Leopoldo Marechal - Adam Buenosayres

Fearful that people might notice my confusion, I then made an effort to follow what my friend and the women were saying in conversation. But my eyes could not leave The One (who shall henceforth thus be named). She was smiling in silence, as though she did not yet dare let her voice rise among the mature voices of her sisters; and her regard was turned earthward, a felicitous circumstance that allowed me discreetly to gaze upon her in rapt contemplation, my eyes now seeming to discover their true métier. Her youth was not yet in full flower, but rather the whole of her, in my eyes, hinted at a dawn comparable to the moment of first light hesitating at the brink of day. Space was ecstatic in her body’s three dimensions, time delighted in every beat of her heart, and light found sublimation in her entirety. Seeing her, I could not discern what substantial form or what adorable number of creative power had been incarnated in her fragile clay, but I did understand that it was a number brimming over, a form transcending or overflowing into a kind of beauty whose splendour, uncontainable, preceded her like a messenger, followed her like a shadow, and flanked her on the right as her lance, on the left as her shield. Tall and straight beneath the airy dress concealing her, her form seemed ready to sprout, painfully, like the bud of a leaf that swells and breaks and ventures a new lobe. And as I observed that lifeward tension in her being, along with the stature of her grace, I recalled the friend’s poem, which begins thus:

Tall among women now, the girl

wants the name Wind… 6

So well did my friend’s image fit her that, never ceasing to look at her, I repeated in mente the two lines of verse, marvelling at how their meaning was only just then revealed to me. For, if Wind was the name that suited her, so then would her foot be wind and so her hand, when it would eventually rise and come down upon the flower of the soul. And at that thought, my soul quaked, as if intuiting in the woman a new heartache, the prelude of another war.

As the happy rhythm of the tertulia intensifed, so did the tumult in my being. And with my attention divided between the voices coming from outside me and the restless and unsettled voices within me, I resolved to get away from there, wishing to measure in solitude the proportions of that new conflict. So I left the house in Saavedra, and, as in a dream, I covered the distance separating that house from my cloister, its habitual four walls. Immediately upon arrival, my soul, secluded in her intimacy, began to reconstruct the image of The One in all her lines, weights, and colours. So perfect was the reconstruction that my soul again trembled in wonder before the image alone; aware of the nature of her excitation, my soul became fearful because she believed she had already lived it to the point of disillusionment, so that now, rearmed within immobility, she might be free of any new anxiety. That is why my soul pulled back for a moment from the sweetness of that new summons and began to reproach herself for her fragility: “What? After such a long journey, you are going to plunge back into the deceitful river of creatures? Will you again descend into the finitude and danger of earthly love, after having attained the notion of an infinite love?” But the voices of alarm could not gainsay the enchanted vision she bore within her. Instead, revolving around that image, she realized that the more she gazed at it, the more completely her will would surrender to it. Meanwhile, night had fallen upon the earth and was peopling my room with shadows. As I remember, I then opened the two shutters of my window, fell back into an armchair, and began to contemplate the vault of the starry sky, where a crescent moon pretended to sail above the little clouds of silver. The springtime night, its air humid and fragrant as a girl’s breath, brought forth a long-forgotten tremor within me, freshening in some ineffable way the dryness of my soul, as if suddenly inviting her to put forth new buds. From the suburban street a chorus of childish voices wafted up:

Between Saint Peter and Saint John

they built a new boat:

the sails were of silver,

the oars were of steel… 7

Allowing my eyes to wander over the field of stars, I noticed a tenderness from bygone days stealing back into my heart, nudging it along broad roads to benevolence. And on that memorable night so much mercy seemed to rain down from on high that my eyes suddenly filled with tears, not of anguish, as was usually the case, but tears of relief at the peace brought me by the night sky. Attributing such salutary effects to the revelation of The One, I then turned again in imagination to contemplate her; and resuming my soliloquy, I wondered what might be in store for me, what goodness I would find in that mysterious figure of girlhood.

