I don’t know how long that unique dialogue went on between two voices and one gaze; nor is it my purpose to divulge all that was said on that midday occasion beneath a willow in Saavedra. I shall only say that, all of a sudden, the laughter and shouting of young men erupted into the garden. The frightened doves scattered in a flutter of wings. It seemed to me some magic circle was being broken, or the doorway to a secret was stealthily closing.
XII
There followed more light-filled days during which I visited the woman of Saavedra so many times that I believed myself arrived at the pinnacle of happiness. But one afternoon, when care seemed as far away as can be, I clearly realized that my repose was nearing its end and the dawn of anxiety was nigh. We were walking in the garden, at the hour when the shadows lengthen, and we chanced upon the greenhouse where sun-shy flowers resided: the white roses there intoxicated us with their perfume, and she too was a white rose, a rose of damp velvet. Her voice must have had some intimate affinity with water, for it was liquid, diaphanously resonant, like the well-water back in Maipú, when a stone fell in and aroused recondite music. Being alone in the floral nursery brought us closer together than ever. It was my great opportunity and my inevitable risk, because at her side I suddenly felt the birth of an anguish that would never leave me, as if at the moment of our greatest closeness there was already opening between us an irremediable distance, just as two heavenly bodies, as they reach their maximum degree of proximity, simultaneously touch the first degree of their separation. The grotto-like light, eroding shapes and forms, managed to exalt them miraculously; and the form of The One assumed for me a painful relief, a plenitude which, once glimpsed, made me shake with anguish, as if so much grace, so slightly supported, suddenly revealed to me how perilous her fragility was. And again the admonitory drums of the night began to beat in my soul, and before my terrified eyes I watched as The One withered and fell among the roses, she as mortal as they.
And baleful voices began to cry from within me: “Look at the fragility of what you love!” A fit of weeping overcame me then, which I desperately tried to stifle, not only because it betrayed, in the presence of The One, a side of my being that no one, not even I, could look at without trembling; but also because I was frightened by the absolute impossibility of giving her an explanation for my weeping. But she hadn’t missed the advent of my tears, and she said to me: “Adam Buenosayres, why are you crying?” Here, at the risk of seeming otiose, I need to express the effect those two little words had upon me: for the first time, I was hearing from her lips the letters of my name. When she encunciated “Adam Buenosayres,” I felt myself named as never before, as though witnessing for the first time the complete revelation of my being and the exact colour of my destiny. And when she then asked me, “Why are you crying?” she did so as though for all eternity she had known why, but with such sweetness that I wept all the harder and, without a word of reply, ran out of the greenhouse and fled through the crowd of flowers.
The voice of alarm raised within me that afternoon would never again fall silent. It sounded two or three times more, when I came into contact with the woman of Saavedra. But it arose so urgently, so distressing was its cry, that I could not bear to hear it and stopped my visits to the garden, clinging to the circle of my much-wept-over solitude. Distancing myself, I was losing her in the garden, but at the same time, it turned out, I was recovering her in thought, and more frequently, with more precision, with more dangerous intimacy. In those days, I admired no grace, assessed no perfection, discerned no truth that did not take me back in memory to The One and to the inevitable meditation on her death. And though such mournful ideas were interrupted when sleep overcame my body, I would then descend into a world of phantoms where the same funereal liturgy was rendered in terrible visions, the same grief rehearsed which, while awake, I felt only in premonitions.
Then I conceived of the incredible enterprise. Perhaps it was the venerable terror, or the fecundity of my lament, or the cry of never-extinguished hope. In any case, I was moved to undertake the difficult labour of enchantment, the strange work of alchemy — the transmutation of the woman of Saavedra. No doubt it was that: the heroic desire to put up a dike against the ineluctable, and to preserve in spirit what in matter was already flowing unstoppably deathward. Such was the extraordinary, prudential labour initiated by my cares in those days: seeing how vulnerable her resplendent beauty was in mortal clay, I set about extracting from that woman all the durable lines, volumes, and colours, all the grace of her form; and with these same elements (though now rescued from matter) I recontructed her in my soul according to weight, number, and measure. And I forged her form such that henceforth it would be free of all contingency and emancipated from all grief. I recall describing the details of such an astonishing operation in a necessarily obscure poem written at about that time; my friends didn’t understand the poem’s true scope and spun the most diverse conjectures. My hope is that, should their eyes chance upon these lines some day, my friends will remember the poem and finally discern its obscure meaning; I hope they’ll see why in the last phase I called the transmuted woman: Niña-que-ya-no-puede-suceder, “Girl-who-can-no-longer-happen.”11
(Note: The following chapters bring the Blue-Bound Notebook to a close. They were written, no doubt, by Adam Buenosayres after his definitive tertulia in Saavedra. The manuscript lies before me now, awaiting transcription. But before continuing, I contemplate its tormented lines, full of scratched-out phrases and corrected words, altogether different from the handwriting in the first part of the Notebook, whose exquisiteness speaks of an artist’s slow, painstaking work. This last part begins with an extravagant fable or apologue. It goes like this:)
XIII
It comes to pass — not every year — that Springtime, tired perhaps of lying dormant in the sap of trees or the blood of animals, shakes off the vapours of sleep and says to herself that it’s now time to dance upon the earth. In vain the heads of astronomers swivel in denial; in vain the almanacs, perturbed, warn her the time to dance is not yet come. Mindless of such wholesome counsel, Springtime sallies forth into the world: her bugle plays reveille for the flowers, her dance arouses a profusion of prematurely sprouting leaves. This does come to pass, but not every year; and in the orchard of Maipú a certain young peach tree did not know this (I was a child then, and spy of hidden gestures). It happened once that — while the elderly peach trees, experienced in the exercise of prudence, were still asleep and ignoring the deceitful song of spring — the young peach tree opened its blossoms (thus did my love misjudge time!) and exposed them to the benevolent critique of the sparrow. But it wasn’t long before the frost returned (silly little fable); and that year the young peach tree, its blossoms whimpering, learned the exact date of its springtime. Thus does my love, weeping, learn its lesson.
In the last part of the Notebook, I gave an account of the alchemical work I’d initiated with the virtues of that laudable woman, redeeming them from the devastation I perceived already in progress and translating them to the intimate retreat of my soul, where they might acquire the stability of things spiritual. I say now that no sooner had I begun than the inevitable doubling of The One took place, producing the necessary opposition between the earthly woman, who was being reduced to nothing, and the celestial woman, whom my soul was building up in her secret workshop. And since the construction of one was being done with the remains of the other, it was not long before I noticed that as the spiritual creature grew in size and virtue, the terrestrial creature diminished in inverse proportion, until it arrived at its limit of nothingness. Thus did “the death of The One” impose itself upon my mind with the rigour of a necessity. And its date must have been, in my eyes, as foreseeable as that of an event in the heavens.