Leopoldo Marechal - Adam Buenosayres

”Now, gentlemen, you may think the Invention of the Personage would have been complete by now. Not so, unfortunately; one final turn of the screw was yet to come. Despite my transformation, I still retained a certain animal dynamism that made me hold my head high, walk tall, and speak in full voice — motes of imperfection which certainly did not escape the expert eye of my inventors. Jose Antonio and Raphael warned me about it one day: we were in a country where no man was allowed to exercise government who did not have one foot already in the grave. Their advice, therefore, was that I should simulate an attack of gout when walking, an asthma attack when breathing, and a worrisome hoarseness of voice when talking. Once again I obeyed, and with astounding results: my visible decrepitude and my oratorical triumphs allowed me, step by step, to scale the Olympian heights of officialdom. Henceforth, the Personage was a masterpiece. One time I tried smiling in front of the mirror; like Lautréamont’s hero, 91I understood it was impossible, even if I were to take a penknife to my face and carve it. My inner dessication was so complete that, when Victoria later came from La Rosada to show me her firstborn son, I didn’t even raise my eyes from the Record of Parliamentary Proceedings. A copy of Germán’s book arrived one day: Song in the Blood had just been published to great acclaim. I fell asleep on the second page. Finally, in an attempt at physical exertion, I discovered the gout and asthma had become real and taken me in their grip.

”I’ve forgotten the rest; everything gets hazy and confused when I try to recall the nebulous chronology of my Personage Time — everything, that is, except the circumstances of my final demise. Pay attention now, gentlemen, because the Death of the Personage is drawing nigh! One night, while I was waiting at home for some guests who were going with me to an official ceremony, I fell sound asleep in an armchair. I was dressed in tails and, inadvertently, I’d pulled my top hat down over my face before nodding off; and so, from the vantage point of the doorway, all that could be seen were my shoulders and hat. When the Secretary came in, heading up the delegation, he assumed I was asleep. Creeping up to me on tiptoe, he touched my shoulder. Then, before his startled eyes, tuxedo and top hat collapsed into the armchair — empty, completely empty! At the end of the long process of obliteration, the Personage had crossed the frontier between being and non-being, disappearing into the void. Slowly picking up my clothes, the Secretary turned to the delegation and announced in a cold voice: “The Personage has died.” On his way out the door, he paused, angrily pushed away a few wayward tears, and repeated: “The Personage has died.”

With these words, the Personage fell into a silence that seemed final, as though he considered his tale concluded.

— And then? I asked, not hiding from him my sympathy.

— Then, he answered, I felt my pneuma coming down into this circle of hell and heading irresistibly for the Sector of the Personages. Here I am. How long it’s been, I don’t know. Lately, an accidental leak gave me hope for a second death. Ah, gentlemen, I give you no thanks for inflating me a third time!

He stood staring at us, his eyes sad and reproachful. Visibly hesitant, Schultz consulted me with a look. And sensing in my return look some strange form of pity, he performed an act that would later earn him a good deal of praise: he untied the string around the homoglobe ’s nozzle and let the air escape from his balloon. As the Personage deflated once and for all, a beatific smile stole across his face.

— Let his divine pneuma have its freedom back! grumbled Schultz. He bored us long enough with his shaggy-dog story, going over the top, in my opinion, with his “freshnesses” and “flavours.” But he defended his soul, and didn’t go down without a fight. A real son of a gun! Why did he have to go all the way back to his great-grandfather?

The astrologer dropped the empty husk of the Personage. Then he invited me to follow him through the cloud of homoglobes who, at the mercy of the wind’s caprices, pitched back and forth in the air, tussled with one another, or angrily surged against us. It was an annoying passage. In a few places we had to punch our way through, our fists hitting the spongy bellies, top-hatted heads, or tuxedoed rear-ends of the Personages. And, though we made it out of the homoglobe sector at last, it was only to fall into the no less hostile sector of the homoplumes .

The new loafers were gliding around at various levels in this other block of atmosphere. Essentially, they were schematic sketches: a human head attached to a large undulating feather — variously of an ostrich, rooster, partridge, swan, or peacock. They had long beards hanging down and away from their necks like pseudopods, amid which some of the wretches displayed the organ of their perdition. Pushed this way and that by gusts of wind, the homoplumes began darting around us, sinuous and slippery as fish in an aquarium. Their quick movements and the tickle of their feathers brushing our faces prevented our recognizing them, until finally one of them, more insistent or less cautious, landed on me, brought his lips close to my ear, and shouted mockingly:

— Hey, hoser, whatcha up to? Who’s the other suit?

His words were immediately followed by a wheezing guffaw. When he tried to take flight again, I grabbed hold of his rippling tail and, with Schultz’s help, pulled down the homoplume , who by this time was regaling us with the most colourful expletives known to the lexicon of Villa Crespo. Having wrestled him to the ground, we could see his face, the most bonafide malevo ’s mug ever seen either side of the Maldonado: a dull, narrow forehead, eyes glittering beneath the single, solid line of his eyebrows, lips pursed as though around a bag of insults, but an indecisive nose and a jaw without audacity. A little tan-coloured derby was stuffed over his swinish thatch of hair, though without containing its unruly flow, and a white kerchief was classically knotted around his neck at the point where it joined his plume, which in his case was a rooster feather, grey with white stripes. His pseudopods were clutching a faded, patched-up bandoneón, survivor of a hundred milongas that had ended in fisticuffs.

— It’s the mack from Monte Egmont and Olaya! I exclaimed in recognition.

— Hosers! yelled the pimp, still struggling to get free. Two against one! If ya wanna go for it, come on over to Rancagua Park and have it out mano a mano , mack-style.

— Stop playing the taita ! I told him. Remember when the sergeant from Precinct 21 sawed off your heels and gave you a brush cut?

— That wanker! the mack snarled like a dog at the memory.

— What about the time the gallego from the dairy gave you a black eye?

— Yeah, but with a sucker punch!

— And that’s not all, I insisted. What did you do to Catita? La Chacharola, poor old woman, wanders around looking for you, dying to wring your neck with her cold witch’s fingers. She’s a blister of hatred on the skin of the barrio. Where are her four fine linen sheets from Italy? What did you do with the sock full of money?

The malevo’s mug momentarily clouded over, whether from anger or remorse, I never found out.

— Catita? he sighed after a pause. Ah, one night, under the lamp-post, a tango…

— That’s it! I said. You’ve spent your life trying to be a theme for a tango. While your poor mother supported you, washing clothes day in day out, you — oh, infinite idler! — never got out of the famous sack. Except to go drink mate on the patio and maul the keys of your bandoneón, a martyred virgin. From whose offended breast, by the way, you never managed to squeeze more than a couple of bars from the waltz “El aeroplano.” 92