R.I.P.
Then we all made our way back to the City of the Tobiano Mare.4
In the days that followed, I read two manuscripts that Adam Buenosayres had entrusted to me at his death: The Blue-Bound Notebook and Journey to the Dark City of Cacodelphia. Both works struck me as so extraordinary that I resolved to have them published, confident that they would find a place of honour in Argentine literature. But I later realized those strange pages would not be fully understood by the public without some account of who their author and protagonist was, so I took it upon myself to sketch out a likeness of Adam Buenosayres. At first I had in mind a simple portrait, but then it occurred to me to show my friend in the flow of his life. The more I recalled his extraordinary character, the epic figures cut by his companions, and above all the memorable exploits I had witnessed back in those days, the more the novelistic possibilities expanded before my mind’s eye. I decided on a plan of five books, in which I would present my Adam Buenosayres from the moment of his metaphysical awakening at number 303 Monte Egmont Street until midnight of the following day, when angels and demons fought over his soul in Villa Crespo, in front of the Church of San Bernardo, before the still figure of Christ with the Broken Hand.5 Then I would transcribe The Blue-Bound Notebook and Journey to the Dark City of Cacodelphia as the sixth and seventh books of my tale.
The first pages were written in Paris in the winter of 1930. A deep spiritual crisis later made me drop everything, including literary activity. Fortunately, and just in time, I understood that I was not called to the difficult path of the Perfect Ones.6 And so, to humble the proud ambitions I once held, I turned again to the old pages of my Adam Buenosayres, albeit listlessly, penitentially. But since penance sometimes bears unexpected fruit, my faint interest gathered a new momentum that carried me through to the end, despite the setbacks and misfortunes that impeded its progress.
I publish it now, still torn between my hopes and fears. Before this prologue ends, I must warn my reader that the novelistic devices of the work, strange as they may seem, are all employed to the end of rendering Adam Buenosayres with rigorous accuracy, and not out of vain desire for literary originality. Moreover, the reader will readily ascertain that, in both the poetic and comic registers, I have remained faithful to the tone of Adam Buenosayres’s Notebook as well as his Journey. One final observation: some of my readers may identify certain characters or even recognize themselves. If so, I will not hypocritically claim that this is due to mere coincidence but will accept the consequences: well do I know that, no matter where they are placed in Schultz’s Inferno and no matter what their antics in my five books, the characters in this tale all rise to “heroic stature”; and if some of them appear ridiculous, they do so with grace and without dishonour, by virtue of that “angelic wit” (as Adam Buenosayres called it) that can make satire, too, a form of charity, if performed with the smile that the angels don, perhaps, in the face of human folly.
L.M.
BOOK ONE
Chapter 1. The little white kerchief
I offered you,
embroidered with my hair.1
Temperate and blithe are the autumn days in the witty and graceful city of Buenos Aires, and splendid was the morning on that twenty-eighth of April. Ten o’clock had just struck. Wide awake and gesticulating beneath the morning sun, the Great Capital of the South was a gaggle of men and women who fought shrieking for control over the day and the earth. Rustic reader, were you graced with birdlike powers and had you from your soaring flight cast your sparrow’s gaze o’er the burgh, I know that your loyal porteño breast would have swollen, obedient to the mechanics of pride, before the vision laid out below. Booming black ships, moored in the harbour of Santa María de los Buenos Aires,2 were tossing up onto her piers the industrial harvest of two hemispheres, the colours and sounds of four races, the iodine and salt of seven seas. Other tall and solemn vessels, their holds chock-a-block with the plant, animal, and mineral wealth of our hinterland, were setting sail in the eight watery directions amid the keening farewells of naval sirens. If from there you’d followed the Riachuelo3 upstream to the refrigeration plants, you’d have seen the young bulls and fat heifers jostling out of crammed holding-pens and bellowing in the sun as they waited for the blow between the horns, the deft knife of the slaughterman that would offer a sacrificial hecatomb to the world’s voracity. Orchestral trains entered the city, or departed for the woods of the north, the vineyards of the west, the Virgilian central plains, and the bucolic pastures of the south. From industrial Avellaneda to Belgrano,4 the metropolis was girded with a belt of belching smokestacks that scrawled wrathful sentences by Rivadavia or Sarmiento5 across the manly sky. Murmurs of weights and measures, the clink of cash registers, voices and gestures clashing like weapons, heels in flight: all these seemed the very pulse of the throbbing city. Here the bankers of Reconquista Street drove the mad wheel of Fortune; there the engineers as grave as Geometry contemplated new bridges and roads for the world. Buenos Aires in motion was laughing; Industry and Commerce were leading her by the hand.
But whoa there, reader! Hold your horses, rein in your lyricism, come down from the lofty heights into which my sublime style has launched you. Descend with me to the neighbourhood of Villa Crespo, in front of number 303 Monte Egmont Street. There’s Irma, vigorously sweeping the sidewalk and wailing the first lines of “El Pañuelito.” She stops short and leans on her broom, dishevelled and hot, an eighteen-year-old witch. Her sharp ears tune in the sounds of the city in a single chord: the Italian construction workers’ song, the hammering from the garage named La Joven Cataluña,6 the caterwauling of fat women arguing with the vegetable grocer Alí, the grandiloquence of Jewish blanket vendors, the clamour of boys tearing around after a ragball.7 Then, confirmed in her exalted morning mood, she takes up her song once more:
It was for you,
but you’ve forgotten it.
Soaked in tears,
I have it with me.8
Adam Buenosayres awoke as though returning. Irma’s song hooked him out of deep sleep, pulling him up through fragmented scenes and evanescent ghosts. But after a moment the thread of the music broke off, and Adam fell back down into the depths, surrendering to the delicious dissolution of death. Local deities of Villa Crespo, my tough and happy fellow citizens! Old harpies writhing like gargoyles for no reason at all; tough guys crooning tangos or whistling rancheras; demon kids flying the team colours of River Plate or the Boca Juniors;9 bellicose coachmen twisting on their padded seats as they hummed a tune northward, hurled a curse southward, shouted catcalls to the east and threats to the west! But above all, you, my neighbourhood girls, duets of tapping heels and laughter, suburban muses with or without the rasping voice of Carriego the poet!10 Surely if the girls had climbed the stairs to number 303 and looked in on Adam Buenosayres’s room, our hero’s presence would have moved them to generous silence. Especially had they known that, with his back turned against the new day, defector from the violent city, fugitive from the light, he forgot himself in sleep and in forgetfulness cured his pains — for our protagonist is already fatally wounded, and his agony will be the subtle thread running through the episodes of my novel. Unfortunately, Monte Egmont Street knew nothing of this. And Irma, who wouldn’t have scrupled to rouse Ulysses himself as long as she could sing, launched into the second verse with verve: