The truly sane option would be to ignore the calls from the outside, like Rose of Lima!27 In suspense and terror, Adam had read the story about her battle against the world, about how that rose had imposed a progressive self-destruction upon her mortal coil. One midnight, upon closing the gloomy book and resorting to the never idle loom of his imagination, Adam had evoked the image of Rose in her torture chamber. She had erected a cross in her room where she crucified herself in imitation of her adored Lover, the pain of her cracked sinews and wracked bones affirming the heaviness of flesh which, slight though hers was, had not yet overcome the law of its misery. On her bowed head, through hair that had once been so beautiful, the spikes of her metal crown raked new blood from old scabs. Her gaze fell inert upon the strewn rubble and broken glass that served as her bed, the one she had chosen for her conjugal bliss. Thus did Rose keep her vigil in the deep night of America. Perhaps sounds from the big house filtered into her room — her father’s laboured breathing, her mother’s muttered reproaches, even in dreams, against her daughter’s heavenly folly, or the sighs of her sisters as they dreamed, no doubt, about love affairs. But she paid them no heed, absorbed as she was in her task of annihilation: she was destroying the self within her, so that she might reconstruct that self in the Other. Such was the work of her needle, an embroidery in blood…
The violent clatter of falling objects in the study wrenched him from his abstractions. Adam heard Irma let fly the stoutest, most energetic obscenity of them all. But a human howl from the next room cut her short:
— Infernal womaaan!
He recognized the voice of Samuel Tesler and heard the philosopher’s fist hit the wall three times to demand Adam’s testimony and solidarity against Irma’s excesses. “The Bachante has awakened Koriskos,”28 observed Adam. “Koriskos is right, the Bachante’s at fault.” So he answered with the required three fist-blows. Instantly the philosopher’s cursing voice folded into itself, a decaying wind that sputtered out among soft sleepy grumblings. Still attentive yet to the other’s murmurs, Adam Buenosayres heroically left his berth and went to open the window wide, letting a torrent of light into the room. Then, faithful to the venerable custom of lyric poets, he returned to bed and gave himself over to breathing the strong autumn air. The aroma of paradise no longer wafted up from the trees on Monte Egmont Street, as on that barbaric spring day with Irma (Adam had said her eyes were just like two mornings together, maybe he’d even kissed her). Now instead came the breath of autumn, heavy with seed, the pungence of dead leaves. Better, though, was the scent of white roses, for they would speak to him always of Solveig. That afternoon he had watched her bend down in the shade of the greenhouse among the roses — they were practically drunk on the smell — and she too was a snow-white rose, a rose of damp velvet; her voice, so moist and clear in timbre, seemed akin to water, the water in the well back in Maipú, when a stone fell in and drew forth secret music. Alone in the flower nursery, they were brought closer together than ever, up against their great opportunity and their inevitable risk. Adam, as he stood by her side, suddenly felt the birth of a grief that would never leave him, as though that moment of supreme closeness opened between them an irremediable distance, as with two stars whose ultimate degree of proximity coincides with the first of their separations. The grotto-like light did not at all undermine the integrity of forms, but rather exalted them prodigiously. The form of Solveig Amundsen became painfully vivid, imbued with a plenitude that made him tremble with anxiety, as though so much grace sustained by such a weak frame suddenly revealed the risk of its fragility. Once again the admonitory drums of night had begun to beat, and before his hallucinated gaze Solveig withered and fell among the pale roses that were as mortal as she.