Recalling the episode of that afternoon, I noted first of all that the vision of the woman in Saavedra had suddenly bedazzled me, as happens when one perceives the light of beauty. As I contemplated her image now, it seemed beyond doubt that her beauty alone could be responsible for the dazzling effect. Moreover, I said to myself, there can be no bedazzlement unless some “splendour” causes it, and I remembered that all beauty was defined as a certain “splendour.” Next, I made two parallel observations. On the one hand, I told myself, all splendour implies a source of the resplendence, which raised the question, What was resplendent in The One? Whence the splendour of her beauty? On the other hand, I observed, her beauty did not dazzle my eyes as material light does, but rather my soul as does intelligble light. Now, given that her beauty was a light I attained through my mind, I reasoned, and that the mind is a power that tends toward the truth, then her beauty could be nothing other than the splendour of something true. To be sure, this last conclusion told me very little, for though I was certain her beauty revealed the presence of something true, I was still in ignorance of the truth being revealed to me by The One. And now I understood the double meaning of the word “revelation,” since her beauty raised a corner of the veil that covered her truth and then let it fall again, as if at once wanting and declining to manifest the truth.

But the beauty before me was not a matter for my mind alone, for it also invited my will, through an appeal in the mode of love I knew so well and so distrusted; and, for that to happen, it was necessary that what my mind knew as true must also appear as good to my will. Surely it was one and the same thing, which showed a different aspect, according to which of the soul’s powers were considering it. However, just as I had not uncovered the intimate nature of her truth, neither had the inner nature of her goodness been revealed to me: I only knew that, faced with her image, my mind operated through light, my will through love; and that they did so in a simultaneous act, such that, in contemplating her image, I knew not whether I loved her now because I knew her, or whether I knew her now because I loved her.

Nevertheless, prudence still clamoured within my being, telling me that an equivalent beauty with similar effects had many times inclined me toward deceptive love. But upon evoking my former loves, I recalled that they had been precipitate, lunging headlong toward creatures, whereas now my soul seemed to move with another rhythm in which I observed two movements: one of transport in slow revolutions around the exceedingly sweet woman, my soul surveying and studying the woman with loving care; the other of rotation on my soul’s axis, thanks to which my soul continued in her self-observation, studying herself in the mode and effects of her contemplation.

IX

The next day and the two or three that followed are vivid in my memory, thanks to the delight I experienced, as if I’d just woken up from a frightening dream. I’ve already described, in another part of my Notebook, the desolation my soul had come to know and the sterile flight of my intelligence above its own ruin. I’ll say now that, under the sole influence of the creature revealed in Saavedra, my whole being seemed to surrender to the rhythm of a nascent life and to a feeling of astonishment, a rising-up from ashes. I remember the brand new emotions, the old wariness, and the conflicting ideas; feeling cooped up in my room, I felt driven to go out in search of light and the open air, and took long walks which, far from pacifying the tumult in my heart, only accentuated it. I’ve already said that springtime in Buenos Aires and the woman of my sleepless nights had manifested themselves at the same time; so, during my walks it happened that my soul’s inward euphoria joined the outward elation of the earth, whose fervent awakening goaded creatures onto paths of exaltation. I preferred to walk in humble neighbourhoods, especially the sun-drenched streets of my Villa Crespo. There, the springtime sky, clear and moist, shone like a look of great tenderness. In the foliage of the trees along the streets, a green light heralded the sprouting buds. A prelude of incipient flowers played in intimate gardens and cordial patios. And my eyes, open like never before, devoured the signs of springtime and feasted on the sky’s blueness, round and smooth as a fruit. Everything had meaning: the hot laughter of the children, a woman’s voice in the distance, a bird swaying on a branch, the colour of a stone. Sympathy of some unknown lineage overflowed in my breast before all that was humble and silent: a delicious intelligence of love was one with a desire to press the living sheaf of creatures tightly to my soul.