BOOK FOUR, CHAPTER 1
1 Viento del este, / agua como peste. Popular saying in Argentina. (Literal translation: “Wind from the east, water like the plague.”)
2 The payador Tissone seems a generic representative of many entertainers of Italian descent who participated in the final stages of the criollista/gauchesque genre. On the other hand, there was indeed a tango singer, Herberto Emiliano de Costa (1901–1935), known in the business as Príncipe Azul or Prince Charming, though this historical figure does not seem to be the basis of Marechal’s character of the same name. (When international tango idol Carlos Gardel died in a plane crash in June 1935, American impresarios saw the handsome de Costa as a possible replacement. On his way to the United States in September 1935, he died of a sudden illness in Trinidad.) Likewise, in the mid-thirties a group called Los Bohemios, directed by Mario Pugliese, was doing musical comedy as well as radio shows.
3 Globe trotter: in English in the original.
4 Giovinezza: “youth” in Italian. Navascués (AB 347n) notes the probable allusion to the Italian Fascist anthem so titled.
5 Vino de la Costa or vino chinche is made from a hybrid grape, a cross between the indigenous Vitis Labrusca and the European Vinifera, and is grown on the coastal area of Buenos Aires Province.
6 The magazine El alma que canta (1916–61) published tango lyrics and popular poetry. Barcia (482n) disparages it as cursi (vulgar, kitsch).
7 “La pampa tiene el ombú / y el puchero el caracú. / Sacudíme la persiana, / que allá viene doña Juana. / Cinco por ocho cuarenta, / pajarito con polenta. / ¿Quién te piantó de la rama, / que no estás en el rosal?” I have translated this doggerel verse freely.
8 Adam’s discourse takes up ideas expressed by Alfonso Reyes in his influential article “Jitanjáforas” published in the one and only issue of Libra (1929), a review directed by Marechal and Francisco Luis Bernárdez: “Putting together two names of objects which of their own accord don’t go together, the poor objects cannot but obey the magic spell, and end up tied together by the word: hence centaurs, mermaids and dragons have been born, the same way as Morality and Metrics” (Corral, ed. 14–15). Reyes goes on to cite Paul Valéry: “No discourse is so obscure, no fable is so absurd nor conversation so incoherent that we cannot in the end attribute some sense to it” (15). Reyes did not take entirely seriously his playful exercise in avant-garde nominalism, unlike Adam, who effectively presses this nominalism into the service of a pious philosophical realism. The allegorical, symbolic, moral, and anagogical he mentions are the four levels of interpretation in medieval theory and mentioned by Dante in his Convivio. Adam’s poetics combines Thomist theory with twentieth-century avant-garde poetics (see Cheadle, Ironic Apocalypse 63–7).
9 “Y el amor, más alegre / que un entierro de niños.” (Note the slight textual variation between this version and the first citation of these verses, which in Book One, chapter 1 exactly replicate those in Marechal’s original poem.)
10 “En el pingo del amor / quise jinetear un día, / creyéndome que sería / solamente escarceador.”
11 The model for the ensuing conversation is the Platonic dialogue, in particular The Symposium, where philosphers are seated around a table. The ideas expressed by Adam were earlier rehearsed by Marechal in his essay “Descenso y ascenso por la Belleza” (1933 and 1939), which elaborates a form of Christian Neoplatonism.
12 Borges, model for Luis Pereda, attended the Lycée Jean Calvin in Geneva as an adolescent.
13 In his hagiographic essay “Vida de Santa Rosa de Lima” (1943), Marechal begins Chapter V: “The saint is an imitator of the Word in the order of Redemption . . . Santa Rosa de Lima, more than anyone, gave herself over to the terrible imitation of the agony of Jesus Christ; and her mortifications were so severe that their mere description both amazes and frightens” (OC II, 381; my translation). Navascués (AB 371n) considers the analogy between poet/artist and saint to derive from Jacques Maritain’s Neo-Thomism. Marechal possessed the 1927 edition of Maritain’s Art et scholastique (1920).
14 “Aparcero don Tissone, / ya que me lo pintan franco / dígale a este servidor: / ¿Por qué el tero caga blanco?”
15 “Caga blanco el tero-tero, / ya lo ha dicho el payador, / porque, de juro, no sabe / cagar en otro color.”
BOOK FOUR, CHAPTER 2
1 Perramus was and continues to be a brand of high-quality, Argentine-made gabardine coat. A perramus (naturalized as a lower-case noun in common Argentine speech) was a status symbol. I am grateful to Professor Raquel Macciuci (Universidad Nacional de la Plata) for this information.