Adam lowered his eyelids: how sore those poor eyes! If one abused the night, demanded everything from its dominion, then it burned like black oil ravaging eyelids that tried in vain to close. The morning after, daylight was like alcohol on the inflamed lids. “Could it be that he was a night spirit, kin to ominous birds, insects with phosphorescent rear-ends, and witches that rode meek broomsticks?” No, because his soul, diurnal, was daughter to her father, the sun of intelligibility. “If this was so, then why did he live by night?” He haunted the night because, in his era, the torch of daytime incited a war without laurels; it raped silence, it scourged holy stillness. Daytime was external like skin, active like the hand, sweaty as armpits, loud-mouthed and prolific in falsehood. Male by sex, daytime was a young, hairy-chested hero. He shied away from the light of day because it pushed him toward the temptation of material fortune, induced the anxiety to possess useless objects, as well as other unhealthy desires: to be a politician, boxer, singer, or gunman. “And the night?” Colourless, odourless, insipid as water, nighttime nevertheless got him as high as good wine. Silence-loving, the night nonetheless kindled the dawn of difficult voices and deep calls which the day with its trombones drowns out. Antipode of light, night made the tiny stars visible. Destroyer of prisons, she favoured escape. Field of truce, she facilitated union and reconciliation. Female who healed, refreshed and stimulated, she lay with man and conceived a son called sleep, the gracious image of death.
And yet, the night could weigh heavily when finally one wanted to sleep and could not. His big, childish eyes wide open at midnight back in Maipú, when insomnia initiated him — oh, so young! — into the mysteries of his nocturnal vocation! And that “journey to silence” through the “jungle of sounds” he’d invented to fall asleep, that trip he used to take in the fitful nights of his childhood! His traveller’s ear hit its first obstacle in the dogs’ barking at the moon as it rose or set. Further along he heard sheep shuffling in their pens, or some cow lowing its insomnia, or a restless horse scratching itself against the palisade. Further still, he came upon the swampy music of creepy-crawlers, their tiny glass guitars or water-crystal violins tinkling over the marsh. At a greater distance he heard a train perforate the night. Then something strange, like a conversation among distant roosters (Lugones’s “telepathic” cocks29), or the sound of the earth turning on its axis. At last, pure silence, healing silence would fill his ears, become song, then lullaby; for silence is the beginning and end of all music, just as white is the beginning and end of all colour. Such had been his childhood! And there it stayed, in the ringing woods of Maipú: howling werewolves would chase it among the night sounds — O adventure!
And once upon a time… Adam was in his little bed, his ear pressed to the very heart of the night, when suddenly he told himself that the earth would explode willy-nilly before you could count to ten. “One, two, three, four,” he counted, hands clenched; “five, six, seven” and he held his breath; “eight, nine… Nothing! For now!”
Or he would imagine his mother had died: he’s dressed in his Sunday best, crying beside the black wooden coffin — alas! — black wood, with bronze handles. His weeping isn’t loud and showy, oh no; his are the silent tears of a brave little soldier. There’s a strong smell of funeral candles, burning wax, and charred wicks, while he — poor child! — bids his mother farewell, peering into the coffin at her for the last time, before the solderers arrive — oh! — those men who seal up lead boxes with steel soldering-irons. Around him, wrapped in light-coloured clothing, the grownup women of his neighbourhood are hovering, and ancient women with great black shawls caress his cheek with hands smelling of old rags or mice or venerable yellowed papers. In the patio, men stand around talking about death, while others seated in the parlour speak of life, as all the while the mate gourd passes from hand to hand, its bombilla gurgling… ah, how the bombilla used to gurgle in those happy times! His classmates from third grade are gaping at him, dying to know what a kid is like whose mom just died. Among them, his seatmate María Esther Silvetti; and maybe he’d give her a peck on the forehead since they’re already boyfriend and girlfriend, have exchanged notes declaring themselves so. But how far from his mind is all that now! Adam looks only at his mother’s face, bathed in a cold sweat that others are drying with soft cloths, and at her hands, which had caressed, darned, combed, knotted his tie — poor, sad, tireless hands. And his sobbing always grows more disconsolate over those hands, and Adam is at the centre of all those compassionate voices… Suddenly, returning to reality, he would hear, from over there in her bed, his mother’s slow, harmonious breathing, and would realize his drama was only imaginary. And yet his tears really did flow when a hundred harsh voices accused him in the darkness: “Monster!” “There’s the kid who gets a kick out of imagining his own mother’s death!” “He imagines his mother’s death so that everybody will feel sorry for him and admire him!”