34 Alfredo Palacios (1878–1965), an Argentine activist known as the first socialist member of Parliament in the Americas, and famous for his speeches.
35 Another allusion to Keyserling’s South American Meditations (see 640n23).
36 Barcia (716n) finds an allusion here to a verse of Garcilaso de la Vega’s “Third Eclogue”: “Flérida, para mí dulce y sabrosa / más que la fruta del cercado ajeno” [Flérida, for me sweeter and tastier / than the fruit of another’s garden].
37 The reference to this Italian monk’s visit in 1640 is obscure but plausible. In El libro de Buenos Aires, Abós includes the testimony of Ascarate de Biscay, who visited Buenos Aires in 1659 and commented that the men “love their leisure and pleasure and are devoted to Venus” (47). Navascués (545n) thinks Marechal may have been referring to the Italian Jesuit Antonio Sepp (1655–1733), who travelled to Buenos Aires in 1690.
38 Emeric Essex Vidal (1791–1861), English painter considered by some to be a precursor of Argentine art, published his Picturesque Illustrations of Buenos Ayres and Montevideo in 1820.
39 The cemetery of La Recoleta, in the centrally located upper-class barrio of the same name, is the final resting place of the wealthy and powerful.
40 The Jockey Club, established in 1882 by Argentine president Carlos Pellegrini for the political and economic elite of the nation, administered the Hippodromes in Palermo and San Isidro. Its original locale, a luxurious palace on Florida Street, is now a tourist attraction.
41 Titania is surely a satirical version of the writer Victoria Ocampo (1890–1979), whose most important accomplishment was the prestigious literary magazine Sur (1931–92), which she herself maintained for several decades, providing a forum for a wide spectrum of thinkers, writers, and artists from the Americas and Europe. Marechal was among Sur’s contributing authors until the outbreak of the Second World War, when the debate over Argentina’s position on the war hardened the increasing polarization of the cultural scene. Sur, aristocratic and liberal, favoured taking a pro-Allied stance; Argentine nationalists of all political stripes favoured a position of neutrality. Jorge Lafforgue and Fernando Colla, who examined the proofs of the novel’s original 1948 edition, found a longer and more detailed version of the Titania/Ocampo satire (372–3n; reproduced by Navascués [AB 549n]). At the behest of the managing editor of Sudamericana, Marechal agreed to tone down the passage; the result was this shortened version. Still, its brutality is in striking contrast to Marechal’s respectful article “Victoria Ocampo y la literatura feminina” (Sur 52, Jan. 1939, 66–70; in OC v, 293–7).
42 As Navascués (AB 550n) perceptively points out, the common theme in these figures is their controversial treatment of sexuality: Arthur Honegger (1892–1955), French avant-garde composer of the erotic operetta Les aventures du roi Pausole (1930); D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928); André Gide (1869–1951), whose Corydon (1924) is about homosexuality; and of course the centrality of sexuality in the theory of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).
43 Navascués (AB 551n) recalls the medieval legend in which unicorns gently approach maidens to be caressed by them. The inversion of the legend here slyly points up the Ultras’ condition of non-virgins.
44 “El Porvenir” means “The Future.”
45 The Asociación Amigos del Arte (1924–42), located on Florida Street, promoted contemporary art, both national and international, exhibiting the likes of Rodin, Toulouse Lautrec, and David Alfaro Siquieros, as well as young Argentine painters, now consecrated, such as Xul Solar. The association was especially active in the 1920s.
46 In the original, ¡No confundir hinchazón con gordura! This apparently lame aphorism seems to parody those that open Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s famous book on gastronomie, Physiologie du goût (1825). The second aphorism, for example: “Les animaux se repaissent; l’homme mange; l’homme d’esprit seul sait manger” [Animals stuff themselves; man eats; only the man of wit knows how to eat]. But the noun hinchazón derives from the verb hinchar, ”to inflate,” which in popular language in the River Plate means also “to annoy, pester,” and so Schultz seems to be punning; his Joycean penchant for wordplay is on display several times in Cacodelphia.
47 Arcades ambo, “both Arcadians”: a phrase, now usually ironic, from Virgil’s Eclogue VIII v4 referring to two shepherd-poets.
48 Navascués (AB 560n) finds in this episode several echoes of Trimalchio’s dinner in the Satyricon by Petronius (c. 27–66 CE).