2 C.P.G. likely stands for Compañía Primitiva de Gas, established in 1910 with British capital.
3 Lenocinium. Latin word for brothel.
4 Camoatí: a Guarani word for a kind of wasp indigenous to river basins of the Paraná, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
5 Albas corpus: popular deformation of the legal principle Habeas corpus.
6 The cultural stereotype of the obtuse gallego causes the laughter here. See 637n5.
7 Schultz’s anti-Jewish slur here anticipates another in Book Seven, the “Journey to Cacodelphia” (see 675n50). There may be some basis for Schultz’s attitude in Xul Solar’s own racial views, at least in the 1920s. Ernesto Mario Barredo, recounting his interview with Xul in La Nación (29 October 1929), drops this comment, shortly after relating that Xul’s father was a German from the Baltic: “we get into a discussion about race. I [Barredo] don’t believe in Arians, and he [Xul] doesn’t altogether believe in Semites” (qtd. in Artundo 65).
8 The common etymology is dubious, according to Joan Corominas (Diccionario etimológico hispánico [1954], vol. 1, under absolver), but was once commonly accepted, as in Ramón Menéndez Pidal’s Manual de gramática histórica española (1904; 6th ed. 1940). Leo Spitzer, writes Corominas, considered the etymological connection “unnecessary” and “improbable” for both semantic and phonetic reasons. Whether Marechal himself accepted the common-etymology thesis is not clear; he may be poking fun indirectly at the erudition of Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz’s essay El hombre que está solo y espera (1930). If so, the mockery seems unjustified, as shown in this passage: “Bachelor [soltero] or married, the Man of Corrientes and Esmeralda is a man who is naked and alone [solo] within the verbal bastion of his skepticism, who is alone amid two million men and women who are alone” (75). The passage clearly distinguishes between bachelorhood and solitude, and in no way attempts to conflate the two.
9 Albert Londres (1884–1932), prototype of the investigative journalist, published Le Chemin de Buenos Aires in 1927, whose subject matter is la traite des Blanches, the trade in white female prostitution. Taking a quasi-anthropological approach, Londres penetrated the milieu of pimps and their women to describe how their world worked, while denouncing poverty as the real cause of prostitution. The reaction in Buenos Aires was righteous indignation, as reflected in Marechal’s characters. Even in 1994 the normally sober Barcia, in his footnote on Londres’s book (532n), cannot refrain from insulting it as a librejo [a poor excuse for a book]. But the librejo has always enjoyed enormous success. Sergei Eisenstein planned a film adaptation of it. The latest edition came out in 2010 (Brussels, Magallan & Cie).
10 Barcia (534n) finds an allusion here to Manuel Gálvez’s novel Hombres en soledad (1938) which, like Adam’s discourse in this passage, proposes a Catholic-Nationalist solution to the problem raised by Scalabrini Ortiz in El hombre que está solo y espera (1930).
BOOK FOUR, CHAPTER 3
1 “¿Dónde están mis compañeros / del Cerrito y Ayacucho?” Two lines from the poem “El inválido” [The Invalid], by Bartolomé Mitre. Barcia (537n) comments that the lines have come to stand as an Argentine ubi sunt. Ongaro (327n) recalls here that Mitre was the first Spanish-language translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
2 Exodus 15:1 and 15:8.
3 Allusion to Ruth 2
4 Allusion to Exodus 32.
5 Allusion to I Kings 12.
6 Allusion to Daniel 3. The three just men, untouched by the flames, are Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego.
7 Abraham the Jew was apparently a fourteenth-century alchemist, magician, and philosopher, probably of Sephardic origin. A manuscript attibuted to him, Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin, was translated in 1899 by the British occultist sect, the Golden Dawn. The Green Lion and Lion’s Blood were chemical compounds (vitriol and metal sulphate, respectively) but endowed alchemically with various symbolic meanings.
8 Philadelphia ( < Greek phileo, “I love” and adelphos, “brother”) is a Christian town privileged in Revelation [Apocalypsis] 1:11 and 3:7. The whole paragraph is an exercise in Biblical typology, drawing as well on non-canonical sources (the alchemical tradition) and depicting the Jews as at once the fallen and the chosen people.
