A bird sang a sad song,
my sweet darling,
when you left me.11
His head tossing and turning on the pillow, Adam Buenosayres’s figure traced a vast gesture of denial. Against his will he was surfacing again, uprooting himself from the phantasmagorical universe that surrounded and hemmed him in. Smoky faces, silent voices, and vague hand gestures faded away below. One face, his grandfather Sebastián’s, was still calling out to him, but it dissolved like the others, in zones of stupor, in delicious depths. Adam hit the rock-bottom certainty of this world and said aloud:
— Too bad!
He half opened his eyes; through the lashes he sensed the darkness thinning, an inchoate clarity, a hint of light filtering through the dense curtain. Before Adam’s eyes, in the illegible chaos filling the room, colours started gathering and pushing each other aside, and lines began to attract or repel one another. Each object sought its sign12 and materialized after a quick, silent war. As on its first day, the world sprang forth from love and hate (Hail, old Empedocles!13), and the world was a rose, a pomegranate, a pipe, a book. Caught between the call of sleep still tugging at his flesh and the claims of the world already stuttering its first names, Adam looked askance at the three pomegranates on the clay plate, the wilted rose in the wineglass, and the half-dozen pipes lying on his work table. I’m the pomegranate! I’m the pipe! I’m the rose! they seemed to shout, proudly declaiming their differences. And therein lay their guilt (Hail, old Anaximander!14): they had broken with what primordially was undifferentiated; they had deserted the blissful Unity.
Adam felt a bitter taste on his tongue — not just the fleshy one, but on the mother tongue of his soul as well — as he watched the parodic genesis unfold in his room. Like a god in the mood for cataclysms, Adam shut his eyes again, and the universe of his room returned to nothingness. “Blast it all, anyway!” he grumbled, imagining the dissolution of the rose, the annihilation of the pomegranate, the atomic explosion of the pipe. Perhaps on merely closing his eyes, the city outside as well had vanished. And the mountains would have faded away, the oceans evaporated, the stars fallen like figs from a tree shaken by its maker… “Hell’s bells!” said Adam to himself. Alarmed, he opened his eyes, and the world put itself back together with the meticulous exactitude of a jigsaw puzzle. He would have to give up his midnight readings of the Book of Revelation! Its terrible images of destruction kept him wide awake, then dogged him in dreams, and left him the next morning with an obscure sense of foreboding. Now more than ever, he needed to keep a weather eye on what was happening in his soul, ever since the drums of the penitential night had beaten for him. It wouldn’t do to succumb to a childish dread of geneses and catastrophes. The truth was that when his eyes were closed (and Adam shut them once again), the rose, for example, was not obliterated at all. On the contrary, the flower lived on within his mind, which was now thinking it; and it lived a lasting existence, free of the corruption tainting the rose outside. For the rose being thought was not this or that rose, but all roses that had ever been and could be in this world: the flower bound by its abstract number, the rose emancipated from autumn and death. Thus if he, Adam Buenosayres, were eternal, so too the rose in his mind, even if all the roses out there were abruptly to perish and never bloom again. “Blessèd is the rose!” Adam said to himself. To live, as the rose, eternally in another, and for the eternity of the Other!
Adam Buenosayres opened his eyes for good. When things insisted on their irrevocable sign, he dejectedly saluted: “Good morning, planet Earth!” He wasn’t yet ready to break the stillness of his supine body; it would have been a concession to the new day, which he resisted with all the weight of his dead will. But from Monte Egmont Street the new day reminded him again of its dominion: “Goal! Goal!” howled ten children’s voices in victory. “Foul! Foul!” roared ten others in protest. The clash of quick battle was heard, then peace being negotiated among insults and laughter, then kids tearing around again as they resumed their game. Afterward, when the uproar of the dust-up had settled down to the level of the ambient street noise, Adam picked out the acrid voice of his landlady, Doña Francisca, cackling reproaches, growling offers, belching disdain as she beleaguered the grocer Alí. “Two hundred pounds of belligerent fat,” thought Adam, recalling her mountainous udders. He imagined the ecstatic figure of Alí standing by his vegetable cart and listening without hearing, absorbed instead by some memory of patient oriental markets.
A repeat of yesterday, Adam was thinking. And tomorrow it will be the same scene all over again. It chilled him to think of this flightless reality that endlessly returned, day in day out, inevitable and monotonous as the ticking of a clock. He turned over in bed, and melancholy springs moaned deep in its guts. “The day is like a trained bird,” reflected Adam. “It comes into the world every twelve hours, at the same spot on the globe, and bores us with its eternal song and dance. Or it’s like a pedantic schoolmaster with his sun hat and his primer of stale knowledge — This is the rose, this is the pomegranate.” With a start, he remembered that he too was a teacher. Thirty-two pairs of listless eyes would soon be peering at him from behind their desks. “Shall I go to school?” he asked in his soul. He recalled the damp building, the principal’s saturnine face, and decadent countenances of the pedagogues, and Adam resolved in his souclass="underline" “I won’t go to school!” This is the rose, he then mused. No! The rose was Solveig Amundsen,15 no matter what the day said. The memory returned of that last afternoon in the big, rambling house in Saavedra. That empty hopeless feeling and the sting of humiliation were mellowing into something like nostalgia for a cherished impossibility. In Solveig Amundsen’s garden, already wilting with autumn, Lucio Negri (the quack doctor!) had stood before the earnest young girls and fervently preached “mental hygiene,” deeming it all the more desirable in “the Amundsen madhouse,” as the place was quite reasonably dubbed. No doubt about it, Lucio Negri had taken advantage of the chance absence of the four brightest lights of the tertulia — the astrologer Schultz, Franky Amundsen, Samuel Tesler, and the pipsqueak Bernini — who hadn’t showed up that day. Lucio had chosen his moment deliberately, of course. Solveig was present among the girls, and Adam was sitting beside her in his role as poet without apparent prospects. At Adam’s rejoinder, that charlatan of a doctor reproached the poet by quoting Adam’s own verses:
Love more joyous
than a child’s funeral.16
The girls had laughed at his metaphor, then stared in distress and incredulity at Adam, and laughed again in chorus — their pigeon breasts stuffed with laughter! But Solveig Amundsen shouldn’t have laughed with the other girls. Maybe she wouldn’t have, if she’d known that her laughter would detonate the collapse of a poetic construction and the ruin of an ideal Solveig. “I’ll have to take her my Blue-Bound Notebook,” said Adam to himself without much hope. As for Lucio Negri, how could he understand why a child’s funeral is joyful? Adam beckoned a memory from childhood — back there, in Maipú17 — evoking the little house on the hill, at night, and the dead child propped up in his little chair beneath smoking candles, the flash of sequins on his tunic, the little gold-foil wings his mother had sewn to his shoulders. The parody of an angel, true! But the angel’s eyes looked out no more. Two cotton swabs in his nostrils contained the incipient stench of rotting flesh. Green flies crawled across his powdered cheeks. Outdoors, however, guitars and accordions were making merry. Sugared mate and gin were doing the rounds. Lead-footed dancers stumbled, and furtive couples wandered off among thistles into the night (Adam understood later!), perhaps moved by the obscure urge to prolong the painful yearning of the generations with their hot blood. The drunken guitarist sang: