8 This seems to be a reference to G.K. Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). Chesterton was quite popular in Buenos Aires. Borges wrote about him in “Sobre Chesterton” (OC II, 72–4). Although he respected his style, Borges argues against Chesterton’s views in “De las alegorías a las novelas” [From Allegory to Novel] (OC II, 122–4). César Pico (see 680n102) was known as the “Chesterton porteño.”
9 Macedonio Fernández (1874–1952): an eccentric personality, witty metaphysician, literary and aesthetic theoretician, brilliant conversationalist, and avant-garde novelist. He corresponded for several years with the American philosopher William James. Macedonio was adopted as a mentor by the literary avant-garde in 1920s Buenos Aires.
10 Sentence attributed to classical Greek author Menander (341–290 BCE), as noted by Navascués (AB 133n). In the next paragraph, Adam continues in a mock-classical vein by referring to Castor and Pollux, twin sons of Zeus and Leda.
11 Crítica [Critique] and La Razón [Reason] were two popular daily newspapers in Buenos Aires. Barcia (198n) notes that when Ortega y Gasset visited the city and heard the vendors hawking these papers on the street, he remarked: “It’s the hour of Kant” in reference to The Critique of Pure Reason. But in his article “La Pampa… promesas” written in Buenos Aires in 1928, Ortega qualifies his verbal association as a comical accident, a calembour (Ortega 630) whose absurdity underlines what he had written in 1924 in his “Carta a un joven argentino que estudia filosofía” [Letter to a Young Argentine Student of Philosophy]: “You Argentines are more sensitive than precise, and as long as that doesn’t change, you will be entirely dependent on Europe in the intellectual realm” (340). In a second article written in 1928, “El hombre a la defensiva,” he is even more sharply critical of Argentine men (he carefully distinguishes them from the women). Gloria Videla, discussing Ortega y Gasset’s intertextual presence in Marechal’s novel, aptly proposes that Marechal “co-elaborates” Ortega’s ideas, accepting them, refuting them, recreating them (Videla 166). The theme deserves more study, but it would seem that Marechal also turns Ortega’s ideas against him (see 641n25 and 645n3). In any case, the two were hardly friends; when Marechal visited the Spanish philosopher in Madrid in 1926, he was given a “glacial” reception (Andrés 26). In 1927, the “Madrid meridian affair” — occasioned by Guillermo de Torre’s claim that Madrid was the intellectual meridian of the Spanish-speaking world — provoked the collective ire of the martinfierristas; but Marechal directed his retort specifically against “Ortega y Gasset and his tribe” (Andrés 23).
12 Mulattos: Samuel Tesler’s favourite insult (see 649n30).
13 The coat-of-arms of the city of Buenos Aires indeed shows a dove symbolizing the Holy Spirit, which hovers above two ships at anchor, signifying the city’s twofold founding, first by Pedro de Mendoza (1516) and definitively by Juan de Garay (1580) (website of Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires). Barcia (200n) notes that the cover illustration of the second edition of Adán Buenosayres (1966) reproduces the city’s coat-of-arms, but in Samuel’s satirical version with the dove replaced by a hen.
14 Catamarca is a province in the northwest of Argentina, bordering on Chile. Irma would likely be an internal migrant, having left her economically depressed home in search of employment in Buenos Aires.
15 In the original, Samuel ironically addresses Adam with the honorific Musajeta, a term correctly spelled in Spanish as musageta (< Greek and Latin, musgetes “guide of the Muses,” one of Apollo’s epithets). The orthographic change is sly: jeta in Spanish means “snout” and is used as a jocular term for nose.
16 The Amundsen tertulia is a fictional version of the Lange family tertulia, which was held every Saturday afternoon, not Thursday. Besides the liturgical resonance of (Holy) Thursday, Marechal may have chosen Thursday rather than Saturday in homage to his admired nineteenth-century writer Lucio V. Mansilla (1831–1913), whose weekly newpaper column Causeries del jueves [Thursday Chats] was bound and published in five volumes under the title Entre nos (1889–90).
17 “El primer cuidao del hombre / es defender el pellejo.” The two lines are from stanza 2,313 of La vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879) [The Return of Martín Fierro], by José Hernández, sequel to his narrative poem Martín Fierro (1872). In the poem, the speech is pronounced by the Viejo Vizcacha, a wily and unscrupulous character named after a rodent, considered to be a pest, indigenous to the Southern Cone.
18 Ricardo Rojas (1882–1957): a writer of the Novecentista generation, notable for its celebration of the 1910 centenary of Argentine independence. Rojas wrote an eight-volume history of Argentine literature and culture, La literatura argentina: Ensayo filosófico sobre la evolución de la cultura en el Plata (1917–1922). In this passage Samuel pokes fun at one of Rojas’s literary ticks.
19 Gloria Videla (174), discussing the intertextuality between Ortega y Gasset, Eduardo Mallea, and Marechal, relates Samuel’s contrasting cities of the chicken and the owl to Mallea’s thesis of the two Argentinas, one visible and vulgar, the other invisible and spiritually superior. Residents of the former enjoy “an eminently bourgeois satisfaction… a state of comfort… a contentment without glory”; the latter are “profound, subterranean, called to a tragic existence.” The former, “garrulous and happy,” are merely play-acting or faking [representando]; the latter are creating (Mallea 365).
20 Samuel spoofs the conventions and stereotypes of the sainete, the popular, melodramatic theatrical form that in 1920s reflected the dramas of the lower classes, many of whom were immigrants (Navascués, AB 142n).
21 Perhaps a parodic allusion to the angel with whom Jacob wrestles in Genesis 32:23–32.
22 The bucolic project is surely a reference to the East-European Jewish settlement in the Argentine pampas in the late nineteenth century, a project sponsored by the Jewish-Belgian Baron Maurice de Hirsch, as well as to that settlement’s literary consecration in Alberto Gerchunoff’s book Los gauchos judíos (1910) [The Jewish Gauchos]. The redemptive vision of Jewish farming was part of the same European Jewish ideology that gave birth to Zionism. Gerchunoff aimed to achieve Jewish assimilation and acceptance by Argentine society by rhetorically marrying Jewishness to gaucho-ness, the latter being a contemporary symbol of Argentine authenticity. As Edna Aizenberg observes (20), Gerchunoff deliberately employed linguistic archaisms, quoting medieval Sephardic texts and paraphrasing Don Quixote, in an attempt to reaffirm the Jews’ historical roots in the Hispanic world and thus legitimate their presence in Argentina. The book, along with its assimilationist project, was enormously successful among Argentine Jews and Gentiles alike, spawning imitations and movie versions. It effectively founded the lineage of Argentine-Jewish literature.