Adam Buenosayres: A Novel
Page 84
16 Adam’s quotation from the Critias is more or less accurate, and according to Plato’s text the white, black, and red stone was indeed used to construct docks.
BOOK FIVE, CHAPTER 2
1 San Luis de la Punta de los Venados: the complete name of the capital city of San Luis Province, in the interior of Argentina.
2 As Navascués (AB 436n) notes, the Principal has apparently been named for the Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827); inspired by J.J. Rousseau’s Romanticism, Pestalozzi set down the modern principles of modern education on the premise that human nature is essentially good.
3 Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s autobiography Recuerdos de provincia (1850) recounts in the chapter “Mi educación” a street fight between two gangs of schoolboys headed up respectively by Barrilito and Chuña (Barcia 586n).
4 The Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Buenos Aires located at Gaona 1730 in the barrio Caballito, is dedicated to the Virgen de los Navegantes [Virgin of the Mariners], originally the Sardinian Madonna di Bonaira, to whom Pedro Mendoza in 1536 dedicated the settlement of Santa María del Buen Aire. The statue described by Adam, in which the Virgin holds a ship in her right hand and the baby Jesus in her left, dates from 1897.
5 In Greek mythology, Bellerophon rode the wingèd horse Pegasus. After killing the monster Chimera, he tried to fly to Mount Olympus, but was stymied and punished by Zeus for his presumption.
6 La Grande Argentina (1930) was the title of Leopoldo Lugones’s nationalist essays. His concept of the Great Argentina took as its model Mussolini’s Italy, which he considered to be reviving the senatorial system of ancient Rome. As pointed out by Enrique Zuleta Álvarez (143–4), Lugones’s philo-Fascist nationalism was somewhat contradictory, in that he favoured economic development through British capital investment. Such development was the basis of the hegemonic liberalism opposed by both Catholic nationalism and left-wing nationalism.
BOOK FIVE, CHAPTER 3
1 “Las doce campanadas eran doce mochuelos: / Alguien abrió la puerta de la torre, y huyeron.” First two lines of Marechal’s poem “Noche de sábado” [Saturday Night] in Días como flechas (1926) (OC I, 95).
2 The poem “Noche de sábado” continues: “¡Igual que un trompo bailará de tu punta / tu corazón nocturno” [Just like a top your heart will dance on end like a top]. Adam’s image looks like a variant on this one.
3 The three images in quotation marks cited by Adam are all verses from Marechal’s “Poema de veinticinco años” [Poem on Turning Twenty-Five Years Old] in Días como flechas (1926). The first stanza reads: “La tierra es un antílope que huye / sobre deshilachados caminos de aventura. / – ¡Salve, moscardón ebrio / girando en el más fuerte mediodía de sombra! / – Mundo, piedra zumbante / de los siete colores . . .” (OC I, 89).
4 “Viernes Santo, Viernes Santo, / día de grande Pasión.”
5 “Página eterna de argentina gloria, / melancólica imagen de la patria.” The first verses of the patriotic poem by Juan Chassaing (1839–1864), minor poet, as well as Unitarian soldier and politician. Children ritually recited the poem in Argentine schools.
6 “Un automóvil, dos automóviles, / tres automóviles, cuatro automóviles.” The ditty continues up to seven automobiles “y un autobús” [and one bus]. According to Marechal (Andrés 21), this was the “anthem” of the magazine Martín Fierro, composed as a joke by Oliverio Girondo and sung to the melody of “La donna è mobile” [Woman is Fickle, from Verdi’s opera Rigoletto (1851)].
7 “Parece que van cayendo / copos de nieve en tu cara.” Marechal has inverted the first two verses of a traditional Spanish requiebro [song of seduction] put to popular music: “Copos de nieve en tu cara / Parece van cayendo: / Mientras más te voy mirando / Mejor me vas pareciendo” (Rodríguez Marín, item 1295).
8 “Dans une tour de Nantes / y avait un prisonnier.” Traditional French song, still popular today, which properly begins: “Dans les prisons de Nantes / y avait un prisonnier.” Often confused, as in Marechal’s text, with a another song that begins: “Dans une tour de Londres / y avait un prisonnier.”
9 Anaximander (see 631n14).
10 Anaximenes (d. 528 BCE) is known for his doctrine that air (Greek pneuma, “wind, breath, spirit”) is the source of all things. In medieval philosophy, the term came to be mean breath of God or Holy Spirit. The medieval Latin form neuma signified as well a musical structure in plainsong, consisting in a prolonged phrase or group of notes sung to a single syllable, usually at the end of a melody.
11 Luján is a town not far west of Buenos Aires. Nuestra Señora de Luján is considered to be the patron saint of Argentina.
12 Barcia (612n) points out the intertextuality between this passage and Marechal’s “Cortejo,” from Poemas australes (1937), in which the deceased is a woman: “la cabeza yacente, sacudida en el viaje, / traza el signo de ¡no!” (OC I, 190) [the prone head, jouncing back and forth in the journey, traces the sign of No!].
13 Allusion to Matthew 18:3. In the King James Version: “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
14 Ramon Lull (1232–1315): philosopher, Franciscan monk, and first major writer in the Catalan language. His most famous work is the Ars generalis ultima or Ars magna (1305).
15 Navascués (AB 464n) finds in the novel’s original manuscript a revealing paragraph that has been suppressed in the published novel: “Names of women [crossed out: that bring disturbing testimony to his conscience]! Herminia, Zulema, Rosa! Irma, in her happy humility (and he’d told her eyes were like two mornings together). Why, what for? When he already knew the sad game and abominated it? But behind Irma arises, suddenly, a figure – terrible Eumenides” [my translation].
16 The Eumenides (the Furies) is a Greek tragedy by Aeschylus. The Furies are to judge Orestes for murdering his mother Clytemnestra; Marechal has apparently conflated the Furies into a single figure.
17 Navascués (AB 466n) finds a much longer sentence in the original manuscript: “I am sick to death of empty [unreadable word], of sterile and proud literature. I renounce the art that made me what I am now, and I offer myself to your art so that you may make me what I ought to be [crossed out: if I can still be anything], if it isn’t already too late” [my translation].
18 Like the hobo of the Dirty Thirties in North America, the image of the linyera (hobo, tramp) became in the década infame a fixture in the Argentine imaginary. Enrique Larreta’s play titled El linyera (1932), in which a tramp suddenly appears and alters the lives of the villagers, was a popular success (a film version was directed by Larreta and Mario Soffici in 1933). Larreta’s character reflects the figure’s dual aspect – on the one hand, a frightening outsider, morally suspect; on the other, a wise messenger.
19 The “Someone” who lays down his arms is likely an allusion to the Knight Faithful and True in Revelation 11:19.
BOOK SIX, “THE BLUE-BOUND NOTEBOOK”
1 In the original: “El Cuaderno de Tapas Azules” [The Notebook with Blue Covers]. The colour azul in Spanish connotes the spiritual (similar to “azure skies” in English) but also, in Hispanic literature, aestheticism and the cult of beauty. The great modernist poet Rubén Darío (1867–1916) titled his most famous book Azul (1888). The chief literary model for Adam’s Notebook, both in substance and poetic language, is the Vita nuova, Dante’s courtly/mystical/devotional account of his love for Beatrice. The oneiric visions of the Notebook recall not only Dante (Vita nuova, chapters III and XII) but the cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus.
2 In the original Spanish: Aquella, the demonstrative pronoun in the feminine form. The form aquel (feminine aquella) marks a strong deictic distance from the position of enunciation. A literal translation would be “That [Feminine] One Yonder” (i.e., “over there” or “out there,” or perhaps “up there”).
3 Navascués (AB 31 and 482n) attributes the image of the soul’s spiralling movements to Marechal’
s reading of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (5–6th century CE), a Byzantine Christian author heavily influenced by Neoplatonism. Later, in Book Seven, Schultz employs the spiral motif in his design of Cacodelphia.
4 “Woman, why weepest thou?” (KJV John 20:13, 15). The question is put twice to Mary Magdalene when she visits Jesus’s tomb. Thanks to Sheila Ethier for pointing out this biblical allusion.
5 In chapter XIV of Vita nuova, “a friend” takes Dante to a place where many beautiful women are gathered, and then Beatrice shows up (Dante 573). The friend in Vita nuova is traditionally considered to be Dante’s mentor, the poet Guido de Cavalcanti (1250?–1300), referred to earlier, in chapter III of Dante’s text, as “the first among my friends” (Dante 564). In Adam’s Notebook, the friend may be an idealized version of Samuel Tesler, with whom Adam has earlier discussed love, philography, etc. Later, Adam capitalizes Friend, as though to indicate a sort of Platonic ideal of the friend. Navascués (AB 498n) recalls the Friend as Love’s counsellor in the Roman de la Rose (circa 1230), a work probably known by Dante and definitely by Marechal.
6 “Entre mujeres alta ya, / la niña quiere llamarse Viento.” First lines of Marechal’s poem “De la adolescente” [On the Adolescent Girl] in Odas para el hombre y la mujer (1929) (OC I, 142).
7 Entre San Pedro y San Juan / hicieron un barco nuevo: / las velas eran de plata, / los remos eran de acero.” A traditional Argentine children’s song, which continues: “Saint Peter was the pilot, / Saint John was a sailor, / and the captain-general / was Jesus of Nazareth” (qtd. in Barcia 648n).
8 The question of gender in Adam’s Notebook is a fascinating one. The soul who narrates her “spiritual autobiography” is clearly cast as feminine, but in this passage there is a sudden shift to a masculine subject position of enunciation.
9 Belgrano is a barrio in the northern part of Buenos Aires, bordering on the river (Río de la Plata). The barrancas, “ravines,” were formed by the action of the river. The Plaza Barrancas de Belgrano is an elegant park.
10 For Fernanda Bravo (155), “Friend” in this passage refers to Dante himself.
11 The line comes from Marechal’s poem “Niña de encabritado corazón” [Girl of Rebellious Heart] in Odas para el hombre y la mujer (1929).
12 As Nicola Jacchia (437n) points out, the phrase seems an allusion to Matthew 8:22 (“Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead,” KJV); cf. Luke 9:60.
13 Barcia (668n) points out the intertextuality between this dream-vision and a poem by Marechal titled “Descripción de un sueño” [Description of a Dream], published in 1928 in the Buenos Aires magazine Síntesis and not collected in any of his books. Adam’s vision and the poem share the theme of the corpse of the beloved being transported in a rowboat to its final destination, as well as many specific images. But, instead of the Christ-like man of Adam’s vision, in the poem an angel speaks to the poet: “El amor es la vid que se riega en exilio / con el agua y la sal de los ojos llovidos. / Más allá de tus ojos colgarán los racimos” (OC I, 486; Marechal’s italics) [Love is the vine that is nourished in exile / by the water and salt of weeping eyes. / Beyond your eyes will hang the bunches of grapes].
14 The image of the Beloved being “nourished” by the substance or heart of the Lover occurs in the first sonnet of Dante’s Vita nuova (chapter III), where the allegorical figure of Love gives the poet’s bleeding heart to his beloved “as nutrition” (Dante 563). The same Dantean passage, no doubt reinforced by his reading of Adán Buenosayres, can be discerned in the penultimate sentence of the introductory “Liminar” of Cervera Salinas’s El síndrome de Beatriz: “With the serpent devouring the centre of her heart, Beatrice, in her eternal misfortune or in her throne of light, nourishes the healthy soul and feeds upon the soul that is sick” (34; my translation).
15 This last sentence of the Blue-Bound Notebook serves as the third of three epigraphs to Abelardo Castillo’s novel Crónica de un iniciado [Chronicle of an Initiate] (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1991): “rosa evadida de la muerte, rosa sin otoño, espejo mío, cuya forma cabal y único nombre conoceré algún día, si, como espero, hay un día en que la sed del hombre da con el agua justa y el exacto manantial.”
BOOK SEVEN
1 Navascués (AB 509n) finds in the original manuscript the terms Cacópolis and Calípolis (“ugly city and beautiful city”). Formed by analogy with Philadelphia (“city of loving brothers”) are the names Cacodelphia (“city of ugly brothers”) and Calidelphia (“city of beautiful brothers”).
2 Ulysses descends into Hades in Book XI of the Odyssey, Aeneas in Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid.
3 The “visible” and “invisible” Buenos Aires alludes to Eduardo Mallea’s notion of a visible and invisible Argentina in his well-known essay Historia de una pasión argentina (1937). In Mallea’s conceit, the visible Argentina was false, inauthentic, and degraded, while the invisible Argentina was the true, spiritual nation. Schultz/Marechal complicates this scheme considerably.
4 The Tabarís was a storied cabaret on the avenida Corrientes in Buenos Aires, famous for dancing and prostitution, and frequented by artists and international celebrities. Nowadays it is a review theatre.
