Adam Buenosayres: A Novel

by Leopoldo Marechal

  9 Perhaps a reference to Marechal’s poem “A un zaino muerto” [To a Dead Chestnut Horse] in Días como flechas: “Sabías deshacer el nudo del horizonte / y masticar el pasto bravío de las leguas” (OC I, 100) [You used to untie the knot of the horizon / and chew up the wild grass of leagues].

  10 Rabelaisian allusion. In Gargantua and Pantagruel (Book Two, chapter VII) appears a list of titles supposedly belonging to the Library of St. Victor. One title is Ars honeste fartandi in societate [The Art of Farting Decorously in Society]; another, Tartaretus de modo cacandi [Treatise (or better: Turdise) on How to Shit].

  11 Gringo: – refers to any foreigner or immigrant, usually Italians, but others as well. Later, Del Solar calls Schultz “gringo”; his real-life model, Xul Solar, was born of an Italian mother and a German-speaking Latvian father.

  12 “Caballito criollo / del galope corto / y el aliento largo.” The first lines of the popular poem “Caballito criollo” by Belisario Roldán (1873–1922), later set to music by Floro Ugarte (1884–1975).

  13 In the original, Adam “todo lo veía en imagen.” There may be an allusion to Eduardo González Lanuza’s short story collection Aquelarre (1928), which Lanuza characterized with the somewhat pleonastic subtitle: “cuentos imaginados en imagen” [stories imagined in images].

  14 “En mi pobre rancho, / vidalitá, / no existe la calma, / desde que está ausente, / vidalitá / el dueño de mi alma.” These lines, along with the stanzas that follow, are Argentine folksongs. The chorus line Vidalitá comes from the folk genre vidalita, typical of the northwestern region of Argentina.

  15 “Amalaya fuera perro, / mi palomita, / para no saber sentir, / ¡adiós, vidita! / El perro no siente agravios, / mi palomita, / todo se le va en dormir, / ¡adiós, vidita!”

  16 “Una vieja estaba meando / (y adiós, que me voy) / debajo de una carreta / (¡cuál será su amor!) / y los bueyes dispararon / (y adiós, que me voy) / creyendo que era tormenta / (¡cuál será su amor!).”

  17 “De arribita me he venido / (la pura verdad) / pisando sobre las flores / (vamos, vidita, bajo el nogal): / Como soy mocito tierno / (la pura verdad) / vengo rendido de amores / (vamos, vidita, bajo el nogal).” Marechal collected and/or invented many more folkloric ditties such as these for possible inclusion in his novel. See Marisa Martínez Pérsico (147–96).

  18 The idea was propagated (invented?) by Leopoldo Lugones, who in El payador (51) spoke of an Andean Sea and even claimed to have found fossilized clam shells in Covunco, Neuquén (51n).

  19 Florentino Ameghino (1854–1911) was an Argentine paleontologist and anthropologist whose book La antigüedad del hombre en el Plata (1880) sustained the thesis that humanity originated in the Argentine pampa. Bernini, the character based on Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz, will espouse his thesis shortly. His father, Pedro Scalabrini, was also a paleontologist who worked closely with Ameghino (Galasso 16–17).

  20 Gaetano Rovereto [Cayetano Roveretto, in Argentina] (1870–1952): Italian geologist, paleontologist, and theoretician of evolution, whose investigations in Argentina resulted in his book Los estratos araucanos y sus fósiles (1914). Paul Wilhelm Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905): influential German geologist. Hugo Obermaier (1877–1946): German paleontologist and anthropologist who worked in Spain, author of El hombre fósil (1916). Josef Bayer (1882–1931): Austrian anthropologist and archeologist who worked with Obermaier.

  21 Even today, the avenida Corrientes is lined with bookstores of all kinds.

  22 El Peludo was the nickname given to President Hipólito Yrigoyen (1852–1933), given his predilection to stay holed up in the Casa de Gobierno and avoid interviews with the press. His populist presidency in the 1920s marked a major shift in Argentine politics and the emergence of the hitherto unrepresented popular classes. That he was “the delight of the Muses” can be read in two senses. Barcia (380n) indicates that Yrigoyen was a favourite theme for the popular payadors. But the martinfierristas were also enthusiastic about him. In the lead-up to the 1928 presidential election, a group of them formed The Committee of Young Intellectuals for the Re-election of Hipólito Yrigoyen, with Borges as president and Marechal as vice-president. Macedonio Fernández, among other writers now canonical, participated as well (Abós, Macedonio 135–6).