9 Allusion to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in 1903 in Russia, which propounds the paranoid delusion that international Jewry is plotting to take over the world by subverting the morals of the Gentiles – a more extreme version of Samuel Tesler’s alcohol-induced temptation. Translated into many languages and circulated throughout Europe and the Americas in the twentieth century, Protocols was first exposed as a fraud in the British and American press in 1921, though with scant effect on its efficacy as anti-Semitic propaganda. Adam Buenosayres apparently believes in the conspiracy theory, along with the old myth, invented in the Middle Ages, of Christ’s curse against the Jews. Anti-Semitism was strong among the extreme sector of the Argentine Catholic-Nationalists, such as Hugo Wast (pseudonym of Gustavo Adolfo Martínez Zuviría [1883–1954]), who wrote the blatantly anti-Semitic novels El Kahal and Oro (1935). However, not all right-wing nationalists were anti-Semitic. The Fascist Leopoldo Lugones (1894–1938) dismissed the Protocols as “malignant and imbecilic” (qtd. in Schwartz 131), and Catholic-Nationalist author Manuel Gálvez considered himself an admirer and friend of the Jews, though clearly he retained a degree of anti-Jewish prejudice. Remarkably, Kessel Schwartz does not discuss Adán Buenosayres in his article “Antisemitism in Modern Argentine Fiction.” But Leonardo Senkman (10–14) does so, even-handedly and insightfully. In Senkman’s view, one may infer, Marechal’s Catholic, anti-Jewish prejudice was similar to that of Gálvez. As Senkman observes, in the 1920s and 1930s both Catholics and agnostic liberals, even in the literary avant-garde of Martín Fierro, harboured the negative Jewish stereotypes of the ambient cultural imaginary.
10 This curious sentence, framing the paragraph, has been translated literally. Marechal writes brazo, not rama [branch], of the fig tree. Though brazo de un árbol is more acceptable in Spanish than the English “arm of a tree,” the choice of words is odd. Given that the paragraph is a gloss on the crucifixion story (referencing passages from Matthew 27, Mark 15, Luke 23, and John 18), the word brazo “arm,” evokes brazo de cruz, “cross-arm,” and by association the arm of the Cross. Citing Matthew 27:3 (error for Matthew 27:5) where Judas hangs himself, Barcia (551n) erroneously attributes the detail of the fig tree to this same biblical passage, which states simply that Judas “went away and hanged himself.” According to Kim Paffenroth (123), “among the many species [of tree] on which Judas hanged himself are the fig, sycamore, elder, willow, grape vine (!), tamarind, oak, dog rose, poplar, and redbud” (Judas 123). In English we have the Judas tree (a flowering deciduous), but in Spanish language and culture the (non-biblical) image of Judas hanging from the fig tree is deeply etched. On the other hand, the Son of Perdition is from John 17:12, where Jesus in prayer tells God that of his faithful followers “none of them is lost, but the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled”; the “scripture’s fulfillment” refers to the Old Testament prophecy: “Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition” (2 Thessalonians 2:3). All this suggests an allegory of Samuel Tesler’s imminent conversion to Christianity: Samuel’s agony (Judas hanged in the fig tree) is a prelude to rebirth in Christ, who in Marechal’s narrative gloss is being simultaneously crucified. In fact, Jacobo Fijman (real-life model for Samuel Tesler) did convert to Christianity in 1930 (Bajarlía 83).
11 In “Dos días” (1927), his own account of his first internment in the mental asylum, Jacobo Fijman recalls saying: “¿no sabe que soy el Mesías?” [Don’t you realize I’m the Messiah?] (San Julián 19); and he insists: “Soy el Mesías” (22), along with the variant “soy el Anunciado” (20, 21). In a 1969 interview, he recalls with sly humour: “Years ago I met up with the midwife who brought me into the world; she said I was born talking. And you know what I was saying? I am the Messiah. What’s more, I said it in Hebrew. Take note, it’s not the kind of childhood memory you’ll hear from Borges” (qtd. in Barjarlía 41). Fijman evidently enjoyed the notoriety of the anecdote and must have told variations on it repeatedly over the course of his life.
12 A century earlier, the area occuped by Villa Crespo would have been the outskirts of the city. The wealthy Balcarce family had their magnificent summer house on what became the 600 block of Warnes Street. In the same era, nearby Canning was known as the avenida del Ministro Inglés, apparently because the British diplomat had his residence there (Pino 94–5).
13 “Super flumina Babylonis ibi sedimus et flevimus cum recordaremur Sion” (Vulgate Psalm 136:1). “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion” (New International Psalm 137:1). Zion, the Promised Land, is for Christians a figure of the Kingdom of God promised by Christ.