49 As Navascués (AB 561n) recalls, in chapter 34 of the Satyricon, “a slave brought in a silver skeleton, so contrived that the joints and movable vertebrae could be turned in any direction. He threw it down upon the table a time or two, and its mobile articulation caused it to assume grotesque attitudes, whereupon Trimalchio chimed in: ‘Poor man is nothing in the scheme of things / And Orcus grips us and to Hades flings / Our bones! This skeleton before us here / Is as important as we ever were! / Let’s live then while we may and life is dear’ ” (Satyricon, Vol. 2, trans. F.W. Firebaugh, Project Gutenberg ebook).
50 In the brothel episode (Book Four, chapter 2), Schultz makes a snide remark about Jewish moralizing (see 662n7). Here his trite witticism, playing on the perfect rhyme in Spanish between color and olor, evokes the medieval anti-Semitic slur of foetor Judaicus. Marechal, after citing Schopenhauer in Book One (see 633n26), seems to attribute the German philosopher’s prejudices to the fictive astrologer. In his essay On Religion, Schopenhauer fulminates against Jewish morality, specifically linking it to foetor Judaicus several times in a few pages. Ironically, however, Schopenhauer’s contempt for Judaism is expressed in a subchapter titled “On Christianity” (Parerga 362–77), in which he abhors the Christian religion for being infected by the perverse “Jewish” moral notion, which stems from the Old Testment book of Genesis, that animals and humans are fundamentally different – a notion equally abhorrent to the Christian (Thomist) Adam Buenosayres. However, it is unlikely that the real-life Xul Solar, whose art continually blurs the boundaries between the human, animal, and plant realms, would endorse the absolute separation of human and animal. In this sense, Xul is indeed close to Schopenhauer.
51 KJV John 17:6.
52 The Summa, by antonomasia, is that of Thomas Aquinas.
53 “Woe unto the world because of offences!” (KJV Matthew 18:7).
54 “Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought out bread and wine. He was the priest of God Most High” (KJV Genesis 14:18). Considered by Christian theologians to be an anticipation of the sacramental bread and wine of the Last Supper. The phrase “in the order of Melchizedek” occurs throughout the Old Testament; e.g., “You are a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek” (KJV Hebrews 5:6).
55 Possibly an allusion to Marcelo T. de Alvear, aristocratic leader of the centrist “anti-personalist” (anti-Yrigoyen) faction of the Radical Party, whose presidency of the nation (1922–28) interrupted the dual presidency (1916–22 and 1928–30) of the populist Hipólito Yrigoyen, also of the Radical Party. Alvear supposedly had a lisp.
56 Condensation of the second of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them; for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God” (KJV Exodus 20:4–5).
57 An allusion to a similar idea, using the same Cervantine example, expressed in Miguel de Unamuno’s influential novel Niebla [Mist] (1914). In a crucial passage, the novel’s protagonist, Augusto Pérez, claims that he is more real than his author, citing against Unamuno the latter’s own oft-repeated argument that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are more real than Cervantes, of whom we know relatively little (Unamuno 150–1).
58 Barcia (753–4n) observes that the following are stories from Argentine folk tradition. The formulaic question “How were the poor devils?” is the equivalent of “How did the trouble start
?” But Schultz will resignify the phrase presently. Juan (Don Juan or Juancito) is the name conventionally assigned to the fox in these tales.
59 A pointed reference to Joyce’s famous boast when asked to explain Ulysses: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.”
60 Perramus: see 661n1.
61 Abel Sánchez (1917) is a novel by Miguel de Unamuno treating the Cain and Abel theme.
62 Given that the novel is set in the mid- to late-1920s, the dance figures a process of decadence ongoing since the 1870s; that is, since shortly after the establishment of the modern liberal hegemony in a unified Argentina under President Mitre in 1862.
63 The Botanical Gardens of Palermo, in Buenos Aires, date back to 1779. Gradually expanding, they now occupy ten hectares.
64 Cuyo is a region in central western Argentina comprising the provinces of Mendoza, San Juan, and San Luis. Tucumán is a province in the north.
65 In ancient Greek art, the god of matrimony Hymenaeus (or Hymenaios) appears as a wingèd child bearing a torch in his hand.
66 White and blue are the colours of the Argentine flag.
67 Malambo de la Cabra Tetona: “The Malambo of the Big-Boobed She-Goat.” The malambo is a folkloric dance in Argentina.
68 I have not translated this paragraph literally, since it is formed entirely of apparently meaningless wordplay.
69 Errare humanum est: “To err is human” (attributed to Seneca). The next phrase in Latin is a variant of a psalm from the Vulgate Bible: nunc ergo reges intellegite erudimini iudices terrae; [“be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth”] (KJV Psalms 2:10).