  23 Located in the city of La Plata, this natural science museum was cutting-edge at the time of its inauguration in 1889 and a source of national pride.

  24 The War of Paraguay, or the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70), pitted Paraguay against Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. This triple alliance was supported by British capital, which until the war had been economically shut out of isolationist Paraguay. The war literally decimated Paraguay’s population and drastically reduced its national territory.

  25 The daily existed from 1928 until 1967. At the invitation of its first director, Alberto Gerchunoff (see 639n22), Marechal worked as a journalist there for some months. It was there that Roberto Arlt became known for his column “Aguafuertes porteñas” (Andrés 29).

  26 The literary conceit of the talking Glyptodon was invented by Enrique González Tuñón (1901–1943) in his vignette “Mi amigo de la prehistoria” [My Friend from Prehistory] in his El alma de las cosas inanimadas (1927).

  27 In Spanish, a verdad de Perogrullo or perogrullada is a truth so trite or obvious as to be not worth saying. Perogrullo’s uncertain historical existence dates back to thirteenth-century Spain.

  28 Navascués (AB 278n) notes that the notion linking aboriginal America with Atlantis goes back to colonial times, at least as far as the Dominican friar Gregorio García’s treatise Origen de los indios del Nuevo Mundo (1607).

  29 Winca means “Christian, white man” in the Araucano language spoken by the Ranquel Indians. The abuse of the gerund (matando, “killing”) in the spoken Spanish of the aboriginals has been picked up from Lucio Mansilla’s Una excusión a los indios ranqueles (1870) [A Visit to the Ranquel Indians]. Marechal’s personal copy of this book is very well thumbed and full of underlined passages, an indication of how much his fictive excursion to Saavedra respectfully parodies Mansilla’s famous book, not only in this passage, as Barcia notes (387n), but throughout the chapter.

  30 As noted by Mansilla, gualicho means “devil” in Araucano.

  31 The invented name combines the Greek morpheme paleo-, “ancient” with the Araucano term –curá, “stone.” The historical Calfucurá was for decades until his death in 1873 the most powerful Aracauno chief in Argentina.

  32 Barcia (388n) notes that the image comes from Marechal’s poetry, but cites only “Didáctica de la Patria,” a poem written much later and included in Heptamerón (1966). In an earlier poem, “Gravitación del cielo” in Poemas australes (1937), the architectural metaphor is applied in a different sense to the nation’s beginnings: “¡Oh deleznable arquitectura, / oh bondadosos arquitectos! / Con tierra frágil nuestros hombres / edificaron su morada” (OC I, 181) [O negligible architecture, / O good-hearted architects! / With fragile earth our men / built their dwelling]. It seems that the later Marechal made poetry out of his novelistic material.

  33 Marechal did in fact know this man in real life. His poem “A un domador de caballos” in Poemas australes (1937) was inspired by him. Gustavo Fontán includes a short sequence with Liberato Farías in his documentary film Marechal, o la batalla de los ángeles (2002). The name of the narrator-protagonist of Marechal’s second novel, El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo (1965), is a variation on the domador’s name: Lisandro Farías.

  34 Schultz’s comment echoes the position of Leopoldo Lugones, first enunciated in his lectures on the gaucho in 1913: “[The gaucho’s] disappearance is a good thing for the country, because he contained an inferior element in his partially aboriginal blood” (El Payador 83).

  35 The last two paragraphs are a pastiche of the first Canto of “El alma del payador” [The Soul of the Payador], in Hilario Ascasubi’s poem Santos Vega (1885).

  36 According to one popular version of the story, Sant
os el Payador (anonymous), which circulated in print in the late nineteenth century: “Santos Vega se murió. / Y fue porque lo venció / Luzbel, sin decir Jesús” (qtd. in Prieto 89) [Santos Vega died. / And it was because he was defeated by / Lucifer, without a mention of Jesus]. But in another version belonging to the oral tradition, Santos Vega met and defeated the Devil, only later to be defeated by a payador from the North (Prieto 104). Adam is championing this version.

  37 This is Rafael Obligado’s version of the story in Part 4, “La muerte del payador,” of Santos Vega. As Prieto writes, this version could be, and was, read as propaganda in support of progress, or the advance of “civilization” over “barbarism,” in the terms of Sarmiento. The debate over the story is not over. In his 700-page history and anthology of gauchesque poetry, Fermín Chávez completely excludes Obligado’s poem, alleging its lack of “gauchesque spirit,” its “pessimism,” its symbolic message of “frustración criolla”; he prefers instead an oral version from Paraguay in which a Guaraní Santos Vega, mounted on a white horse, defeats the “infernal spirit” (Chávez 35).

  38 Cocoliche was a late nineteenth-century vaudeville character who imitated the Spanish spoken by Italian immigrants and came to symbolize them, denoting as well the dialect spoken by Italian immigrants, some terms of which passed into the lunfardo argot and then later into the common language of Argentina.

  39 “I came to Argentina to make America [make my fortune]. And I’m in America to make Argentina.” The chiasmic pun plays on the Italian idiomatic expression fare l’America “to make or seek one’s fortune.”

  40 “I work the land. We eat bread thanks to me.”

  41 The glorified or glorious body refers to the Pauline doctrine of the body’s ressurection: “[The Lord Jesus Christ] shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body” Phillipians 3:21 (KJV). In medieval teaching, a saint’s corpse has the “odour of sanctity.”

  42 Behind the obvious allusion to the Christian saint, Martin of Tours (316–397), lies a veiled allusion to General José de San Martín, known as the “Saint of the Sword” (cf. 634n30 and 636n1). Marechal works this poetic conflation in his later poem Canto de San Martín (1950).

  43 All are birds indigenous to the Argentine pampa.

  44 All traditional folk dances from various Argentine provinces.

  45 The “ditch” would correspond to Medrano Creek as it passes through the farmland of Luis María Saavedra, today occupied by the soccer field of the Club Atlético Platense as well as Sarmiento Park (Piñeiro 75).

  46 The Frogs, trans. Dudley Fitts (Aristophanes 93).

  47 Barcia (400n) points out that the two paragraphs sung by the Chorus are full of allusions to rural Argentine folklore.

  48 Navascués (AB 241n) notes the allusion to the French expression Cherchez la femme! – that is; look for the woman of you want to get to the bottom of the matter.

  49 “Yo soy la muchacha del circo, / por una moneda yo doy.” First lines of the tango “La muchacha del circo” (1928), music by Gerardo Matos Rodríguez and lyrics by Manuel Romero. The circus girl is a trapeze artist who, in exchange for a penny, shares beautiful illusions. On her precarious trapeze, she is like a white dove anxiously leaping heavenward.

  50 Two popular superstitions, according to Barcia (410n). The Pig, a.k.a. the chancho de lata or Tin Pig, wears chains that rattle metallically. The Widow is a ghost who chases young lads and robs them.

  51 A further send-up of the Spirit of the Earth (see 650n32).

  BOOK THREE, CHAPTER 2

  1 Barcia (413n) explains the process: an enclosure or pond of mud would be made; horses would be sent in to work the mud with their hooves and then haul it out for making bricks.

  2 In the original: “¡Traga santos y caga diablos!” [Swallow saints and shit devils!], meaning that they present a sweet image but their words or actions belie the appearance.

  3 Villa Urquiza: a barrio in Buenos Aires bordering on Saavedra.

  4 Emilio Salgari (1862–1911), Italian author of adventure novels, especially the pirate stories whose protagonist was Sandokan.

  5 During La Semana Trágica [The Tragic Week] in January 1919, a series of strikes inspired by Anarchists and Communists were brutally repressed by the Argentine Federal Police and the National Army with the help of paramilitary groups, leaving hundreds dead and thousands wounded. The violence of the repression got out of control and spilled over into attacks on Jewish establishments.

  6 La Brecha. No such daily seems to have existed but it is a likely name for an anarchist publication. The phrase abrir brecha means “to break through”; firme en la brecha “to stand firm” was a militant watchword. Chilean author Mercedes Valdivieso titled her 1961 feminist novel La brecha. In Montevideo, Brecha has been a left-wing weekly since 1985, when it succeeded its forerunner, Marcha, shut down by the Uruguayan dictatorship in 1974.

  7 The issue of cremation was indeed controversial. Roberto Arlt was cremated at his death in 1942, in accord with his express wish. But Arlt’s friend and mentor, the Boedo writer Elías Castelnuovo (1893–1982), regretfully recalls visiting with Arlt the crematorium at the Chacarita Cemetery where the director, a medical hygienist and “fervent believer” in cremation, convinced Arlt with “catechizing propaganda” to sign up for cremation upon his death (qtd. in Saítta 297). Castelnuovo, a progressive socialist intellectual, apparently harbours the same cultural conservatism implied by Marechal’s satirical treatment of Zanetti.

