103 A form of religious mysticism based on the work of the Spanish priest Miguel de Molinos (1640–1697), condemned as heterodox by the Inquisition. Molinos rejected outward devotion and emphasized passive contemplation.
104 It should be noted that in the original there is no sly double-entendre in the word “vice”; vice in Spanish does not have the double meaning it has in English (“vice” in Spanish is vicio).
105 Marechal parodies the poem “De cuáles armas deve armar todo cristiano para vencer el diablo, el mundo e la carne” [Arms of the Christian Knight], strophes 1579–1603 in the fourteenth-century classic Libro de buen amor [Book of Good Love] by Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita (?–c. 1350). In that doctrinal poem, each Christian virtue is associated with a weapon or piece of armour as a mnemonic device.
106 KJV Matthew 7:1.
107 Ninth-century archbishop of Rheims, Turpin is celebrated in La Chanson de Roland (late twelfth-century) for fighting sword in hand against the Moors.
108 Cervercería Río Segundo: a brewery operating from the 1880s to the mid- 1930s. The brewery in Quilmes is still going strong.
109 Edison Anabaruse, along with the names of the rest of the Potentials confronting Adam, is an anagram of Adán Buenosayres. As Navascués (AB 644n) notes, Joyce used the device of anagrams in Ulysses. In the penultimate episode, Ithaca, Leopold Bloom wonders: “What anagrams had he made on his name in youth? / Leopold Bloom / Ellpodbomool / Molldopeloob. / Bollopedoom / Old Ollebo, M. P.” (Joyce 792).
110 Allusion to the controversial defeat of Argentine boxer Luis Ángel Firpo, “Wild Bull of the Pampas,” by Jack Dempsey in the “fight of the century” at Madison Square Gardens, 1923. Firpo did knock Dempsey out of the ring – many sources say for as long as seventeen seconds – but Dempsey finally managed, with the help of American journalists, to climb back in and eventually be declared winner of the fight.
111 This elaborate fantasy clearly satirizes the program of the extreme philo-Fascist faction of conservative Argentine Catholic Nationalism.
112 OSB, Ordo Sancti Benedicti, is the anagram appended to the names of Benedictine monks.
113 Flos Sanctorum: thirteenth-century hagiographical collection known in English as the Lives of the Saints. The Hispanophone world tends to conserve the Latin title.
114 Putifilios: Neocriollo neologism for hijos de puta “sons of whores.” Xul Solar himself employed a similar word in his watercolour Filios del Sol [Sons of the Sun] (1920). Xul, who could laugh at himself, took in stride his caricature as the astrologer Schultz in Adán Buenosayres, but his wife, Micaela (Lita) Cadenas, objected that Xul in real life never used coarse language (Abós, Xul Solar 172–3).
115 Navascués (AB 652n) sees here a barbed allusion to the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, a Neoplatonist interpretation of Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis by author Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius (5th century CE). The implication is that Schultz is merely the commentator of a commentator of others’ ideas.
116 There are a couple of instances of double-entendre in this passage that amount to playful nonsense. The phrase un sublimado de rana could mean “a frog who is exalted” or “a [chemical] sublimate of frog.” This parallels the phrase un comprimido de elefante, which literally means “an elephant pill” or “elephant tablet,” though the context demands that one understand the phrase as a transposition of un elefante comprimido, “a compressed elephant.” Also, ante los ojos del buey literally means “before the ox’s eyes,” but it evokes the term ojo de buey, meaning “porthole” or “circular skylight.” In short, a very Joycean passage that recalls the verbal tomfoolery of Finnegans Wake and suggests a verbal performance of the “horizontalization” of meaning in language.
117 “Contour of Life” is just as enigmatic as the original phrase, el Contorno Vivo. For Navascués (AB 656n), the phrase probably alludes to Convivio, the circle of writers and artists created by César Pico under the auspices of the Cursos de Cultura Católica. This interpretation in turn clarifies the allusion in the next sentence to Caesar (César in Spanish). The Pontifex Maximus, as Navascués has found in a marginal note by Marechal, is Máximo Etchecopar (1912–2002), another Catholic nationalist intellectual. The whole episode seems to send up both egalitarianism and antiegalitarianianism.
