9 Chrysopæia means, etymologically, the “making of gold.” The term comes from the medieval science of alchemy, the source of Adam’s metaphor. The Spanish crisopeya echoes the neologism argentinopeya, coined in Adam’s interior monologue above, which etymologically means the “making of silver,” though the term in its context further suggests a combination of the words Argentina and epopeya (“epic”) or the Argentine epic that will fuse the many disparate ethnicities into the noble metal of a national identity. Later, Marechal will didactically distill this metal symbolism in a poem (“Didáctica de la Patria” in Heptámeron [1966]): “El nombre de tu Patria viene de argentum […] En su metal simbólico la plata / es el noble reflejo del oro principial. / Hazte de plata y espejea el oro / que se da en las alturas, / y verdaderamente serás un argentino” (OC I, 311; Marechal’s italics) [The name of your Nation comes from argentum […] In its symbolic metal, silver / is the noble reflexion of the original gold. / Make yourself silver and mirror / the gold of the heavens, / and truly you will be an Argentine].
10 The allusion is to Arturo Capdevila, native of Córdoba, who had a doctorate in Law and Social Sciences. Capdevila’s poem “Pórtico de Melpómene” (see 642n7) allegorizes the poet’s pursuit of the tragic muse (Melpomene) as a chase through the woods at midnight ending in erotic violence: “Después, junto a la margen de una fuente, / cayó… ¡Caíste! ¡Puesto que eras tú misma! Estabas / pálida como ahora… Temblabas… ¡Oh, temblabas / como ahora!… Caíste vencida, agonizante… / Y yo rodé por tierra, demelenado, hipante, / y comencé a besarte, y comencé a morderte, / como quien va a matarte, por fin, o a poseerte!… (Primera antología 30) [Later, by the side of a fountain, / she fell… You fell!… Because it was you! You were / pale as now… Trembling… Oh, you were trembling / as now!… You fell in defeat, agonizing… / And I tumbled to the ground, dishevelled, gasping, / and I started to kiss you, and to bite you, / like someone about to kill you, finally, or to possess you!…]. In his next comment, Adam parodies this episode. Capdevila’s poem alludes to Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon in the tragedy by Aeschylus, from which Ruth will presently recite a few lines.
11 Allusion to the 1928 tango “Duelo criollo,” a ballad recounting the duel between a payador and a card shark over a suburban girl known as the “flor del barrio” [flower of the barrio]. Both men get killed, and out of grief the pretty girl opens her wings and flies up to heaven.
12 Free translation from the originaclass="underline" “— ¿Quién se comió el puchero?” [Who ate the stew?] / “— El del sombrero” [The one with the hat].
13 “Entre San Pedro y San Juan / hicieron un barco nuevo.”
14 El Hogar, El Gráfico, Mundo Argentino. Popular magazines in 1920s and 1930s Buenos Aires.
15 Carmen (1875), opera by Georges Bizet. Cavalleria rusticana [Rustic Chivalry] (1890), by Pietro Mascagni.
16 Río Negro. A fertile region of Patagonia (southern Argentina), famous for its fruit. Ironic transposition to Argentina of the legendary apple that started the Trojan war.
17 Which-from-a-metal-takes-its-name. Reference to Argentina, derived from the Latin argentum “silver.”
18 Maldonado Creek. The arroyo Maldonado was originally one of several large ditches that drained excess rainwater into the Río de la Plata. Urban development has covered over most of them. Since 1937 the Maldonado has been running through pipes beneath Juan B. Justo Avenue. Marechal’s characterization is obviously ironic.
19 La Paternal. A barrio or neighbourhood adjoining and to the west of Villa Crespo.
20 “All is quiet for half an hour.” Curious allusion, passed over by most of Marechal’s commentators, to the Book of Revelation (8:1): “When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was a silence in heaven for about half an hour.” This is one of many other, more obvious allusions in the novel to the New Testament Apocalypse.
BOOK TWO, CHAPTER 2
1 Captain Amundsen (see 631n15). The tertulia at the Amundsen house recreates the ambience of the Lange tertulia, famous in the annals of Argentine cultural history. After the death of her Norwegian husband, Mrs Lange held weekly social gatherings at 1756 Tronador Street with her five beautiful daughters in attendance: Irma, Haydée, María Cristina, Norah, and Ruth (Ruti). (A younger son, Juan Carlos, died young.) In the novel, the five sisters are reduced to three — Ethel, Haydée, and Solveig — Haydée Lange corresponding to Haydée Amundsen. In real life, the very beautiful Haydée Lange enamoured many of the tertulia’s male vistors — including Borges and Xul Solar, according to at least one biographer of Norah Lange. Ruth Lange is novelistically transposed to Ruty Johansen; Irma, the reader will recall, is the name of the cleaning girl who seduces Adam at his rooming house. It has been conjectured that Solveig Amundsen corresponds to Norah Lange (1905–1972), the sole female martinfierrista and dubbed in those years the “Muse of Martín Fierro.” But the passive Solveig bears scant resemblance to the real-life Norah, who was outgoing, exuberant, and highly articulate. Franky Amundsen does not correspond to any male Lange, but bears some resemblance to Oliverio Girondo (1891–1967), who later married Norah Lange to form one of the most storied couples in Argentine literary history (see http://www.girondo-lange.com.ar/, website maintained by Susana Lange).
2 Maimonides (1138–1204) was a Spanish Jew born in Córdoba. A great rabbinical authority and physician, prolific writer and scholar, in his philosophical masterwork, the Guide of the Perplexed, he attempts to reconcile religion with secular knowledge. Samuel’s boutade is not entirely such: Maimonides in his Guide claims that “before Plato and Aristotle introduced science and philosophy to the Greeks, the patriarchs introduced it to Israel” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [online]).
3 “El estado actual de la doctrina de las secreciones internas” (1922) [The Current Status of the Doctrine of Internal Secretions] was the title of a lengthy address given by the prestigious Gregorio Marañón (1887–1960), both a humanistic intellectual/writer and a medical doctor/researcher who pioneered the science of endocrinology. But Marechal might have left the phrase alone, had not José Ortega y Gasset, citing a 1915 article by Marañón, glorified it in his 1921 essay “El Quijote en la escuela” [Don Quixote in the School Curriculum]: “No other chapter of contemporary science, perhaps, is more revolutionary of old ideas than the doctrine of internal secretions” (Ortega 279), a sentence apparently echoed by Lucio Negri.
4 Santos Vega: a gaucho legendary for his talent as a payador whose historical existence (still debated) dates to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century in the Province of Buenos Aires. The young Bartolomé Mitre was the first to make him a symbolic figure of the newly independent Argentine nation in his 1838 poem “A Santos Vega.” Toward 1850 Hilario Ascasubi wrote a novel in verse titled Santos Vega, o Los mellizos de La Flor. Eduardo Gutiérrez’s serial novel Santos Vega (1880) and its sequel Una amistad hasta la muerte (1881) [A Die-Hard Friendship] make the character an outlaw gaucho like his own character, Juan Moreira (see 645n28). With this moreirización of the legendary payador, Santos Vega enters the imaginary of populist criollismo (see 649n27) much to the chagrin of the cultural elite represented in gentlemen-writers such as Rafael Obligado, who published his four-part poem Santos Vega in 1885.