70 The Gallic metaphysician is no doubt René Guénon (cf. 626n20, 628n6, and 637n7). Schultz’s discourse is indebted to Guénon’s exposition, in Introduction générale à l’étude des doctrines hindous (1921), of the Hindu caste system, whose mythic origin is given in the Rig Veda.
71 In his essay “Autopsia de Creso” [Autopsy of Croesus], Marechal praises Guénon as a “philosopher of history” (Cuaderno 53).
72 Xul Solar painted several watercolours in the 1920s with the motif of the dragon, including: Dos Dragos (1920), Dama, pájaro, drago (1922), Hombre y dragón (1922), Drago y dama fluctúo (1923), Drago San Jorge (1923), and Drago (1927).
73 La Prensa is an old, staunchly liberal Argentine daily in existence since 1869. During the government of Juan Domingo Perón, it was closed down and in 1951 was expropriated for its militant anti-Peronist stance. Returned to its owners in 1956, it resumed operations and continues to this day.
74 “¡Hijo audaz de la llanura / y guardián de nuestro suelo!” First verses of the ten-line poem “Al Pampero” by Rafael Obligado (1851–1920).
75 In Spanish, the two basic meanings of bomba are “pump” and “bomb,” but the expression hacer bombas means “to blow bubbles”; estar echando bombas, “to be foaming at the mouth.”
76 Unione e Benevolanza. An association of Italian immigrants still active today and founded in Buenos Aires in 1858, according to its website.
77 Barcia (797n) notes that name orejudo (long-eared) was popularly applied to the Conservative Party, after their leader Marelino Ugarte’s nickname “el Petizo Orejudo” (the Long-Eared Pipsqueak).
78 “En el extremo de una recta / que no se puede prolongar / levantar a dicha recta / una perpendicular.”
79 Personaje in Spanish has a dual meaning that is weakened by its rendering in English as “personage”: (1) a public person of note; and (2) a character in a literary, theatrical, or cinematic work of fiction. The antecedent of Marechal’s “Personage” is the idle, cultured, jaded bachelor of the Argentine patrician class, given literary representation most famously in Eugenio Cambaceres’s Pot pourri (1881), whose protagonist is a dilettantish, failed author; Cambaceres exploits the metaphor of the personaje and the theatrical actor to great effect (see Ludmer). The type is also represented in Lucio Vicente López’s La gran aldea (1884). Ricardo Güiraldes’s novel Raucho, whose hero leaves the ranch for a dissolute life in Paris only to be tormented by nostalgia for the land, is another text haunting the saga of the Personage. However, when Julio Cortázar reviewed Adán in 1949, he saw in this episode a debt to the “bureaucratic picaresque” of Roberto Payró (1867–1928).
80 Godos (Goths) was the derogatory term given by Spanish American patriots to the Spaniards during the Wars of Independence (1810–24).
81 Reference to the Battle of San Lorenzo (see 636n1).
82 Juan Antonio Álvarez de Arenales (1770–1831) was put in charge by General San Martín of a division sent from Chile to liberate Peru from Royalist forces in 1819.
83 The Battle of Ayacucho in Peru (1824), in which the last major stronghold of Royalist forces was defeated, is considered to be the final decisive battle in the Wars of Independence.
84 The region of Provinces of Río de la Plata, once independence was definitively achieved, fell into a series of civil wars along both territorial and ideological lines, especially between Federalists and Unitarians.
85 The so-called Campaña del Desierto reached its climax with the invasion of the south by General Julio Argentino Roca in the late 1870s. The purpose was to reclaim the “desert”; that is, to take possesion of the land not yet occupied by white Argentina by subduing the native peoples. The campaign is considered genocidal by many today.
86 In the character Germán, Marechal is perhaps paying homage to Ricardo Güiraldes, whose Cuentos de muerte y de sangre [Stories of Death and of Blood], as well as his book of poetry exalting the land Cencerro de cristal [Glass Cowbell], was published in 1915, though not to great acclaim as in the case of Germán’s Song in the Blood. However, great acclaim did immediately greet Güiraldes’s Don Segundo Sombra (1926).
87 The unmentioned term is probably cipayo (cognate of the English “sepoy,” an Indian soldier fighting for the imperial British Army), adapted in Argentine nationalist discourse to mean the equivalent of traitor.
88 “El solterón” [The Old Bachelor] is a poem in Leopoldo Lugones’s Los crepúsculos del jardín (1905). In the poem, a lonely old man in his room recalls an old flame, considers writing her a love letter, then gives up the idea when he finds that his rusty old pen no longer writes.