14 Narrating the agony of Santa Rosa de Lima, Marechal writes of her agony: “Rosa, on the cross, must have imitated the Crucified, saying as did he in his agony: ‘I’m thirsty. Thirst is devouring me!’ ” (Vida de Santa Rosa de Lima, OC II, 419). The biblical allusion is to John 19:28; again, the implication is that Samuel is undergoing his via crucis prior to an eventual conversion to Catholicism. Abelardo Castillo’s character Jacobo Fiksler – based on Jacobo Fijman/Samuel Tesler – protagonizes a novel whose title seems to refer to this passage: El que tiene sed (1985) [He Who Is Thirsty].
15 Noumena (plural of noumenon) in Plato refers to the objects of intelligence or substantive Ideas. Marechal is likely using the term in the Platonic rather than the Kantian sense.
BOOK FIVE, CHAPTER 1
1 See 633n22.
2 The Pampas lived in the plains of what is now the Province of Buenos Aires. Hunters and gatherers, they were famous for hunting ostriches using bolas (two or more stones tied to a strong cord, to be thrown at the prey so as to wind round it and entangle it).
3 Chubut is a province in southern Argentina. This episode is a homage to Ricardo Güiraldes’s famous novel, Don Segundo Sombra (1926), a text of literary modernism that closes the cycle of the gauchesque genre.
4 “En el corimbo rojo de la mañana zumban / tus abejorros, Maravilla.” In the red corymb of morning your / bumblebees buzz, Wonder.” First lines of Marechal’s poem “Canto en la grupa de una mañana” [Song on the Haunches of a Morning] in Días como flechas (1926).
5 In particular, Jorge Luis Borges, who brought ultraísmo from his contacts with the Spanish literary avant-garde, and Xul Solar, who had spent several years in Europe.
6 As Barcia (567n) observes, Santos Vega stands in here for that other iconic gaucho, Martín Fierro, whose name was taken by the celebrated literary magazine (1924–27).
7 The Royal Keller, located at the heart of Buenos Aires (at Esmeralda 385), was a storied confitería and literary/artistic gathering place, including for the martinfierristas.
8 Speaking of his own life, Marechal uses the phrase “a first call to order” (Andrés 30) to characterize his evolution from the his avant-garde poetry of the mid-twenties to the “metaphysical” verses of Odas para el Hombre y la Mujer (1929). Adam’s trip to Europe is a narrative condensation of Marechal’s two trips there, in 1926 and 1929–30.
9 Navascués (AB 425n) surmises that Adam is referring to the mountain
of San Miguel de Aralar, popularly known as the “Angel of Aralar,” near Olazagutía, Navarra.
10 Garcilaso de la Vega (1501–1536), Spanish poet who introduced Renaissance verse forms into Spanish literature. Salicio and Nemeroso are two “shepherds” who dialogue in Garcilaso’s first Égloga.
11 Don Quixote’s lengthy, eloquent paean to the mythical Golden Age (Book 1, chapter 11) is delivered in the presence of real shepherds, not characters out of pastoral novel as the Knight believes. The rustic shepherds, of course, have no idea what he’s talking about.
12 Athanase Apartis (1899–1972): sculptor born in Greece who studied under the more famous French sculptor Antoine Bourdelle (1861–1929).
13 Valery Larbaud translated Joyce’s Ulysses into French (the version that Marechal read in Paris in 1929–30); his article “James Joyce” (Nouvelle Revue Française 1922) is ground zero of Joycean criticism. Friend of Ricardo Güiraldes and Manuel Gálvez, among other Argentine writers, Larbaud wrote articles in the 1920s for the major daily La Nación as well as for the literary magazines Proa and Martín Fierro (see Cheadle, “Between Wandering Rocks: Joyce’s Ulysses in the Argentine Culture Wars”).
14 Jujuy is the northernmost province of Argentina, bordering on northern Chile and southern Bolivia.
15 Alquiles Badi (1894–1976), Alberto Morera (1904–1954), Raquel Forner (1902–1988), Horacio Butler (1897–1983). Argentine painters who, among others – notably Antonio Berni (1905–1981) – formed the so-called Group of Paris. Perhaps the most internationally famous now are Berni and Forner. Marechal frequented the group both in the French capital and in Sanary-sur-Mer.
Adam Buenosayres: A Novel Page 83