21 The name of Adam’s pipe, connoting the poetry of courtly love (Eleanor of Aquitaine was the patroness of several famous twelfth-century poets), is most likely taken from the short story “Eleonora” by Edgar Allan Poe, to whom Adam refers a few pages later. The standard Spanish version of the name Eleanor is Leonor, but Marechal uses a Hispanicized spelling of the French Éléonore, since he would have read the story in Baudelaire’s translation (though Baudelaire tries to conserve Poe’s spelling: Éléonora). In Poe’s story, the first-person narrator-protagonist swears to his beloved as she approaches death that he will remain faithful to her and “never bind [him] self in marriage to any daughter of Earth” (The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Vol. 2 of The Raven edition. Project Gutenberg online). Adam, for his part, will desert the “earthly” Solveig in favour of her “heavenly” form. Moreover, Poe cites words of the thirteenth-century Catalan mystic Ramón Lull as an epigraph to his story: Sub conservatione formae specificae salva anima [“The salvation of the soul depends on the conservation of the specific form”]; Lull’s sentence might well serve Adam in his project to conserve the form of Solveig in his poetry and thus “save” her from mortality.
22 “Cuatro palomas blancas, / cuatro celestes, / cuatro coloraditas / me dan la muerte.” This traditional folksong appears as the epigraph to Marechal’s poem “Elegía del Sur” [Elegy for the South] in Poemas australes (1937) (OC I, 195).
23 “Cucú, cucú / cantaba la rana, / cucú, cucú, / debajo del agua.” A traditional lullaby.
24 Manitou has usually been translated by Europeans as the Creator or Great Spirit; Barcia (164n) perpetuates the missionary spirit by equating the term with the Hebreo-Christian Dios (God). Manitou, or Manitú, as Marechal writes it in Spanish, is the European deformation of a term currently transliterated as Mnidoo, according to Mary Ann Noakwegijig-Corbiere, translator and native speaker of Nishnaabemwin (Ojibwe). This word is specific to the Nishnaabemwin, one of the languages in the Algonkian language group spoken in most of Ontario and parts of Quebec. Barcia assumes that Oppavoc means tobacco, which seems logical. The word does appear to be a variant of uppovac, “tobacco” in the language spoken by the Virginia tribes (Dixon 24), but it is not even close to the Nishnaabe word for tobacco, semaa. However, the Nishnaabe were great travellers who worked a continental web of trade connections in the pre-Columbian era and afterwards; the Nishnaabe word for pipe, opwaagan, is not too far removed form the Virginia tribes’ uhpoocan, in turn related to uppovac (Dixon 24), a similarity that would be explained by the northward transfer of the pipe technology through trade relations. Thus, it seems a happy accident that Adam’s flight of fancy not only personifies his pipe Eleonore, but also metonymically conflates a gift of nature (tobacco) with the human artifact devised for its consumption (pipe). [My thanks to Dr Noakwegijig-Corbiere (University of Sudbury) and linguist J. Randoph Valentine (University of Wisconsin at Madison) for generously sharing their expertise on this point.]
25 paraíso — literally “paradise,” but here referring concretely to the bead-tree.
26 The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) wrote: “[Through the sexual impulse] the will of the individual appears at a higher power as the will of the species… But what appears in consciousness as a sexual impulse directed to a definite individual is in itself the will to live as a definitely determined individual. Now in this case the sexual impulse, although in itself a subjective need, knows how to assume very skilfully the mask of an objective admiration, and thus to deceive our consciousness; for nature requires this strategem to attain its ends” (Schopenhauer, The World 340–1). The theme is a constant in Schopenhauer. In his late work, Parerga and Paralipomena, he writes that “sexual desire, especially when through fixation on a definite woman it is concentrated to amorous infatuation, is the quintessence of the whole fraud of this noble world; for it promises so unspeakably, infinitely, and excessively much, and then performs so contemptibly little” (Parerga 316). Elsewhere, Marechal chastises Schopenhauer for his misogynistic “grosería” (“Victoria Ocampo y la literatura femenina,” OC V, 296).
27 Rose of Lima (1586–1617) was the first canonized saint to have been born in the Americas. Lines from Marechal’s hagiographic Vida de Santa Rosa de Lima (1943) appear in Adam’s discourse on poetics in Book Four. As María de los Angeles Marechal notes (126), Adán came out on 30 August in honour of Santa Rosa’s liturgical feast day.
28 Koriskos or Coriscus was one of Plato’s disciples in the Academy. However, as becomes evident in the second chapter of Book One, Adam is likely recalling a passage in Aristotle’s disquisition On Dreams. To illustrate the case of a dreamer who is aware that he or she is dreaming, Aristotle writes that “something within him speaks to this effect: ‘the image of Koriskos presents itself, but the real Koriskos is not present’ ” (Aristotle 734). Adam decontextualizes the Aristotelian passage and (mis) applies it to his own situation: in the next chapter, he will see Samuel’s sleeping body and note that Samuel, being asleep, is not really present. Barcia (166n), in what seems rather a stretch, proposes to conflate Koriskos with Choricus, king of Arcadia and father of the inventors of the art of wrestling and the palaestra. [I am grateful to Dr Louis L’Allier of Thorneloe University in Sudbury for sharing his expertise on this point.]
29 Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938), modernist poet of the generation prior to the 1920s avant-garde that included Marechal. The image of a “telepathic cock” is from Lugones’s poem “Claro de luna” [Moonlight], in Lunario sentimental (1909). In his “Retrueque a Lugones” (Martín Fierro 26, December 1925), Marechal famously, and cheekily, polemicized with Lugones on the issue of traditional rhyme and metre (defended by Lugones) versus free verse, championed by the avant-gardists.