Leopoldo Marechal - Adam Buenosayres

I got there in plenty of time and sat down on a stone bench beside a giant magnolia tree. Suddenly, I recall, a vague dread came over me as I imagined the woman of Saavedra soon coming along that very path, its sand crunching beneath her feet. The effects of her first revelation were too present in my memory for me not to fear now the effects of a second revelation. When I imagined her recognizing me, even talking to me, my turmoil reached such a pitch that I got up and took a few steps in flight. But I returned to my bench of stone and, from that moment forward, oblivious of my surroundings, I kept my eyes on the path’s most distant point where she would rise like the dawn. My heart had begun to beat frantically, its drumbeats intensifying as the moment of truth approached. All of a sudden, the magnificent dawn broke. A youthful horde came up the sun-drenched earthen steps of the slope: bright girlish eyes, hair blowing in the breeze, mercurial bodies beneath dresses, tinkling laughter, voices hoisted aloft, the whole spring-like avalanche passed vertiginously before me. In vain did I seek the face of The One amid the flushed faces, her body among the bodies, her voice among the voices: The One was not there, she had not come.

When I came back to myself, night was falling: a chill exhalation from the garden made my body shudder, and I heard the sparrows up in the magnolia tree chattering their goodnight to the fallen sun. I was alone. Around me, the desolation of the earth seemed to well upward as the sky filled out with a multitude of stars. But the solitude of my soul exceeded that of the earth, so much so that I pitied myself; and I would have wept upon the dunes of my own desert, had there remained anything in me capable of crying. I looked into my being for the image of The One, and the desert answered me; I tried to recover at least my mind and my will, but neither responded. To be sure, The One was no longer within me; but neither was I, being outside myself instead. Where? The truth came to me then and there, and I received it with a shudder: until that moment I’d believed the woman of Saavedra, in all the empire of her truth, was within me; as it turned out, however, she did not reside within me, but I within her.

I went home to my room, leaving the Barrancas de Belgrano and crossing the city as it noisily set about its night life. There, between the four walls of my jail cell, the light out, I flopped down fully dressed on my unmade bed, closing the useless eyes of my flesh and the useless eyes of my soul. What my being could not attain in waking consciousness, it found in its other existence, in dreams. For it entered a world of tortured images whose true aspect I shall never remember, but in the midst of which my soul must have suffered terrors so lifelike that they passed into my flesh and jolted my body awake. When I sat up, a deep silence reigned all around, but I was still not free of that phantasmagorical imagery. Then, feeling my way in the dark, I walked over to the window and opened it wide: a spectral dawn light was bathing the rooftops of Villa Crespo as far as the eye could see; the stars were dimming in a sky of nickel; the grey bulk of buildings, the blurry outline of trees, the slow resurrection of colour, the entire old world once again waking up before my eyes exuded at that hour at a vague air of fatigue, an indefinable taste of death. I recall that an early bird, hidden in the paradise trees in the street, croaked two or three broken notes, as if it too were bewailing the fatigue of the world. Then I closed my window and drew the curtains. Having restored my room to nighttime, I went back to bed, longing for silence and oblivion. Upon my eyelids fell a long dreamless sleep, merciful simulacrum of death.

After that afternoon, and for quite a few days, I was in a singular state of absence, severely arid, though without fits or anxieties. Distanced from The One and absent from myself, I was but a double solitude. I felt like someone living in another heart, a heart in exile; and that someone knew not how to revoke his exile along with that of the absent heart. I was looking for the woman of Saavedra, unaware I was seeking for her, because in my being there was no glimmer of understanding. And that search was but an unconscious will to be; for to find The One meant to find myself, and finding her and finding myself would be resolved in a single act. My aimless wandering would sometimes bring me, as though in a dream state, to the house in Saavedra, on whose threshold I would suddenly stir up some inchoate emotion. There, beside the wrought-iron gate, oblivious to the mildness of the season and the evening bliss, I would nevertheless enter a state of unease, which, resembling life, reanimated my being for a few short minutes. Then, clinging to the sweet thought of her closeness, I meditated on The One, mentally associating her with the things of her daily world, with the sidewalk to her house, the little paths through her garden, the threshold of her door, the worn-out brass door-knocker, with everything that still retained, no doubt, the trace of her footstep, the warmth of her hand. In gathering up at least the vestiges of the presence so thoroughly denied me, my heart revived, if only for a moment, until it came time to go back home, when each step I took away from The One was, irremediably, another step away from myself.

XI

But at last came a red-letter afternoon I shall never forget. I still do not know if that friend who inititated me into the Saavedra tertulias had read the secret of my soul. I only know that by his side, one early afternoon, I crossed the threshold of the house, quivering, and stopped short as though stepping into a land both desired and feared. True, the grace of the garden had already been revealed to my eyes on their first encounter with The One; but then so great had been the work of my solitude and so deceitful the labour of my fantasy, that now my eyes, turned toward the garden, comtemplated it afresh as if for the first time. Moreover, glimpsed through the fence over the course of many nights, the garden had to my furtive eyes assumed the dimensions of an inaccessible province or the profile of a forbidden coast viewed by a mariner from afar: no wonder, then, my knees wobbled on crossing the threshold and my steps came to a halt before the world newly on display. But the voice of the friend waiting at my side infused me with courage, and we entered the garden on a path passing among new flowers. I walked as in a dream, with no fear or anxiety at all, weak and jubilant like someone recently brought back to life who marvels at all the things of the earth. When a turn in the path took us behind the house, I stopped, holding my friend back with my hand: there lay the garden in its full amplitude; and, mistress of that luminous domain, a Woman was coming to meet us.

She moved slowly forward, beneath a sun perpendicular to the earth: her body, without shadow, had the firm fragility of a branch, a sort of combative force in her lightness, a terrible audacity in her decorum. She wore a sky-blue dress wrapped round her like a whisp of mist; but the garden, the light, the air, all heaven and earth joined forces and worked to clothe her, so much to be feared was her nakedness. With her face turned to the sun, she showed the two violets of her eyes and the slight arc of her smile; a bee buzzed in circles around her hair. As she walked, her small feet crushed golden sand, seashells, and the carapaces of blue beetles. Her arrival seemed to last an eternity, as if The One came from very far off, across a hundred days and a hundred nights.

Ah, well did I recognize her power in the faintness suffered by my heart at every step she took! And I recognized too the admirable virtue with which she remedied that effect on me, when she finally came up to us and extended the double bridge of her voice and her hand. I was hearing her for the first time, and to my ears her words took on a resonance that was new and nonetheless ancient: hers was a morning voice, of the same family as other morning voices that once upon a time, back in Maipú, had spirited me out of childish frights and nightmares. And, certainly, it was a joyous awakening after the phantasmagoria of dreams possessing me, thanks to the charm of her voice and the brush of her hand — warm, dry and golden as a spike of wheat: a rekindled strength, boldness trying its wings, allowed me to face without flinching the Woman so long contemplated in my mind.