89 El Tigre is a resort town outside Buenos Aires at the delta of the Paraná River, a fluvial area full of islands.
90 Gloria Videla (174) sees in this interpolated story a debt to Ortega y Gasset’s critique, in “El hombre a la defensiva,” of the Argentine male who gains his position for reasons other than merit and competence, who wears a mask which becomes rigid, who suffers a scission between his authentic self and his social role, who “denies his spontaneous self in favour of the imaginary personage he believes himself to be” (Ortega 653).
91 Allusion to the nihilist hero of the poem Les Chants de Maldoror (1869), by the Comte de Lautréamont, pseudonym of Isidore Lucien Ducasse (b. 1846 in Montevideo; d. Paris 1870).
92 “El aeroplano”: a popular waltz composed by Pedro Datta (1887–1934), and a standard in the repertoire of tango orchestras.
93 “Don Esteban”: a tango composed by bandoneonista Augusto Berto (1889–1953), credited with making the bandoneón a standard instrument of tango music.
94 Place Pigalle, in Paris near Montmartre, had been renowned since the end of the nineteenth century for its artists’ studios and literary cafés.
95 Navascués (AB 630n) detects behind this character a satirical version of tango musician and composer Luis Mandarino (1899–1993), who was born in the Abasto zone and went to perform in Paris with Francisco Todarelli. Marechal recalls the “famous duo Mandarino-Tordarelli” (Andrés 27).
96 Protagonist of Alexandre Dumas’s novel La Dame aux camélias (1848), adapted for stage in 1852, and in 1853 for the Verdi’s opera La Traviata.
97 “Day of Wrath,” a hymn attribu
ted to Tomasso da Celano (c.1200–c.1260) forming part of the Requiem Mass. The phrase comes from the Vulgate version of the Old Testament book of Zephaniah (1:15): Dies irae dies illa tribulacionis et angustiae et miseriae dies tenebrarum et caliginis dies nebulae et turbinis. [“That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness”] (KJV Zeph 1:15). The theme of the Great Day of the Lord will become, in New Testament apocalyptic, that of Judgment Day or the Last Judgment.
98 All figures in the book of Revelation (Apocalypse). On the theme of apocalyticism in Adán, see Cheadle, The Ironic Apocalypse.
99 The children’s game of reaching for a ring on the end of a stick is traditional in merry-go-rounds in Buenos Aires. The city’s older calesitas are now a valued heritage; the municipal government has even published a book, Calesitas de Buenos Aires (Gobierno de la Ciudad Buenos Aires, 2005).
100 In light of the struggle among these mock-ecclesiastical figures, in particular between the Vice-Pope (see 680n102) and the Grand Orisonist, it is tempting to see in the ring an indirect allusion to the Anulus Pescatoris – the Ring of the Fisherman which, symbolically inherited from Saint Peter, bears the seal of the Pope. In Spanish, this ring is termed el anillo del Pescador. It should be pointed out, however, that Marechal does not use the word anillo but its synonym sortija, whose root etonym – Latin sors “lot, fate” – links the image of the merry-go-round to the topos of the wheel of fortune.
101 Vulgate version of the words “touch me not,” words spoken by Jesus to Mary Magdalene when she finds him risen from the tomb, in the Gospel of John (20:17).
102 The Vice-Pope is in fact César E. Pico (1895–1966), one of the founders of the Cursos de Cultura Católica as well as its wing of Christian artists and writers, Convivio. Marechal, in 1968, recalls the anecdote humorously: Pico indeed named himself Vice-Pope, half in jest, in order to combat, on behalf of the too-distant Roman Pope, the “sotanic [sic] pride” of certain priests (Andrés 39). However, what appears as a jovial lark may veil a rather more serious affair; that is, the polemic sustained by Pico in 1937 against Jacques Maritain, a regular visitor to Buenos Aires. Maritain condemned both sides in the Spanish Civil War, effectively witholding support for the “Christian” Franquistas, whereas the Argentine Catholic Nationalists, including Marechal in 1936, supported Franco in line with the official Church position. Maritain’s neutrality, for Pico, was a cop-out. By refusing to take sides, then, Maritain could perhaps be considered “guilty” of Quietism, at least from the perspective of militant orthodox Catholicism. If so, then Schultz’s Orisonists would be caricatures of Maritain’s Argentine followers, such as the priests Raphael Pividal and Augusto Durelli (see Zanca, “Cruzados y pescadores”). Navascués (AB 635n), however, considers that the polemic was between César Pico and Monseñor Franceschi, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, who in 1933 apparently censured Pico for his open endorsement of Fascism.
Adam Buenosayres: A Novel Page 85