30 General José de San Martín (1778–1850), a hero of the South American wars of independence. From Buenos Aires he led the Expedición de los Andes, crossing the mountains to liberate Chile in 1817 and proceeding north to meet Simón Bolívar finally in Guayaquil in 1822. Known as the Santo de la Espada [Saint of the Sword] for his honourable conduct as a revolutionary military hero, he apparently harboured no personal political ambitions. He is commemorated in public monuments throughout South America. In Buenos Aires, the Plaza de San Martín, a large, beautiful park in the heart of the city, features an immense statue of the general on horseback. In his essay “Narrar a San Martín” (2005) [Narrating San Martín], Martín Kohan looks at the mythification of San Martín as a founding father of Argentina.
31 Spanish translation of Cuore (1886) [Heart], a sentimental children’s novel by the Italian Edmondo de Amicis. Barcia (171n) notes its great popularity in Argentina. Navascués (AB 113n) notes that part of the plot takes place in Argentina.
32 “Viernes Santo, Viernes Santo, / día de grande Pasión, / cuando lo crucificaron / al Divino Redentor.”
33 Juan de Garay, the Spanish explorer who founded Buenos Aires in 1580. (A failed attempt to found the city had been made by Pedro de Mendoza in 1536.)
34 Juan Manuel de Rozas (or Rosas), a Federalist with rural and popular support, upon assuming power named himself the Ilustre Restaurador de las Leyes [Illustrious Restorer of Law and Order] and ruled his Santa Federación [Holy Federation] with an iron fist from 1829 to 1852. The Mazorca (so called because their emblem was a mazorca or ear of corn) was his ferocious police force. The political enemies of the populist-nationalist Federalists, allied with the Catholic Church, were the Unitarians — urban, liberal, Europhile.
35 Amalia, by José Mármol (see 628n3). A few elements of Grampa Sebastián’s story seem to be taken from Mármol’s novel. Mármol always characterizes Rosas’s people as ferocious and bestial, like the two Mazorca agents in Sebastián’s story; Mármol describes one Federalist soldier, for example, as having “a physiognomy in which one could not distinguish where the beast ended and the human began” (Mármol 65b). At the outset of Marmol’s novel an initial group of six Unitarians are attempting to cross the river in a whaleboat to reach Uruguay and join the army of General Lavalle, who was preparing to attack Rosas in Buenos Aires; hence, Rosas’s suspicion that Sebastián has been smuggling “savage Unitarians.” The latter insult is endlessly repeated by the Federalists in Amalia. Manuelita, daughter of Rosas, is portrayed by Mármol sympathetically as a victim of her paranoid and despotic father; her task was to guard his person and “keep watch over the house, the doors, and even his food” (Mármol 291a). Sebastián’s passage through an entrance hall or zaguán to a patio where a mulatta mashes corn recalls the episode in Amalia set at the house of Rosas’s sister-in-law, María Josefa Ezcurra (an important figure in Rosas’s police apparatus); the zaguán and patio of the house were swarming with a “multitude of negresses, mulattas, chinas, ducks, hens, and every other animal created by God,” as well as a group of men condemned to the gallows (64b), the fate that Adam Buenosayres’s Grampa Sebastián escapes.
The neutral evocation of the mulatta in Marechal’s text contrasts with the overtly scornful racism in Mármol’s novel. Rosas did indeed enjoy the support of the lower classes, including Afro-Argentines, and his plebeian support-base only served to disqualify Rosas’s legitimacy in the eyes of the cultivated and patrician Unitarians. That Sebastián declares himself a good Federalist is an index of Marechal’s sympathy with the historical revisionism of Catholic nationalism, first given expression in Julio Irazusta’s Ensayo sobre Rosas (1935).
36 In the originaclass="underline" tocarle el violín [play the violin on him]. As Navascués (AB 115n) explains, this was a torture called la refalosa in which a knife is slowly drawn back and forth, like a violin bow, across the victim’s throat. Hilario Ascasubi immortalized the practice in his poem “La refalosa” (1839), in which one of Rosas’s mazorqueros describes this torture in detail.
37 Rosas insisted that his followers and partisans wear a red insignia in the form of a tie or ribbon to indicate their Federalist allegiance. The Unitarian colour was blue.
38 According to rural custom, a gaucho who arrived at a ranch would ask for permission to dismount. Permission granted would usually mean that the stranger would be fed and lodged among the ranch-hands for the night, and his horse allowed to graze.
39 Navascués (AB 116n) reads in this phrase, which Adam will repeat in Book Five, a nod to Joyce’s Ulysses. In “Telemachus” (chapter 2), Stephen Dedalus says inwardly, “Weave, weaver of the wind” (30). In J. Salas Subirat’s 1945 translation: “Teje, tejedor del viento” (56).
40 Boethius (480–524), author of De Consolatione Philosophiae [The Consolation of Philosophy], a Neoplatonic dialogue between Philosophy and himself (OCD).
41 Reference to Río de la Plata, literally “River of Silver,” traditionally (mis)translated by the English as the “River Plate.”
BOOK ONE, CHAPTER 2
1 General José de San Martín (see 634n30). According to Argentine tradition, the Sargeant Juan Bautista Cabral saved the life of his leader, San Martín, in the Battle of San Lorenzo (Feb. 3, 1813) against royalist forces. In his Historia de San Martín y de la emancipación americana (1887–88), Bartolomé Mitre immortalized the scene in which Cabral, after freeing San Martín from beneath his fallen horse, was mortally wounded by the enemy and died saying: “Muero contento! Hemos batido al enemigo!” [I die happy! We have beaten the enemy!].
2 The poet Jacobo Fijman (1898–1970), on whom Samuel Tesler is based, was born in Uriff in Russian Bessarabia (Bajarlía 11). In the parenthetical passages throughout this chapter, Marechal deliberately parodies Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, by Diogenes Laërtius (Marechal, Claves 14).
3 Santos Vega: a legendary gaucho and payador (cowboy minstrel), immortalized in nineteenth-century Argentine gauchesque poetry, where he becomes a Romantic icon of the spirit of life on the pampa.
4 Otium poeticum: leisure for poetic contemplation (Navascués, AB 127n). Incorrectly rendered in the original as ocius poeticus due to inference from the Spanish ocio poético.
5 Galician Spanish immigration accounted for 17 percent of the total number of immigrants to Argentina between 1857 and the 1930. The gallegos, in popular culture, came to be known by several stereotypical features, both positive and negative. According to María Rosa Lojo, they were seen as honest and hard-working, but also as gullible and unsophisticated (Los “gallegos” 34–5).
6 Quo usque tandem, Catalina, abutere patientia nostra? [How long will you abuse our patience?] The sentence is from Cicero’s first speech against Catiline, who proposed his candidacy for the Roman Senate after having been implicated in a political plot.
7 Samuel’s note is lifted almost straight from René Guénon’s book Le symbolisme de la Croix (1931): “ ‘When this yod has been produced’, says the Sepher Yetsirah, ‘that which remained of the mystery of the hidden Avir (ether) was aor (light),’ and in fact, if yod is removed from the word Avir, what is left is Aor.” According to Guénon, following the ancient Kabbalistic text Sepher Yetsirah, the yod “hieroglyphically represents the Principle, and all the other letters of the Hebrew alphabet are said to be formed from it, a formation which, according to the Sepher Yetsirah, symbolizes that of the manifested world itself” (Guénon, Symbolism 25). Marechal was an avid reader of Guénon’s books (Coulson 8, 97). Cf. 626n20, 628n6, and 677n70.