–1960). The tango is a lugubrious meditation on death written in lunfardo and inspired by the eponymous cemetery (see 628n2).

  7 Paternal is a barrio bordering on both Chacarita and Villa Crespo. Villa Soldati is in the south end of the city.

  8 lobisome (also, lobisón or lobizón) < Portuguese, lobishome “wolf-man.” The werewolf legend passed from Brazilian to Argentine folklore. In Brazil, the seventh consecutive son of the same father and mother, from the age of thirteen, changes into a lobishome on Fridays during Lent from midnight to two in the morning. In the Argentine version, the seventh of consecutive sons in a family turns into a wolf-like creature that wanders the hills and attacks all humans. This legend was so prevalent in the 1900s that children were being abandoned or killed. To prevent this, a law was passed in the 1920s making the president of Argentina the legal godfather to the seventh son of all families. The state gives the boy a gold medal and a scholarship for his studies until his twenty-first birthday. The tradition continues to this day. On 7 June 2004, Argentine president Néstor Kichner attended the baptism of the seventh boy born to a family in the city of Sunchales, in the northern province of Santa Fe.