  8 “Olas que al llegar / plañideras muriendo a mis pies.” “Waves that break and die / plaintive at my feet.” Verses from the Vals sobre las olas, a waltz in the Viennese style composed in 1888 by the Mexican composer Juventino Rosas, who died in Cuba in 1894. Popular in Europe, the waltz was illegitimately claimed by many European composers. The Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) recalls that during his students days spent in early-twentieth-century Spain the visiting Spanish-American students used to sing this waltz in order “to distinguish and affirm our collective personality.” Thus, he continues, the Vals sobre las olas came to be “a sort of hymn of the peoples of Spanish America vis-à-vis the foreign contingent; it did not cease to be a pleasurable dance, but it became as well an expression of nationalist and regionalist resistance” (Ortiz 18).

  9 Juan Moreira: see 649n28.

  10 “El Choclo” [The Corncob] is an old chestnut in the tango repertoire, first performed publicly in 1903.

  11 A.M. Zubieta (120) considers that the taita Flores is Francisco Real, the murdered protagonist of Borges’s famous story “Hombre de la esquina rosada” (in Historia universal de la infamia [1935]), who has resuscitated and retells his story “with changes.” In Borges’s story, Francisco Real is murdered, secretly, by the sly first-person narrator (Borges OC I, 331–6). Zubieta’s thesis, though she does not say so explicitly, implies a subtle literary duel being waged between Marechal and Borges.

  12 “Cascabel, cascabelito, / ríe, ríe, y no llores.” From the tango “Cascabelito” (1924; lyrics by Juan Andrés Caruso, music by José Böhr). In the following paragraph, as Barcia (450n) indicates, several other tangos are referenced: “Milonguita” (1920), “Flor de fango” (1919), and “Mano a mano” (1923). Marechal’s pastiche is based on the popular stereotype first coined in Evarista Carriego’s posthumous La costurerita que dio un mal paso [The Little Seamstress Who Took a False Step] (see 659n14). It came to be emblematic of tango culture, directly inspiring, for example, “No salgas de tu barrio” (1927) [Don’t Leave Your Neighbourhood] (Gobello Letras de tango, vol. 2, 125). Osvaldo Pugliese closes the cycle in 1934 with a tango without lyrics titled “La Beba,” the title alone invoking the pathos of the neighbourhood girl who went astray. The stereotype reflected the burning social issue of young working-class women who, in search of economic independence, often fell into prostitution. Manuel Gálvez’s widely read novel Nacha Regules (1919) represents a middle-brow treatment of the theme; a film version was made in 1950
by Luis César Amadori.

  13 In “the fiery sunsets of Villa Ortúzar” A.M. Zubieta (118–19) sees an allusion to Borges’s poem “Último sol en Villa Ortúzar” [Last Sunlight in Villa Ortúzar] (OC I, 71); and, less convincingly, in the game of truco in the phantasmal general stores an allusion to “Fundación mítica de Buenos Aires” [Mythic Founding of Buenos Aires] (OC II, 81). The well-known poems belong, respectively, to Luna de enfrente (1925) and Cuaderno de San Martín (1929), books in which Borges, like Marechal in this passage, was working with topoi drawn from Evaristo Carriego’s poetry and tango lyrics.

  14 Marechal’s family melodrama is a pastiche of Evarista Carriego’s La costurerita que dio un mal paso, a classic of the literature about suburban Buenos Aires. This cycle of eleven poems, mostly sonnets, tells the story of the sister gone astray, the effects on the family, her return and reconciliation with the family. Also referenced in this chapter is Carriego’s posthumous La canción del barrio), in particular the poem “El velorio” [The Wake]. Borges’s essay “Evaristo Carriego” (1930) dedicates an entire chapter to La canción del barrio (Borges, OC I, 130–41).

  15 Gabino Ezeiza (1858–1916), a.k.a. “El Negro Ezeiza,” was a famous Afro-Argentine payador and author of popular criollista or gauchesque literature; e.g., Colección de cantares and Cantares criollos, both published in 1880 (Prieto 57). He continually toured rural Argentina and Uruguay in circuses and appeared in theatres in both Buenos Aires and Montevideo. He was a champion in the poetic “counterpoint” contests known as payadas, in which two payadores would compete by improvising on a given theme.