Leopoldo Marechal - Adam Buenosayres

”Bathed in an opulent light that made the food on the plates and the wine in the glasses sparkle, and pleasantly attending to the friendly voices and the temptation of a world that was again calling me, I all of a sudden sensed something moving in front of my eyes, something like a green fly, a buzzing fly of metallic sheen. I swatted at it with my fingers, and the fly went away. And then, opposite me, I saw three women dressed in mourning seated at the empty place at the table. Their three pairs of burning eyes pierced me as they laughed like three drunken Bacchantes, their laughter dark, throaty, monotonous, echoless. Stunned by that vision, I pushed away my plate, rubbed my eyes, and looked again: the three women in mourning, the three uninvited commensals, remained where they were, seated on the empty side of the table, piercing me with their gaze and still laughing. Later I found out that my friends had gone painfully silent when they saw me roughly push my plate away and stare stupidly at the sector of the table which for them was empty. But, at that moment, I saw only the sharp faces and frightful attire of the three women. For, as I quickly noticed, they weren’t really dressed in mourning but in black dance costumes, overly elaborate with ribbons and trimmings, but so torn and filthy that the women seemed to have just come from a bacchanal or a crime. The same disorder was apparent in their dishevelled hair; among their locks there still gleamed fragments of diadems, bits of gold leaf, and scarabs of silver. And the same filth could be seen in their throats bubbling with laughter and in their long fingers ending in black-painted nails that stood out against the white tablecoth. Looking back on it now, I recall that it didn’t occur to me to doubt the reality of the women — hard to doubt with the harsh light seeming to expose them! What I did sense, in my distress, was that they were there with some definite purpose, and that I ought to confront them, take heed of the prodigous evil they were no doubt bringing, and put up an invincible resistance against them, a tough shell of disdain. Resolved in this decision, I dared to give them a challenging look; and only then did I notice that the women’s eyes were not inquisitorial but terribly wise; and only then — madman that I am! — did I realize their laughter expressed no evil at all, but rather a knowledge so terrifying that when I sensed it I felt cold drops trickle down my forehead. “No, no!” I suddenly shouted. “Not that!” And, picking up a wineglass, I hurled it at the fateful females. Right away I felt myself surrounded, helped, consoled by friendly voices. But my attention was still on the three women observing me and laughing; now they whispered among themselves; now they turned again to fix meditative eyes upon me and laugh the somber laugh of those in the know. Then I got to my feet and fled the room, leaving six astonished commensals who turned their gaze to the empty sector of the table.

”That whole afternoon I was locked in a hard battle with terror. My mind, in its new state of dread, had to clear a path through the veil of madness pressing down upon me, in order to discern, without the interference of panic, what secret lay beneath that vision. But toward evening, a dazzling insight lit up the chaos: undeniably, the revelation of the three ghastly women had coincided exactly with the hour when I was coming back to life and also forgetting. Not surprisingly, the offended spirits of Bellona had appeared to me at the very table where we were celebrating my betrayal of her memory. The three women, then, had wanted me to know that my destiny and Bellona’s were still linked, that Bellona would continue to stir up within me the strange war presaged in her name, beyond and in spite of death.

”Remembrance of Bellona: that was the heavy, sleepless, penitential toil that entirely occupied my hours in the days following. I had to reconstruct her image line by line, volume by volume, gesture by gesture, and maintain it under the gaze of my soul, night and day, without lapses or distractions. I had to evoke every instant of her life, one by one, with the tremendous precision of the cinema, and then put them all together in a living synchronism, so that my heart might thus contemplate them, even if it were to break in anguish. You can’t imagine to what extremes of detail I went in trying to achieve the impossible reconstruction of Bellona. In my madness, I pursued traces of a colour or odour that had been hers, in her dresser drawers, in her cold forgotten clothing, in the familiar objects she had touched so many times. What’s more, those favourite objects of hers soon acquired a magical prestige that for days on end had me indulging in the grossest fetishisms: I would adore a comb, venerate a gem, or kiss a satin slipper. Thus passed exactly one week since the unforgettable luncheon. My many acts of contrition and reparation had exhausted my inner resources, but in exchange had brought me the sweet ache or painful pleasure that is the customary fruit of penitence. 152

“That afternoon I at last broke my voluntary imprisonment and went outside to walk along the seashore, along the deserted beach stretching beyond the Lighthouse, amid the warm sand dunes and the cool spray from the waves. Tough marine birds pecked at the cresting swells. A black bull that had waded into the sea up to his knees was sniffing the salt spume and lowing softly. A few dead sharks lay here and there, half-buried in the sand, and their rotting stench, mingled with the bitter saltpetre smell of the marsh, assailed my nostrils but fortified my spirit with a certain healthy rigour. The immense peace coming down from on high was met by the peace of the earth in repose; and a desire for union with the peace of earth and sky filled my tranquil and triumphant soul, which, redeemed and consoled by its possession of an eternal Bellona, wandered without fear along the shore, sighing with relief, and daring once again to look at things calmly. And just as these emotions were beginning to soar within me like a grateful prayer, I suddenly sensed the green fly buzzing in front of my eyes. When I shooed it away, I saw the three fateful women come forward, stand in a line ahead of me, stare at me with their hard, knowing eyes, and laugh, and laugh, and slyly laugh. For a moment I stood petrified: all the constructions built up by my madness collapsed inwardly in a dreadful heap. And again I felt naked before the three implacable women who stood there observing me and laughing, their luxurious rags and snarled locks blowing in the wind. I attempted to face them down, tried taking a few steps toward them, but they didn’t back away. I threw fistfuls of sand in their faces, but could not make them swallow their abominable laughter. Then, just as night was falling, I took flight, my feet sinking into the soft clinging sand and my ankles getting entangled in treacherous seaweed. But this time the females gave chase: they flew after me, hooting like obscene banshees, laughing offensively, panting like repugnant beasts. I can’t tell you now how long my flight lasted among the darkened dunes, but my memory retains the impression of an infinite fugue.

”Henceforth, and until the happy day of my liberation, I led an existence that, unhinged though it may have seemed, had a meaning and a plan: to destroy in myself every last vestige of intelligence, to drown out all claims of memory, and to bend my will, consciously and in solitude, to the operation of the inner hardening I wanted for my being. So I sought out not friends, exactly, but the company of strangers who often saw me drinking at orgies as an absent guest of stone, 153or whirling at their wild dance parties with the automatism of a dead star. Truth be told, that period is an obscure blur in my memory. Which lights up violently when evoking and assembling the details of the scene that put an end to so much pain.