5 Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, the first part of The Divine Comedy trilogy, is the structural model for the parodic “Journey to Cacodelphia.” Virgil, the old-world Latin poet, plays the role of guide to the poet Dante. The reader familiar with the Inferno will recognize allusions to it in many Cacodelphian episodes.
6 To Barcia (678n), this spell appears to be Marechal’s invention, but Jacchia (446) considers it to be from an invocation of the Celtic goddess (or god) Cerunnos.
7 Logistilla is the good fairy in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (see 651n41).
8 Various names or designations for the Old Testament Yahweh (Barcia 678n), but Jacchia (447) finds this incantation in a medieval manuscript, L’Opération de sept esprits des planètes, conserved in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris.
9 A reference to the medieval Spanish folk character of the crone and procuress, who by antonomasia came to be known as La Celestina. La Celestina is a secondary character in the Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea (1499), by Fernando de Rojas, but the resourceful crone stole the show, as it were, and the play came to be popularly known as La Celestina. The skill set attributed to Doña Tecla is that of La Celestina – in particular, the art of sowing up the broken hymen of deflowered virgins in order to refit them for marriage.
10 These tongue-twisters in English (taken from English Tongue Twisters
11 “De mi pago me he venido / arrastrando mi reboso / sólo por venir a verte / cara de perro baboso.”
12 “De mi pago me he venido, / arrastrando mi chalina, / sólo por venir a verte, cara de / yegua madrina.”
13 Mandinga refers to a people from the west coast of Africa. In Spanish America, the term came to be associated with the religions of African slaves, considered evil by Christianity, and then to mean the Devil, a usage still common in rural Latin America.
14 Schultz speaks in his neocriollo language.
15 In the original: ¡Pirocagaron los Paliogogos! The made-up verb pirocagar is a mock-erudite (and mock-Neocriollo) version of the popular expression cagar fuego, “to shit fire,” which means “to fail, to mess up, to be screwed.” “Pollygogs” is Doña Tecla’s mispronunciation of Paleogogues, Schultz’s neologism meaning etymologically “old leaders” in contrast to the Neogogue or “new leader.”
16 Barcia (682n) and Navascués (AB 517n) note here the echo of the Inferno (Canto III, vv. 134–6), where Dante falls asleep.
17 Gath and Chaves: see note 648n20. In Books One to Five.
18 Luna Park, often called the “Palacio de los Deportes” [Sports Palace] and built in 1931, is a covered stadium used for boxing m
atches and other spectacles for mass consumption. Both the Palacio and the Boca Juniors’ stadium, La Bombonera, are still in use today.
19 Barcia (687n) speculates that this sentence alludes to the first presidency (1946–55) of Juan Domingo Perón.
20 Spanish has adopted the Canadian term “toboggan” and resignified it to mean “slide” of the amusement park type. Schultz’s neocriollo word combines “holy” and “toboggan.”
21 The Latin phrase refers to the Pope’s right to appoint a cardinal and withhold his name in pectore, “within his bosom”; i.e., without publicly naming the cardinal.
22 Celtic culture still survives in Galicia, and bagpipes are a traditional instrument there.
23 Alberto Vacarezza (1886–1959) was a popular playwright whose sainetes, comic or melodramatic sketches, reflected life among the lower classes.
24 ad honorem, “without pay.”
25 Waltz over the Waves (see 658n8).
26 Berreta in lunfardo means “fake.”
27 In “learned ignorance” Navascués (AB 534n) finds an allusion to De docta ignorantia (1440), in which Nicholas of Cusa characterizes the learned man as being aware of his own ignorance.
28 Beffa in Italian means “mockery,” ‘joke,” ‘hoax.”
29 Reference to the maxim: “Cobbler, stick to your last.” In Spanish: “Zapatero, a tus zapatos.”
30 “Unyielding waist” translates inquebrantable cintura. But in the original manuscript Navascués (AB 536n) finds cintura casta, literally “chaste waist” but suggestive of cinturón de castidad “chastity belt.”
31 The famous military “Marcha de San Lorenzo” (composed in 1901 by Cayetano Alberto Silva) honours General José de San Martín’s grenadiers and commemorates the Battle of San Lorenzo (636n1).
32 The entertainment in confiterías during the 1930s was commonly provided by young women’s orchestras.
33 Emilio Castelar (1832–1899), liberal democratic president of Spain during the First Republic (1873–74), renowned for his oratory.