Leopoldo Marechal - Adam Buenosayres

”The next morning I went to my notary and signed over the title deed to La Rosada. The civil marriage took place at noon, the nuptial blessing late in the afternoon. That night, having got them aboard their train, I told my niece: “La Rosada is growing old, but she’ll liven up when more children come along and restore the freshness she lost with us.” I turned to the engineer and warned him: “Careful with the mineral fertilizer and the Shorthorn sperm in vacuum flasks!” And to both of them: “I’ll send you the furniture and the military trophies I brought here from La Rosada. I was going to send them to the museum, but things have changed now. It’s good for children to grow up in the shadow of weaponry.” They left, and I was left alone on the platform. I was displeased with myself only because of that last speech I’d foisted upon them, which now struck me as melodramatic.

Again the Personage was quiet for an interval during which he shed the dreamy expression he’d been showing us while recounting the idyll. Then he took up his tale once again:

— The following days were grey and soulless. The wind that had shaken me was a borrowed one; as soon as it stopped blowing, I relapsed into inertia, into solitude compounded, and into that “lucid death” consisting, gentlemen, in knowing oneself to be finished, as one endlessly reviews the text of hours dead and gone. I used to be sober; the rural sobriety of my family was my inheritance. But now I gave in to alcohol and solitary bouts of drinking. Then, sick and tired of seeing my own ghost in each and every one of my reflexions, I started going out at night to the dance halls on Maipú Street, where vacant beings like me, females for rent, and tangos grubby with sadness attempted to construct an impossible architecture of jubilation. There, recalling my glory days in the cabarets parisiens (where I’d rivalled Russian princes with my feats of bottle-brandishing and mirror-smashing), I stirred up a few donnybrooks that soon earned me a certain scandalous notoriety. One afternoon (the day after a brawl landed me in jail), my two brothers paid me a visit. Now, watch carefully, gentlemen! Because right in front of your astonished eyes the Invention of the Personage is about to take place! Far from displaying any ill-feeling toward me, José Antonio and Raphael were suspiciously cordial, behaviour that should have put me on alert. But there I was with an icepack on my head, a bitter taste in my mouth, and troubling memories of the night before. My brothers’ speech was a classic, complete with beginning, middle, and end. The beginning , designed to censure my shameful conduct and assess the dishonour it threw upon our lineage, was a model of tact, seasoned by a pinch of the gay salt of indulgence. The middle , which developed the theme of my natural talents and how they’d been wasted up until now, had the rare virtue of making me blush beneath my bag of ice. The end was as sudden as it was unforeseen: in order to give my pathetic existence a purpose, José Antonio and Raphael offered me, in the name of Minister X, the General Directorate Z, an enviable position for which many men would have sold their soul. I stared at them in terror. What did I know about the workings of Z? But Raphael and José Antonio tried to put me at ease by saying that one’s suitability for the post, according to custom, came with one’s being appointed to it, much like a gift of grace gratis data by the Minister. While telling me this, they were observing me attentively, registering my every move and gesture, as a sculptor studies his clay before giving it form! In the eyes of both, there burned a malignant creative fire! Those two demons talked so long and persuasively that in the end — out of curiosity or desperation? — I accepted, not imagining the future consequences of that singular moment.

”Well, gentlemen, the Personage already brewing inside me made its first appearance a few days later at the General Directorate Z. The Minister himself had deigned to anoint me personally with the oil of official liturgy; that is, with a speech I listened to reverently, for it was a veritable graveyard of clichés. I listened, yes, but without hearing, as I stared in a daze around the room where a multitude of abstract personages were listening as well, or seemed to be. I soon noticed that the personages in the room were arranged according to a rigorously calibrated astronomical regime: around the Minister revolved the greater and lesser planets, each of whom had his retinue of subdued satellites, who in turn dragged in their orbits a host of modest asteroids, grains of stardust in that remarkable Astronomy. Taking a look around me, I was appalled: ah, gentlemen, I too was the centre of a circle of anxious faces who were soon turning to me, vacant satellites attracted to my orbit and exposed to the administrative light no doubt already beaming from me! I shuddered, gentlemen, for I had the impression of attending a ritual without mystery, a ghostly pantomime, a ballet of soundless puppets. That’s when something exploded within me — I’ll call it my First Dionysian Rebellion. Everything human about me suddenly gelled in an urgent desire to let fly, right there and then, a thunderous, formidable guffaw of Homeric proportions. But José Antonio and Raphael were sending studious and worried glances my way. I managed to contain myself, hardening my facial muscles by main force, a physically painful feat I’ll call the First Imprint of the Mask. 90

”Gentlemen, a useful bit of advice: never, not even as a lark, try imprinting your face with a mask. The mask ends up taking over! When the Minister finished his speech, all eyes turned to me. It was my turn to make a speech in response! Feeling trapped, I feverishly looked around for some way of escape, by any means possible. But there was no way out; I was already caught in the cogs of the mechanism. Then came my Second Dionysian Rebellion: “I’ll send them a Panic message,” I said to myself, “a gigantic Evohé! — a spine-tingling invitation to Springtime that’ll set their dead hearts a-throb beneath their fancy waistcoats!” But, alas! Raphael and José Antonio were at my side, urging me to answer. And I spoke at last. I spoke of the General Directorate Z and the fundamental problems facing it, my speech abounding in classical and modern quotations, as well as intrinsically unintelligible paradoxes and metaphors obscure to everyone, including me. The more I talked, the more I enjoyed the sound of my own voice. This came as quite a surprise. And it prompted a flash of revelation, the crystal-clear resolution of the enigma of my old tendencies: I was a born orator!

”Thanks to this late realization, and to my initial noisy triumph, the Personage of recently moulded clay gained a firmer footing. The following afternoon, my soul heavy with dark premonitions, I took up my duties as Director General. After negotiating my way past two porters who jockeyed for the signal honour of taking my top hat, I was led to my Office. The furniture in the room, beaten down by ten generations of personages, received me with the hostile air of old dogs growling at an unfamiliar face. Waiting for me there was the Secretary! Gentlemen, the memory of that sinister little man still gives me chills. Dessicated as a clod of hardened earth, he had lightless eyes in a perfectly expressionless face, and wore a dreary suit over a funereal shirt. Nevertheless, a certain subtle irony leaked from him, a fluid slyness, a demonic malevolence; it was like an invisible sweat oozing from his pores, so offensively mysterious that several times a brutal urge came over me to smash open the inscrutable carapace of his face with a hammer, as children do with their toys, just to find out what was inside. When I asked him about my duties, the wretch led me to my desk, showed me a notepad, and put two pencils in my hand, one red and the other blue. Then he had me look through a peephole into the antechamber of my office, now chock full of men and women waiting. In his sour, monotonous voice, like that of an animal trained to talk, the Secretary recited the drill for me: every one of those men and women was a “postulant” bearing a letter. My job was to receive the letter, read it, then immediately pass it on to him. He would then indicate whether I was to note the postulant’s name under the column of the Chosen in blue pencil, or under Reprobates in red. The abominable instructions made me a puppet to be manipulated by the Secretary’s nicotine-yellowed fingers; and having heard them, I glared so hard at him that the man, incredible as it may seem, actually smiled or grimaced (I was never sure which), and then muttered something about “political convenience” and “the electoral imperative.” I bowed my head. Then the tragic procession began.