23 An allusion to Count Hermann Keyserling’s South American Meditations (1932), which devotes an entire chapter to “Sorrow.” Keyserling’s rather patronizing thesis is that South American humanity is stuck in the “Third Day of Creation,” a vegetative, chthonic reality imbued with a passive, suffering sadness. In a dialectical twist, however, he praises this condition: “South American sadness is worth more than all North American optimism and all Neo-European idealism” (310; Keyserling’s italics). Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz (real-life model for Bernini) took up the notion of Argentine sadness in his famous essay “El hombre que está solo y espera” (1931) [The Man Who Is Alone and Waits/Hopes]. Keyserling was one of many prominent European thinkers and writers who were attracted to visit Buenos Aires in the 1920s and 1930s: among them were Spanish literary critic Guillermo de Torre, Spanish avant-garde writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, French Fascist intellectual Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, French Catholic intellectual Jacques Maritain, and Italian Futurist poet Filippo Tomasso Marinetti.
24 Macedonio Fernández (see 637n9). The original phrase, from his experimental metaphysical essay “No toda es vigilia la de los ojos abiertos” (1928) [Not All Consciousness Is of the Waking Kind] is a poetic formulation of his doctrine of “absolute subjectivism or idealism.” Being, writes Maedonio, is “un almismo ayoico” (25), literally: a non-selfish soul-ism or soulishness. One of Macedonio’s chapter titles is “El mundo es un almismo.” Marechal has combined the two phrases: “El mundo es un almismo ayoico.” This neologism is consonant with Macedonio’s assertion that the Yo [the “I,” the Self] is an invention of our “grammatical genius,” but that it lacks all substance or content. Samuel Tesler’s reply is: “El mundo es un yoísmo al pedo,” which more literally translated would be: “The world is a vain egoism, useless as a fart.”
25 Twice Samuel insists on giving Adam Buenosayres a lesson in frankness, the second time assuming the mantle of the European master. This looks like a satirical allusion to Ortega y Gasset’s contention in “El hombre a la defensiva” that “in normal social intercourse the Argentine [man] does not let himself go; on the contrary, at the approach of another, he locks up his soul and goes on the defensive… Whereas we [Europeans] let ourselves go and lose ourselves with complete sincerity in the theme required by the conversation, our [Argentine] interlocutor adopts an attitude” of petulant self-importance (Ortega 643). Ortega goes on to develop at length the metaphor of the mask behind which the insincere Argentine defensively hides. But in a sly manoeuvre, Marechal has Samuel, master of the masks, impersonate the “sincere” European.
26 Philography (Sp. Filografía): a term denoting the Neoplatonic Renaissance genre of “writing about love” initiated by the exiled Iberian Jew León Hebreo in his Dialogues of Love (1535), which take the form of allegorical conversations between Sofía (Wisdom) and Filón (Lover). León Hebreo was forcibly exiled from Portugal in 1483 and then from Spain in 1492. His work was published posthumously in the Tuscan dialect in Rome in 1535. The best (re)translation to Spanish is Diálogos de amor (1587), by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca princess, Garcilaso remains in the Latin American imaginary as a powerful figure of racial and cultural mestizaje. León Hebreo’s book and its various translations ended up on the index of books prohibited by the Inquisition.
27 Besides the appropriation of Ortega y Gasset’s mask metaphor in this episode (641n25), at this juncture there is likely a more respectful allusion to the same leitmotif in Jacobo Fijman’s best-known book of poetry, Molino rojo (1926). The figure of masks, always in the plural, is key in the poem thus titled, “Máscaras” [Masks], as well as in “Feria” [Fair], but perhaps most significantly in the famous first poem of the collection, “Canto del cisne” [Swan Song]: “Oficios de las máscaras absurdas; pero tan humanas” (Poesía completa 36) [Offices {in the sense of liturgical offices} of masks that are absurd but so human]. This line follows upon the first two verses of the poem, the most oft-quoted of Fijman’s poetry: “Demencia: / el camino más alto y desierto” [Dementia: the highest and most deserted road]. For a perceptive commentary on this poem, see Melanie Nicholson (105–8).
28 Ombú or Phytolacca dioica: a large tree of immense girth (up to fifteen metres) and luxuriant foliage. Considered to be the only tree native to the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay, it has thus become their symbol. The tree’s sap is poisonous; hence the folk wisdom, alluded to by Adam, about the unhealthy quality of the ombú’s shadow.
29 Federico Lacroze (1838–1899): owner of Tramway Central, the company that established the first streetcar line in Buenos Aires in 1870.
30 In the neo-colonial economy of Argentina during the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, the large market share enjoyed by English woollen products, in detriment to locally produced woollens, was an especially sensitive issue.
31 Natura naturata (nature as created entity or system) and natura naturans (nature as creative force or process): medieval Latin terms, the latter attributed by the OED to a translator of Averroes and later associated with Spinoza.
32 Sofrosyne: ancient Greek term for healthy-mindedness and serenity through moderation.
33 This invented name is a Rabelais-style joke: Asinus (Latin “ass”); Paleologos (Greek, “versed in things ancient”).
BOOK TWO, CHAPTER 1
1 “Argentine epic,” for argentinopeya in the original (see 642n9).
2 Antaeus, in Greek mythology, was son of Poseidon and Gaia, and of gigantic strength.
3 Saint Vitalis, whose feast day is 28 April, was martyred in Bologna in the third century. Titular saint of the basilica at Ravenna.
4 Teatro Colón. Magnificent opera house and theatre in downtown Buenos Aires, inaugurated in 1908, two years before the centenary celebration of Argentina’s nationhood. A proud symbol of Argentina’s wealth and success in its project of liberal modernization.
5 The quote from Hamlet is in English in the original Spanish text.
6 Quia tempus erit amplius (Vulgate Bible, Apocalypsis 10:6), phrase spoken by an angel to the seer of Patmos. In the NSRV: “there will be no more delay” (Rev 10:6); the angel continues: “but in the days when the seventh angel is to blow his trumpet, the mystery of God will be fulfilled” (Rev 10:7).
7 “¡Melpómene, la musa de la tragedia viene!” First verse of “Pórtico de Melpómene” from Melpómene (1912) by Arturo Capdevila (1889–1967), whose romantic poetry appealed to a wide public.
8 Berta Singerman (1901–1998), singer, reciter, and stage and film actress. A Russian immigrant to Argentina, she was famous for her recitations throughout Spanish America (Barcia 242n). She starred in the silent film La vendedora de Harrods (1920 or 1921) [The Salesgirl at Harrods].