Leopoldo Marechal - Adam Buenosayres

One night (the third after the encounter), when I was out wandering, either chance or my longing for the woman of my adventure — I still don’t know which — led me to Saavedra. Never had the weight of any night seemed so light as it fell upon my shoulders; nor had Saavedra ever seemed so close to heaven. I was ambling along nocturnal streets, by grates and walls plumed with wisteria, their blossoms caressing my brow and bringing to mind the familiar taste of springtimes that had arisen and fallen back there, in Maipú, or perhaps yonder, in an orchard where angels now stand watch. The night air, sweet as wine, and the silence, disturbed only by rustling leaves or a bird stirring and singing between dreams, made me experience a serenity I had never known before. In that atmosphere my mind no longer worked with a tiresome web of inner words, but rather through a sure intuition of things, arrived at — it seemed — solely by opening the eyes and ears of my soul. I exercised that delicious form of knowing for the first time. And since all that light came to me through the mirror of The One, I began to suspect that a mystery was both hiding her and revealing her: she was hidden in its essence and revealed in its operation.

I cannot say if it was the glimpse of her mystery that made my heart beat faster and slowed my steps as I approached her place of residence. All I know is that when I got close to her garden my knees wobbled and I had to rest against a tree. The garden of The One was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence; among its bars heavy with years, the honeysuckle had woven its thick tangle and built up a fragrant wall between the privacy of the house and the indiscretion of outside eyes. I remember that my hands, plunging into the denseness, managed to break through the wall of leaves and open up a hole, which allowed me to take in the garden cloaked in darkness, in the centre of which rose the solid architecture of the house. I stood watching for a long time: agile silhouettes crossed the luminous rectangular windows; to my ears came the murmur of family conversations that now and then were cut into by the blade of youthful laughter or by abrupt gaps of silence swooping down on the house like birds of prey. If the air circulating round the house seemed lighter, it was no doubt crowned by a more benign sky. At that moment, all my vitality was concentrated in my eyes and ears. They tried to pick up the subtlest pulse of the house, in their desire to catch even a trace of the admirable woman who had been revealed to me in that same garden. How long I stood thus, clinging to the bars like a thief in the night, I do not know: little by little the intimate voices fell silent; one after another the lights in the windows went out. A deep chord was still resonating in the dark, as if some careless hand had suddenly fallen upon the keys of a piano and its vibrations were wandering away into the silence until they were finally lost.

Only then did I abandon my observation post and sit down at the threshold of the house. There I began to think about the feelings my nocturnal espionage had aroused. And above all it amazed me to think that The One moved within a family circle whose eyes beheld her at all hours; they had seen her birth, given her a name by which they called her; they followed her every gesture, but were unaware of her inner essence, such as it had been revealed to me in a brief instant of contemplation. And I asked myself then, in that soliloquy on the threshold: What was it that I saw in The One and others could not see? My answer, as at the first encounter, was that I saw her in her harmonious number, or better, in the set of singing numbers that formed her from head to foot and exalted her above nothingness through the creative virtue of numbers, in the same way that through numbers a piece of music is constructed and sustained within silence. And here I experienced a sudden start: that womanly cipher, that harmonious number, had not sprung from nothingness. How, then, to think about that number without thinking about the mind that had formed it and about the voice that had proferred it?

This return to metaphysics, on a night like that and on such an occasion, provoked a painful movement of rebellion in my spirit: to deduce the First Cause from its effects had always seemed to me a cold and sterile result of logic, incapable of moving the soul according to love. More precisely, the irruption of The One into my dark night had seemed to be announcing to my soul a bright day of liberation, a recompense for my soul’s tribulations. And just at the point when, in thinking about The One, I touched or believed I was touching the ultimate depths of my being, lo and behold, I stopped thinking about her in order to think about an Other, as though the woman of Saavedra were no more than a bridge of silver offered to I knew not what new pilgrimage of my mind. Rebellion and fatigue — that is what I experienced upon finding myself again at the beginning of a journey, just when I thought I’d arrived at quietude through love and at happiness through quietude. But I immediately noticed that the notion of the Other, suggested by the woman of Saavedra, occurred to me not as a result of a laborious process of reasoning but with the ease of an image that is reflected in water, which enamours the eyes of the one who looks at it, and that makes him 8feel the desire to raise his eyes and look around for the original of the copy.

I stood up from the doorstep, my soul filled with an inexpressible commotion. I began to walk slowly down the solitary street, under the canopy of leaves rustling in the breath of the night. Again I raised my eyes to contemplate the immense troop of stars moving slowly across the sky in a sacred adagio; and for the first time my tenderness turned, not to the visible flock, but to the hidden shepherd who guided it from on high. There was in the night a correspondence of signs, or a concert of voices calling one another in recognition, happy just to be, to float for an instant above nothingness. But my heart, which so many times before had savoured such music solely for its musical delight, now refused to hear it and seemed to rise higher, as though, in abstraction from the music, my heart sought the face of the invisible Strummer. And when I understood that this unknown rapture was due only to the virtue of The One, my soul burned like a fragrant leaf and, become smoke, ascended above its own fire.

X

The story of my life is a succession of endings and rebeginnings, of rises and falls alternating with rigorous precision. Since childhood, I have learned to quail, at my peak moments of joy, for the pain whose advent I know to be imminent; every happy Sunday I’ve ever known has been overshadowed by a threatening Monday. Many have been the moments of marvellous rapture, when my soul, like a sharp sparrowhawk, has savoured the atmosphere of great heights; but the hawk has always come back to earth, its beak empty of any living prey. So it is that the soul, between rising and falling, has begun to dream of a flight without return; and that is why, ever since childhood, there is within her an aching voice that cries out for a never-ending Sunday.

The next day, when the euphoria of that night had dissipated, my spirit began to flag and my mind to doubt the value of its conquest. Withdrawing into myself as so many times before, I noticed that poverty and solitude reigned in my being more than ever. Suspecting that perhaps it had all been a game in my imagination, I rebelled against myself and decided to punish my own madness. Then, carefully reviewing the details of my first encounter with the woman of Saavedra, it seemed to me that something substantial remained. Then I became aware of my urgent need to seek her out and to measure in her presence the precise worth of my turmoil. Truth be told, a second encounter did not seem likely: the friend who had taken me to the house in Saavedra was away from Buenos Aires, and I dared not show up there alone, for fear of revealing my secret. Mulling over schemes, which I promptly rejected, and feeling more and more profoundly the need to see her, I finally resolved to provoke a meeting in Barrancas de Belgrano; 9I knew that The One walked through the park with classmates every afternoon on her way home from school.