5 Perhaps a veiled reference de José Ingenieros (1887–1925), famous psychologist, criminologist, and socialist intellectual who wrote a “Scientific Interpretation and Therapeutic Value of Hypnotism” (1903). (The Spanish ingeniero means engineer.) But Navascués (AB 211n) has found a manuscript note indicating that Valdez corresponds to the ingeniero Acevedo, a maternal uncle of J.L. Borges.
6 Barcia (293n) points out that this passage cites two lines from Marechal’s poem “De la Patria joven” (from Odas para el Hombre y la Mujer [1929]): “Un pie arraigado en la tierra en la niñez y el otro / ya tendido en los bailes de la tierra.” In the poem, the youthful Argentine nation is thus figured as a young girl; the transposition of these verses may suggest a national-allegorical dimension in the character Solveig.
7 Schultz is based on Xul Solar (1887–1963), avant-garde painter, musician and musicologist, writer, astrologer, and “visionary” aesthetician. His biographer, Álvaro Abós (173), finds that Schultz, unlike the caricatures of other notable cultural figures in the novel, is a fairly accurate reflection of Xul and of the way he was regarded in his milieu. Cintia Cristiá, in her musicological study of Xul Solar, appears to share this view. Schultz’s distaste for Beethoven and Grieg, Cristiá observes (62), indicates that Marechal would have been aware of Xul Solar’s indifference toward nineteenth-century music (with the exception of Wagner) and his preference for Bach and twentieth-century avant-garde composers.
8 Cristiá’s comment on this passage: “This hyperbole, consistent with the parodic tone of the novel, is not so hyperbolic if one considers that on the traditional pentagram, without alterations or additional lines, it is posible to write only eleven notes, whereas Xul Solar’s hexagram… accommodates twenty-six distinct pitches” (69).
9 As early as 1929, Xul Solar was attempting to redesign the piano keyboard. See Cristiá (76–84).
10 In an autobiographical note penned by Xul Solar, he claims that he is a “recreator, not an inventor” (qtd. in Artundo 43).
11 Norah Lange in a 1934 speech attributes the flower-eating gesture to the poet Amado Villar (1889–1954) (Estimados congéneres, 11–12).
12 A covered fruit-and-vegetable market, inaugurated in 1893, on the avenida Corrientes in Buenos Aires. Since 1999 it as been a mall, el Abasto Shopping.
13 Xul Solar did indeed invent a new language named neo-criollo [sic], a streamlined composite of Spanish and Portuguese. Later he abandoned neocriollo and concentrated on inventing the panlengua, which was to incorporate features of several languages (Lindstrom 244). Xul also spoke, however, about his plans for certain “anatomical improvements” in the human type to produce a “Homo Novus” (Artundo 49). Schultz’s discourse conflates in the Neocriollo these several notions of Xul Solar. Both Barcia and Navascués reproduce, in their respective editions of Adán, Marechal’s pencilled sketch of Schultz’s Neocriollo.
14 George Brummel (1778–1840): an Englishman, the most famous dandy of the nineteenth century, who created the rules of etiquette in his era.
15 Schultz’s notions are not much more fantastical than those proposed by Xul Solar in his 1957 article “Propuestas para más vida futura” [Proposals for More Life in the Future] (in Artundo 146–51). These include: (1) communal wetnurses (col-nursas, in the panlengua) endowed with mammaries the size of demijohns, which in turn would be equipped with multiple retractable ducts designed to feed the population; (2) a long, prehensile tail to serve the human body as a third arm; (3) a skin-sack inflatable at will by hydrogen-generating glands, its purpose being to offset the force of gravity on the human body; (4) extremely long arms like wings or the suspension lines of a parachute meant for human flight. Oscar Svanascini (9) mentions in addition to these “improvements” the following: suppression of the human stomach; a swivel-neck allowing the head to turn 360 degrees; eyes on the tips of horns like those of snails.
16 “¡Ven, triste amigo! / En la penumbra del invernadero, / junto a las rosas fraternales.” I have not been able to locate the source of these verses, but they appear to refer to Book Six, chapter XII.
17 In the originaclass="underline" “para que le hiciese compañía”; in Toulat’s French translation: “pour lui tenir compagnie.” To keep whom (or what) company? The poetic phantom? I suspect a typographical error: le should be the reflexive pronoun se: “para que se hiciese compañía.”
18 This group of three verses, as well as the next two tercets, are quoted almost verbatim from Marechal’s poem “Canción del ídolo” from his book Días como flechas (1926) (OC I, 92). First tercet: “Yo, alfarero sentado en el tapiz de los días, / ¿con qué barro modelé tu garganta de ídolo / y tus piernas que se tuercen como arroyos?” Second tercet: “Mi pulgar afinó tu vientre / más liso que la piel de los tambores nupciales, / y puso cuerdas al arco nuevo de tu sonrisa.” Third tercet: “Haz que maduren los frutos / y que la lluvia deje su país de llanto, / ídolo de los alfareros.” Translations mine.
19 Luis Pereda: clearly a caricature of Jorge Luis Borges, the only send-up in the roman-à-clef to have aroused serious indignation in Argentine literary circles. Franky Amundsen: associated with several historical personajes, including Oliverio Girondo (1891–1967); Marechal’s close friend and canonical poet, Francisco Luis Bernárdez (1900–1978); and a lesser known martinfierrista and M.’s childhood friend, Ilka Krupkin. As Navascués (AB 227n) judiciously concludes, Franky Amundsen is best understood as a composite of traits drawn from various martinfierristas. Arturo Del Solar: this least vivid of the caricatures probably corresponds to Borges’s cousin Guillermo Juan (“Willie”) Borges. The pipsqueak Bernini [el petizo Bernini]: clearly a parodic version of writer Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz (1898–1959).
20 Gath y Chaves was a department store founded in 1883 by the Englishman Alfred Gath and the Argentine Lorenzo Chaves. Merging with Harrods Buenos Aires in 1922, the store became a symbol of foreign-dominated commerce. As Barcia (316n) points out, the irony of this passage lies in the circumstance that a foreign business is packaging and selling back to Argentines the “exotic” culture of the local suburbs. The Anglophile, European-educated Borges, real-life model for Luis Pereda, is the particular butt of this joke.
21 Franky Amundsen’s penchant for all things pirate-related seems to be a cartoonish send-up of a facet of Oliverio Girondo’s character and life. In 1936 Girondo bought a brigantine, a sailing vessel traditionally favoured by pirates (brigantine < It. brigantino “brigand”). Earlier, to celebrate the publication of Norah Lange’s book Forty-Five Days and Thiry Sailors (1933), he organized a costume party in which Norah appeared as a mermaid, the male guests in sailor suits, and he in a captain’s uniform. They all posed for a famous publicity photo. On the other hand, in his 1938 review of Girondo’s Interlunio (OC V, 421–4), Marechal admired his Rabelaisian “gigantism” and his outlandish humour. Cf. Norah Lange’s salute to the boat’s launch in Estimados congéneres (26ff); she refers to it both as a bergantín and as a paylebot (Hispanicized version of “pilot boat”).