Adam pauses, under the rain, at the corner of Gurruchaga and Triunvirato. From there, still undecided, he contemplates the ghostly ambience of Gurruchaga Street, a tunnel burrowing into the very flesh of the night, elongated between two rows of shivering paradise trees, their feet bound in metal rings, like two files of galley slaves trudging toward winter. Phosphorescent like the eye of a cat, the clock of San Bernardo peeps out from its tower. Not a single tremor of the final bell-stroke remains in the air, and silence flows now from above, blood of dead bells. Unexpectedly, a treacherous gust rakes the trees and they whimper like children. A fistful of rain hits Adam in the face; he staggers in a deluge of fallen leaves rushing along, rustling like old papers, while the streetlamps suspended overhead dance a mad jig of hanged men. The gust has passed. Silence and stillness are restored beneath the rain’s soft song. Solitude, emptiness, Adam enters Gurruchaga Street.
— Hermetic doors and windows, the keys turned, bolts drawn: thus they defend their escape into sleep. The sleeper’s house, safeguarded like trench or tomb. Yesterday’s combat, right here: not a soul left on the battlefield! Men and women, Trojans and Tyrians, what are they doing now? Their prone bodies sailing away on beds of iron, wood, or brass inside impregnable cubes — all have stolen away! Only I alone. If in the depths of midnight, if at the precise instant when one day gives way to another, if at that very juncture one might slip through a crack, freed from time! Yesterday, an anxious little boy among the party lights and music, who saw how time flowed like acid, gnawing at the festive house and those inside. Or an adolescent who dreamed of banishing Time from his poetry… Lord, I would have liked to be like the men of Maipú, who knew when to laugh and when to cry, when to work or sleep, fight or be reconciled; men well grounded in this world, in its bright and colourful reality! And not go wandering doubtful and mistrustful as though among vain images, reading into the signs of things much more than they literally say, and receiving, in the possession of things, much less than they promised. For I have devoured creation and its terrible multiplicity of forms: ah, colours that call out, impetuous gestures, lines to make one die of love! Only to find my thirst deceived, then to suffer remorse for my injustice to the world’s creatures, for demanding of them a happiness they cannot give. And now this disappointment — also unjust! — that makes me see creatures as letters of a dead language. Not to have looked, ah, not to have looked! Or to have looked always and only with a reader’s eyes like those I had in childhood, back there in the garden of Maipú, when in the beauty of intelligible forms I attained a vision of that which is stable and neither suffers autumn nor undergoes change. And therein lie the injustice and the remorse: to have regarded with a lover’s eyes what I should have seen with the eyes of a reader. (Must jot this down as soon as I get home.) How well they go together, the street and midnight and the drizzle! The Izmir Café is closed, too. No. Somebody’s singing.
With his ears peeled, Adam Buenosayres stops in front of the Izmir. Past the half-drawn metal blinds, in the murky interior, he can see hazy human figures standing still or gesturing sleepily. From within come the strains of an Asian song; accompanied by a lute or zither, a plangent voice is tearing at throaty gutturals and wringing a sob from each and every ah. Adam can smell sweet anisette, as well as strong tobacco smouldering no doubt in four-tubed hookahs.
“Another cloistered world. They, too, have traced their hermetic circle, and now they sail away, escaping in song. I saw them yesterday — their greenish faces and heavy-lashed eyes — cruel witnesses of the battle. What landscapes or scenes will they be recalling now, enclosed in their circle, sailors in music? Faces, perhaps. Countenances of men, women, or children whose voices once sang this same song of torn gutturals and sobbed ah’s beneath a different sky — oh, but one infinitely more beautiful! Why more beautiful? For being far off. An ancient song, no doubt. And all the other tongues that sang it before: thousands of lips undone and faces dispelled, back there in the sad graveyards of Asia Minor: mouths full of dirt and eyes full of lime. All have stolen away!”
Adam takes off his broad-brimmed hat. Two or three withered little leaves fall from it. His hand wipes away the raindrops streaming down his face. Then he starts to walk again, up the street.
— And the days used to begin with my mother’s song:
Four white doves,
four blue…
Or that other song, in Maipú, a chorus of kids beside Grandma at the rain-lashed window:
Good Friday, Good Friday,
day of great Passion…4
And the one at Teachers’ College, adolescent voices, salt and pepper eyes in the big music room:
Eternal page of Argentine glory,
melancholy image of the fatherland…5
Or the one we liked to sing in the basement of the Royal Keller, we longhaired poets and passionate avant-gardists in the Santos Vega group, to the tune of “La donna è mobile”:
One automobile, two automobiles,
three automobiles, four automobiles…6
And that one in Madrid, amid the fervent twang of guitars and arguments:
Looks like snowflakes
are falling on your face…7
Or the one in Paris, in Atanasio’s studio, the table laid among figures of clay, the sacrifice of a white hen on the altar of the Muses, an army of bottles:
In a tower in Nantes
there was a prisoner…8
And that other one in Sanary, or the one in Italy… Songs! They come back now to put me face to face with a day’s pleasure or a night’s shame: remorse for having sung and for having heard others sing. Silence — how I sought and cherished it when a child! Voyage to silence, through the forest of nighttime sounds. And the way I’d walk on tiptoe with reverential stealth, my urge to silently open doors and drawers: liturgies of silence. Because I already knew, without being told, that silence is not music’s negation but all music in its infinite possibility and in its blissful indifferentiation. Yes, the musical chaos in which all the undifferentiated songs still form a single canticle, without mutually excluding each other, without committing this injustice in the order of time. Anaximander,9 old and dark, I salute you on this final night! And your disciple Anaximenes, as well, with his sacred pneuma: the breath of creative inspiration and expiration!10 The theory I expounded yesterday at Ciro’s — when quite sloshed. Shouldn’t have spoken, no one understood a thing. Yes, Schultz did, good old Schultz. Ah, all in One! Sadness is born in the multiple.
Sad and brooding, Adam Buenosayres looks at the manifestation of diversity around him. He caresses the trunks of trees, as though feeling for some heartbeat beneath the moist bark. Then he crouches down, picks up a handful of dead leaves, breathes in their bitter aroma, and lets them slowly fall. Afterward he moves on, touching wet walls, cold thresholds, the wood of doors, the iron of balconies.