Leopoldo Marechal - Adam Buenosayres

Sweet bygone memories, lost flavours! The Personage’s chest swelled, and Schultz and I had to hold him down, one on each side, to prevent him flying away on us.

— Needless to say, I was no longer welcome at Raphael’s house. But I still had my brother José Antonio’s home to visit. Let me describe it now in a few words. While economics prevailed at Raphael’s place, political and social ambition found ample accommodation at José Antonio’s. The matron of the house was the proverbial “capable wife,” sharp-faced and calculating, warm or cold as suited her purpose. Consumed by the fever of ambition, she was at once laudable and odious. She had laid out her children’s destinies a priori : from birth, each had been consigned to such-and-such an administrative post and marriage with so-and-so. That lady held in her hands the threads of what-was-to-be, of fortunes, illustrious family names, and testamentary labyrinths; she spun and interwove them wisely, like an inexorable domestic Goddess of Fate. Her home was an incubator of personages whose future held no unknowns, their mother having foreseen every last detail down to their famous dying words. Now, gentlemen, its disconcerting abundance notwithstanding, reality has a certain symmetry; I point this out in advance, lest you hold it against me upon hearing the story of my niece Victoria.

”In that mansion solely inhabited by algebraic destinies, Victoria seemed to be an independent force, a tuft of life disentangled from the maternal distaff: a late sprout from an apparently withered tree… Damn it all! This last bit is from Song in the Blood . Excuse me, gentlemen — a reminiscence. As I was saying, Victoria was to her home what Germán had been to his; and if marriage between blood relatives were not abhorrent to me, I would surely have seen them wed. Fool that I am, I actually imagined such a union, forgetting that no one in José Antonio’s family married otherwise than to the “name” assigned him or her in my sister-in-law’s Book of Life! And the name allotted to Victoria was that of Baron Hartz, a character of Semitic features, gold-filled teeth, oily complexion, and receding hairline, whose fortune was as large as it was mysterious. Not without feeling my blood stir in instinctive rebellion, I watched as he set up camp in their house. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do in the drama (which would probably ensue), short of taking a pair of scissors and cutting the thread of sister-in-law Lachesis, an act I judged to be as impossible as snatching someone’s destiny from the Fate Herself. Moreover, Victoria showed no sign of worry. She had my father’s strong chin, my grandfather’s reserved character, and the dangerous self-confidence typical of our blood-line, for good or ill. One night I discovered her secret. I came upon her in a bar accompanied by a strapping young fellow to whom she breezily introduced me. He was an agronomic engineer with a blond brush-cut, green eyes, and an innocent face reminiscent of those facial types in northern Italy, half German and half Latin. The crazy fellow talked to me all night about mineral fertilizers, artificial insemination in cows, and Shorthorn sperm in vacuum flasks to be delivered to zones where the quality of cattle was poor. Listening to his scientific rave, I wondered what the heck Victoria found seductive in that big squarehead. But when I saw them rowing in El Tigre, 89their oarstrokes in unison, united in song, I realized it was serious and began to worry. Without quite knowing how, I got caught up in their romantic idyll. Some obscure fatality seemed to link me to those two, the only ones left in my lineage who were still wild at heart! In any event, if they were Love, I was the Elegy who by their side was already weeping the death of their romance. Let the children go ahead and spin their hopelessly frail cobweb! Not far off, in the city, a woman with greedy eyes was turning the symbolic distaff!

”These and other metaphors of the same ilk came to me as I watched the two lovers. And I pathetically fondled these figures of speech — sad, lonely old romantic that I was! — not suspecting that circumstances would soon expel me from my comfortable spot in the Greek chorus and throw me as an actor onto centre stage. At last the drama reached its crisis. It was a warm and marvellous evening in October… No, sorry! Damned literature! What I meant was, that evening at José Antonio’s they were to announce Victoria’s engagement to Baron Hartz. Pleading an imaginary indisposition, I excused myself from attending a ceremony which I considered (it could hardly be otherwise) the sacrifice of a white dove on the chill altar of Mammon. That night I didn’t leave my apartment. I sat slumped in my armchair, feeling more than ever the weight of my solitude. Reaching for a bottle of Napoleon cognac to fend off the “gnawing worm of melancholy,” I gave myself over to the saddest thoughts. After the first drink, my cogitations becoming downright woeful, there came a tap-tap at my door. I shivered with dread: might it not be Poe’s raven paying me a visit for another dialogue on Love and Death? But I quickly recovered, telling myself that, much as the raven liked to get involved in the love life of poets, it wasn’t likely to butt into that of an agronomic engineer — a subtle idea, and a felicitous one, soon corroborated by a fresh round of knocking. I flung open the door, and there stood Victoria!

”I could not have been more surprised if the raven itself had come in. Carrying an overnight bag, two hatboxes, and a fur coat, her fugitive air made me distinctly uneasy. She told all, with utter insouciance (she had my father’s strong chin, our family’s dangerous audacity!): fifteen minutes earlier, in the guest-filled salon, she had “done her duty” by telling her progenitors that she alone would be responsible for her future. The Goddess of Fate had fainted! Baron Hartz had smiled elegantly, like a gambler who knows how to lose. Consternation and scandal lay in Victoria’s wake. My first impulse was to phone José Antonio, but Victoria snatched the receiver from my hand. Panic-stricken, I quaffed a second cognac and, under my niece’s benevolent gaze, I improvised a sermon about “social conventions” that rang pathetically hollow. Seeing I was getting nowhere, I begged her to understand “my situation”: not long before, on account of another family madman, I had broken with my brother Raphael. But then I had been guided by “the incorruptible interests of literature,” whereas now… I gave up that tack, too, because Victoria, not hearing a word, had fixed her eyes on me, two calm and confident eyes seemingly awaiting a miracle. Exasperated and at the end of my tether, I burst out: “Crazy, knuckleheaded girl! What have I got to do with love? All I’m left with is cold ashes…” Great God, then the miracle came! As though I’d just invoked an old demon, I felt an invisible presence surround me: the breath of the night, coming in through my windows, revived I don’t know what taste of sweet, bygone springtimes. From their portraits hanging in my room, women both adorable and adored seemed to cry out: “Remember when!” Their calls evoked shades of freshness, resonance, and warmth I’d thought long since faded, alas! Heartstrings I’d given up for dead began to thrum. I closed my eyes, as if blinded by a light. Believing it was a dream, I had a third shot of cognac. But voices and music were saying “Remember!”, weeping “Remember!”, laughing “Remember!” All of a sudden an enormous idea flashed through my brain: I shook my head, as though bedazzled, then laughed in my soul, after knocking back my fourth cognac. “Bring on the agronomist!” I told Victoria as laconically as a general. Calm and smiling, as if it had been written for all eternity in God’s good book, Victoria dialled a telephone number. When the brush-head arrived, I dictated my Agenda to them, confirmed it with one last drink from the bottle of Napoleon, and the two of them had to put me to bed.