Leopoldo Marechal - Adam Buenosayres

— Hmm, Del Solar spluttered. The outskirts of Buenos Aires have a long tradition of witchcraft. Apparitions of both the Pig and the Widow are commonplace. 50

At that point, Buenosayres had the bright idea of telling the ghost story he’d heard as a child from his grandfather Sebastián. It’s wintertime, one midnight in August. Grampa is sleeping the sleep of the just, out there in his cabin lost among hills and dales, when suddenly he wakes up to the sound of someone or something knocking at the window. Must be the wind, he thinks. He half sits up in his cot and listens. Now the noise is at the cabin door — an insistent tapping as though huge wings were beating at the door. Grampa lights his lamp and cries out: Who’s there? No answer, the wings just keep on beating. So he gets out of bed, takes the bar from the door, and opens it. Outside he finds a flock of enormous turkeys. Spreading their tails, they push past him and barge into the cabin. Now, Grandfather Sebastián has never seen such huge turkeys and he begins to suspect witchcraft, especially when the turkeys, making an infernal racket, crowd round and push him against the wall. So he grabs the bar and starts battering the turkeys with it. Far from backing off, they seem to revel in each blow. His hair standing on end, Grampa runs over and pulls out a silver-plated knife hidden under the head of the bed. He makes the sign of the cross by putting the blade over the sheath and shoves it at the beasts. What banshees! They all back away, screeching like old crones after a flogging. Grampa sees them pile out through the door and flee across the fields into the night like souls rounded up by the devil.

Gradually, as Adam’s tale unfolded, the group had tightened around the storyteller as they walked. Even Schultz, regretting he’d embarked them on such a dire demonology, was walking cheek by jowl with his comrades, anxiously peering into the shadows in spite of himself. Such was the state of the group’s morale when Buenosayres finished his yarn. Next, as if one ghost story weren’t enough, Samuel Tesler began to recount a gloomy tale of love and hate. It had taken place in his native land, Besarabia, vaguely remembered from childhood. It was about a woman and a man. She was as adorable as she was disdainful. He was a victim of unrequited love that had turned into implacable rancour. The two of them lived in the same house, separated by a wall. For no apparent reason, the young woman started showing symptoms of a rare disease. Every midnight her fever would come to a crisis, at the very same moment when, on the other side of the wall, three hammer blows were heard. Day after day, at the stroke of midnight, the hammer pounded three times on the wall, and the young woman’s condition worsened. For a month the young woman went on wasting away. Then, at the final blow of the hammer, she gave up the ghost. Several days later, the love-stricken man mysteriously disappeared. The police entered his room. On the wall separating his room from hers, the shape of a woman had been drawn in pencil. A nail had been driven deep into the figure’s heart. The hammer lay on the floor.

Samuel’s story, told in that place and at such an hour, was the last straw. The group had just come to the top of a hill. What happened there was as fast as it was inexplicable. Luis Pereda suddenly tripped over something massive. He went tumbling down the slope without so much as a shout. The others ran to help him, but before they got to the bottom where he lay, he got up and took to his heels at full speed.

— The Devil! he screamed. The Devil!

The explorers looked back to where Pereda had fallen. They could make out a dark bulk arising from the ground and raising two horns like those of an ox. Simultaneously, the silence of the night was broken by a long “mooooo.” 51The entire group, panic-stricken, took off after the fleeing Pereda, with Schultz in the lead, the very vanguard of terror. An accelerated fugue dragged them all indiscriminately across merciless terrain. As they fled, the night semed to unleash all its secret fury against them. Behind them, invisible arms reached out, straining to seize them in clawlike fingers. The napes of their necks prickled under the icy breath of the pursuers. Heathen war whoops, bestial panting, and burlesque snickers filled their ears. They bounded along, afraid that at any moment they might step on some repulsive shape slithering over the ground.

How long did that giddy career last? They never knew. Later, they only remembered suddenly topping a rise in the ground and seeing two or three street lamps emerge in the near distance.

— Lights! they shouted. Lights!

And they ran as fast as they could down the slope.

They had arrived.

Adam Buenosayres, the astrologer Schultz, and Samuel Tesler were tarrying, deep in thought, in the chamber where the deceased lay in state. As men who have plumbed the ancient mystery of death, all three contemplated the mortal remains of the man who had been Juan Robles (a fine specimen of a criollo , if ever there was one). According to the neighbours, he’d kicked the bucket after fifty-nine years in an existence both happy and laborious. He’d whiled away his time on earth drifting from pulpería to pulpería , from siesta to siesta, watching his famous mares stomp mud for brick-making. 1And just now Juan Robles was looking quite ceremonious, stuffed into his wedding suit and stretched out full length in his black coffin with bronze handles.

Surrounding the coffin were six candlesticks, dripping wax, the flame at their tips gradually shrinking around the charred wicks. At the head of Juan Robles’s casket, a metal crucifix glinted in the scant candlelight, and the curved torso of the cross projected its terrible shadow onto the wall deep in the chamber. Four potted palm trees and a few flowers from the neighbouring garden decorated the funeral chapel. The lid of the casket had been propped against one wall like an ominous door waiting to close forever. The Three Crones, huddled in one corner of the room, had just stopped clucking to spy on those three strangers staring at the cadaver as though at something outlandish. In the opposite corner, the Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law seemed to be sleeping, cocooned within their capacious black shawls.

It certainly wasn’t the mud-stomper’s mortal flesh, already cold, that attracted the strangers’ interest. The essential thing, in their view, was Juan Robles’s imperishable soul, recently detached from its earthly coil and launched into who knows what obscure regions. What regions? For the astrologer Schultz, initiate of Eastern mysteries, the question permitted only one answer, and he was explaining this to his friend Tesler in the grave voice appropriate to such a mournful occasion. If every individual born into this world had just died in some other world, he said, and if every individual who died here had just been born on another plane of cosmic existence, it obviously followed that Juan Robles, now dead on earth, was at that moment crying for the first time in another world, eagerly clinging once again to a maternal nipple, being swaddled in solicitous diapers, and provoking a new set of joys and worries. In what form? Under what new life conditions? There lay the great question! But Samuel Tesler, accustomed to a more colourful philosophy, repudiated that abstract mechanism of births and deaths; moreover, to imagine the deceased Juan Robles already in another world, bawling and pissing his diapers, was an Orientalist notion that he, for one, had a hard time swallowing. For his taste, what was wanted was a tribunal of souls with plenty of pomp and colour, presided over by straight-talking judges who could meticulously ferret the dirt out of a conscience, post mortem . In the opinion of the philosopher of Villa Crespo, the soul of Juan Robles had been brought by jackal-headed Anubis to the ineluctable scale of merit- and demerit-points; the deceased’s heart would now be sitting on one side of the balance, while on the other side weighed the severe feather of the Law. What was Thot doing as he stood beside the weighing machine? Inclining his graceful ibis head, Thot was etching the exact weight of that heart on a little tablet.