118 As with much of the novel’s “metaphysical” lore, Schultz’s theory of motion seems to come from Plato’s Timaeus (par. 34); the world’s body as fashioned by the Demiurge according to Reason, says Plato’s character, is spherical and its only motion rotational; worldly creatures are endowed with the other six (rectilinear) motions as enumerated by Schultz, which are “wanderings” without reason (Cornford 55–6).
119 In Orlando furioso, Agramante is the king of the pagan Saracens. In Canto 27, his warriors begin to fight among one another. King Agramante’s camp came to be a proverbial site of discord. Don Quixote (Book I, chapter 46) recalls the campo de Agramante during a burlesque brawl at the inn.
120 In the original: guarda e passa, from Dante’s Inferno, canto III, verse 51 (Barcia 8867n).
121 Felice Orsini (1819–1858) designed a bomb of fulminate of mercury that would explode on impact. He used such bombs in an assassination attempt on Napoleon III, hoping to set off a revolution in France that would in turn facilitate Italy’s independence.
122 The anarchist movement in Argentina, as Navascués (AB 662n) following José C. Moya notes, was among the largest in the world in the early twentieth century. According to Moya (20), Buenos Aires was the second most important centre of anarchism after Barcelona. Moya discusses the paradox of the stereotype of the Jewish anarchist, ideologically in contradiction with that of the rapacious Jewish capitalist. David Viñas, whose maternal grandparents were Russian Jews, takes up the theme in his novels Los dueños de la tierra (1958) [Masters of the Earth], En la semana trágica (1966) [In the Tragic Week], and Dar la cara (1975) [Stand Up and Be Counted] (see Misoo Park, “Otro discurso del programa político de Contorno” PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2009).
123 Coram populo – Latin, “before the people, in public.”
124 A likely allusion to a scene in El mal metafísico (1916) [The Metaphysical Disease], by Manuel Gálvez, where anarchists are portrayed at their Sunday picnics in the park Isla Maciel; taken there by an anarchist friend, the protagonist finds the scene depressingly mediocre and bourgeois (Part Two, chapter v).
125 Parodic inversion of Socrates’s famous simile comparing himself to “a sort of gadfly, given to the state by God; and the state is a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you” (Plato’s Apology, trans. Benjamin Jowett. Project Gutenberg ebook). The real-life referent of the Boss is Natalio Félix Botana (1888–1941), a newspaper magnate famous for bringing sensationalist journalism to the River Plate region. Starting in 1921, his newspaper, Crítica, carried a version of Socrates’s sentence printed as its motto just beneath the daily’s logo (Abós, El tábano 297).
126 This particular sentence is quoted in Abós’s biography of Natalio Botana titled El tábano (1921) [The Gadfly] in support of his claim that Marechal’s infernal episode is “one of the most lucid texts” ever written about the Argentine Citizen Kane, as Abós (11) characterizes him, noting that the word tábano is an anagram of Botana (7).
127 “The Thief in His Forest of Bricks”: the title of a novel projected by Arlt but never written. Pedro Juan Vignale announced it as Arlt’s next novel in his literary column “Autores y Libros” of 29 June 1930 in El Mundo (Saítta 76).
128 Navascués (AB 670n) finds a note by Marechal indicating that Walker is based on Roberto Arlt (1900–1942), who worked as a journalist at El Mundo with Marechal and also for Botana at Crítica. Arlt’s vivid Aguafuertes porteños (1933) [Etchings of Buenos Aires] were originally written for the ne
wspaper. However, Walker the Red seems less like Arlt himself than a possible character from one of his raw, powerful novels, Los siete locos (1929) [The Seven Madmen] and Los lanzallamas (1931) [The Flame-Throwers].
129 An approximation of Matthew 18:6.
130 Matthew 18:3.
131 The idiom tener cola de paja means “to feel guilty or at fault,” as in the proverb: “El que tiene cola de paja no debe acercarse al fuego” [he who has a tail of straw shouldn’t get too close to the fire].
132 In Greek mythology, Euterpe is the muse of music.
133 This would be the location of the Amundsen house, setting of the tertulia episode in Book Two, chapter 2. In historical reality, the house at the corner of Tronador and Pampa in the barrio Villa Urquiza belonged to the Lange family (see 639n16).
134 The image occurs at least twice in Borges’s early poetry: first in the poem “Calle con almacén rosado” (in Luna de enfrente, 1925); after walking all night, the poet comes upon a street corner with a general store tinged pink by the dawn light; the poem is an ode to the city of Buenos Aires (Borges OC I, 57). And again in “Fundación mítica de Buenos Aires”: “Un almacén rosado como revés de naipe . . . el almacén rosado floreció en un compadre, / ya patrón de la esquina, ya resentido y duro” (OC I, 81). In Alistair Reid’s translation: “A general store pink as the back of a playing card . . . the corner bar flowered into life as a local bully, / already cock of his walk, resentful, tough” (Borges, Selected Poems 49). Gin is the preferred drink of traditional gauchos and tough suburban compadres.
135 The early Borges got these spellings from gauchesque poetry, which attemped to reflect the colloquial speech habits of rural Argentina.
136 A glamorous café on the avenida de Mayo in the heart of Buenos Aires, frequented by famous writers, artists, and musicians. La Peña del Tortoni, inaugurated in 1926 by Benito Quinquel Martín, was a famous literary and cultural discussion group that met in the café basement. Marechal, in his oral memoire, recalls fêting Luigi Pirandello at the Tortoni, and that Ricardo Güiraldes brought Carlos Gardel there to sing. But things could get rowdy. Marechal also remembers alcohol-inspired hijinks, such as a caper involving Evar Méndez (editor of Martín Fierro), Marechal, and others: they barged in carrying Norah Lange on a chair stolen from a nearby café, noisily went downstairs, and broke up a poetry recital in progress (Andrés 23–4).
137 The cult of the metaphor is typical of ultraísmo, the avant-garde poetics brought by Borges to Argentina in the early 1920s. The first and fourth principle of this poetics, as theorized by Borges, were “the reduction of lyric poetry to its primordial element: the metaphor”; “the synthesis of two or more images in one, which thus enlarges the scope of suggestivity” (Salas, Estudio preliminar viii). Borges, Marechal, Eduardo González Lanuza, Francisco Luis Bernárdez, and Oliverio Girondo practised ultraísmo.
138 Both lines are from Marechal’s own poetry. The first is from “Poema sin título” (Días como flechas, 1926; OC I, 93–4). The second is from the poem “Elogio,” published in the magazine Caras y Caretas (issue 1446, 19 June 1926; OC I, 476).
139 A slight variant on a line in “Balada para los niños que serán poetas” [Ballad for children who will be poets] in Días como flechas (OC I, 105–6).
140 Navascués (AB 686n) opines that the tunicked pipsqueak parodies Horacio Schiavo (1903–1978), a Catholic poet and friend of Marechal.
141 Boedo is a working-class street whose name was informally adopted by a group of 1920s leftist writers who considered literature to be a form of social and political engagement, as opposed to the rival Florida group, whose literary concerns were with avant-garde aestheticism. The dyad Boedo-Florida has been argued over for decades in Argentina, with no absolute consensus as to who belonged to which group – or even if the division into two rival movements has any validity. Borges, in a gesture typical of him, simply denied the existence of any Boedo group as such. Marechal, in later life, said several times (according to Horacio Salas) that the Boedo-Florida polemic was “almost an invention” designed to generate publicity (Salas, Memoria 231). Recently, Ojeda Bär and Carbone have postulated a “Third Zone,” whose writers fluctuated between the two groups without belonging to either (Ojeda 26–8). But see also Candiano and Peralta’s excellent book Boedo (2007), subtitled a “History of the First Cultural Movement of the Argentine Left.”
142 Erato: in Greek mythology, the Muse of love poetry.
143 Juan Moreira (see 649n28).
144 Barranca abajo [Down the Ravine] (1905), a tragic drama, is the best-known work of Uruguayan playwright Florencio Sánchez (1875–1910).
145 Juan José (1895) a tragic melodrama with a social message by Spanish writer Joaquín Dicenta Benedicto (1862–1917); Barcia (900n) notes that the play was popular in 1920s Buenos Aires.
146 Spanish translation of La cena delle beffe (1909; The Jesters’ Supper) by Italian writer Sem Benelli (1877–1949), a melodrama set in Renaissance Florence and immensely popular in Italy, France, England, the United States, and apparently in Buenos Aires, where a Spanish translation was published in 1925.
147 Teatro Astral, located at 1630 Corrientes Avenue in Buenos Aires, specializing in review theatre of mass appeal.
148 Terpsichore: in Greek mythology, the Muse of dance.
149 Thalia: in Greek mythology, the Muse of comedy and idyllic poetry.
150 As Navascués (AB 690n) recalls, the False Thalia’s recipe parodically condenses Alberto Vacarezza’s celebrated formula for the sainete. In his La comparsa se despide (1932) [The Boys in the Band Say Goodbye], a character explains it in lunfardo-laced language to a North American tourist: “Poca cosa: / un patio de conventiyo, / un italiano encargado, / un yoyega retobado, / una percanta, un vivillo. / Dos malevos de cuchillo, / un chamuyo, una pasión, / choques, celos, discusión, / desafío, puñalada, / aspamento, disparada, / auxilio, cana y telón” (Néstor Pinsón, “Alberto Vacarezza.” Todo Tango online). [Nothing to it: a tenement building courtyard, / an Italian superintendent, / a riled-up Galician, / a broad, a wise guy. / Two hoodlums with blades, / conversation, passion, / conflict, jealousy, argument, / challenge, knife-thrust, / hand-wringing, flight, / help, cop, and curtain] (my translation).
151 Cf. Marechal’s poem “A Belona” [To Bellona] in the third edition in 1944 of Odas para el hombre y la mujer (first edition, 1929), as noted by Navascués (AB 692n). The Roman goddess of war was a motif in Marechal’s work of the mid-40s; also from that period is an unpublished play, Muerte y epitafio de Belona, consulted by Navascués at the Fundación Leopoldo Marechal, whose plot is similar to the story told by the Man with the Intellectual Eyes, though with variations. Moreover, the goddess Bellona is a character in La púrpura de la rosa (1701), the first opera composed and mounted in the New World in Lima, Peru (music by Tomás de Torrejón, based on a comedy by Spanish Golden Age playwright Calderón de la Barca).
152 Navascués (AB 692n) perceptively observes that the playwright’s devotional remembrance of Bellona parallels the artistic transformation of Solveig by Adam Buenosayres. The two relationships – Bellona and her adoring husband, Solveig and her adoring poet/suitor Adam – invite comparative analysis. See also Cheadle, “Teoría de la violencia en Adán Buenosayres.”
153 “Guest of stone” translates convidado de piedra, a phrase coined by Tirso de Molina’s El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra [The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest] (1630); the famous play of the Spanish Golden Age is the first literary rendering of the Don Juan myth. In Tirso’s play, the “guest of stone” is the ghost (incarnate in his mortuary statue) of Don Gonzalo, father of one of Don Juan’s female conquests. Don Juan kills the father in an altercation, and later mockingly invites him to dinner. The statue, or convidado de piedra, unexpectedly shows up at dinner and drags Don Juan off to hell.
154 The three women, long before their literary antecedent in the witches in Macbeth, can be traced to the Erinyes (“the avengers”) of classical mytho
logy. Both Barcia (911n) and Navascués (AB 697n) invoke Aeschylus’s tragedy The Eumenides [The Furies] (final play of the Oresteia trilogy). Navascués plausibly traces the green fly to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mouches (1943), given that Marechal’s personal library contains a book of Sartre’s theatre in Spanish translation.
155 Comrade Friedrich is probably Engels (1820–1895), Karl Marx’s collaborator, but it may also be clumsy allusion to Nietzsche (1844–1900), whose summary dismissal of religion was notorious. Later in this episode Samuel sarcastically invokes Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and the superman.
156 Navascués (AB 780n) fnds here an allusion to Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827), who theorized the material origins of the universe.
157 The notions of “sufficient reason” and “thing in itself” are from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781).
158 Argentine intellectuals, as usual, were precocious in their uptake of theosophy in the late nineteenth century. With early adherents such as Leopoldo Lugones, Alfredo Palacios, and José Ingenieros, the movement was culturally very influential. Theosophy’s challenge to organized religion was felt as a threat by the Argentine Catholic Church.
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