22 Original lyrics for all three stanzas: “Venía por la barranca / un tranguay angloargentina / cuando a mitad de camino / encuentra un carro encajao / ‘¡Compañero, hágase a un lao!’ / dice el del coche al carrero. ‘Si no vienen a poner / una cuarta, ¡todo el día / estará el carro en la vía!’ / Y el cochero, ya enojao, / le contesta: ‘¡Dos biabazos / te daría por pesao!’ / El carrero / se ataja la puñalada, / y a las dos o tres paradas / le larga un viaje al cochero / que si éste no es tan ligero / y en el aire lo abaraja / media barriga le raja, / como sandía campera.”
Marechal, late in life, recalled learning this song by heart in childhood from an early twentieth-century gramophone recording made by Alfredo Eusebio Gobbi (1877–1938) for Gath y Chaves (Andrés 14). Gobbi and his wife, Flora, started out in the circus and were active in popular criollista culture; their songs are considered precursors to the tango. Their son Alfredo Julio Floro Gobbi (1912–1965) became a famous tango composer.
23 In the originaclass="underline" “listo para entrar en la de San Quintín”; literally, ready to enter the Battle of Saint-Quentin (1557), in which the Spanish forces trounced the French in a decisive event marking a high point in the power of the Spanish Empire under the Habsburg dynasty.
24 To break someone’s soul, romperle el alma a alguien, is an old Argentine expression whose approximate equivalent would be “to thrash someone within an inch of his life.”
25 This passage considerably exaggerates a statistic adduced in the famous essay El hombre que está solo y espera (1931) by Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz (real-life model for Bernini). In his chapter “La ciudad sin amor,” Scalabrini Ortiz alleged that, of the million or so inhabitants of Buenos Aires, there were 120,000 fewer women than men (60).
26 In the originaclass="underline" Aventura criolli-malevi-fúnebri-putani-arrabalera. Franky parodies the neocriollo language invented by Xul Solar (real-life model for Schultz).
27 This paragraph sets up Marechal’s hyperbolic satire of criollismo, a popular cultural and literary movement that flourished approximately between the 1870s and the 1920s, and whose final, moribund stage is hilariously parodied in Book Three. In El discurso criollista en la formación de la Argentina moderna (1988 and 2008), a classic of Argentine cultural history, Adolfo Prieto points out that, in reaction to the burgeoning cultural phenomenon of the popular criollista literature being consumed by the semi-literate masses, both native and immigrant, the cultural elite “seemed to oscillate between fascination and anger.” By the turn of the nineteenth century, however, they had formed a “veritable program of cultural politics meant to contain the advance of popular literature of criollista stamp” (20). This reactionary cultural attitude is mockingly invested in the voice of the narrator of this passage, a technique that Marechal no doubt owes to his reading of Joyce’s Ulysses.
28 Samuel is likely referring, not to the universally revered literary figures Martín Fierro or Santos Vega, but to Juan Moreira, the legendary nineteenth-century gaucho outlaw (gaucho malo) who inspired Eduardo Gutiérrez’s eponymous serial novel (1879–1880). Always enormously popular, the novel was adapted in 1886 for the circus stage by Juan Podestá (1858–1937). In the twentieth century the novel has inspired several film versions, notably Leonardo Favio’s in 1973. Juan Moreira is probably the prototype behind the noble-outlaw protagonist of the Adriano Caetano’s movie Un oso rojo (2002) [A Red Bear].
29 In Xul Solar’s early paintings, angels are often a theme — for example, Dos Anjos (1915), Deities of Soil (1918), Angels (1921). But Franky may be alluding to Xul’s water-colour Mestizos de avión y gente (1936) in which two hybrid airplane-human figures, equipped with wings, propellers, and wheels, fly over a semi-urban landscape, each of them trailing what looks like an anchor.
30 This bizarre (and jarring) racist penchant in Samuel Tesler appears to originate from an idée fixe in the real-life poet Jacobo Fijman. Navascués cites a 1929 letter from Alfonso Reyes to J. Ortega y Gasset, in which Reyes complains about a Jew called Fijman insulting him not only as “an influential widow [sic] in Argentine literature” but also as a ¡mulato! — that latter insult being obviously the more astonishing (and outrageous?) to the great Mexican author (Navascués, AB 135n; Corral 167).
In one of Vicente Zito Lema’s rambling interviews with him in the late 1960s, Fijman claims that the Virgin Mary was black. Zito Lema asks him if Jesus Christ, then, was mulatto. Fijman’s reply, though incoherent, is revealing: “La concepción de la virgen es inmaculada. Esto es también secreto de estado. Vía de Cristo. Cristo es rubio. Pero un día fue negro. Y otro verde. Los mulatos son culpables. Se pasan horas y horas tocando el tambor. En Africa ha [sic] visto que sus casas son hornos de barro. Están poseídos por la avaricia” [The Virgin’s conception is immaculate. This too is a state secret. Christ’s Way. Christ is blond. But one day he was black. And another day, green. Mulattos are guilty. They spend hours and hours beating their drums. In Africa I’ve seen that their houses are earthen ovens. They’re possessed by greed] (Zito Lema 68; my emphasis). It seems that for Fijman the mulatto condition denotes or symbolizes a fall from moral purity into impurity and iniquity.
31 Adam’s words — “estoy solo e inmóviclass="underline" soy un argentino en esperanza” — echo the title of Scalabrini Ortiz’s El hombre que está solo y espera (1931) [The Man Who Is Alone and Waits/Hopes]. On the intertextual relations between Scalabrini’s essay and Marechal’s novel, see Cheadle, “Twentieth-Century homo bonaerense.”
32 El Espíritu de la Tierra, or Spirit of the Earth, is a mythopoetic notion elaborated in Scalabrini Ortiz in his above-cited essay. It is perhaps the last expression of a kind of mystical telluric organicism cultivated by the previous (novecentista) generation of Argentine writers, particularly Ricardo Rojas. Scalabrini’s take on this topos is less earnestly Romantic and more heuristic than that of Rojas, and has nothing of Bernini’s comic bathos.
33 Probable allusion to a prose-poem by Oliverio Girondo (real-life model for Franky Amundsen) entitled Interlunio (1937). The poem’s protagonist tells his quasi-delirious story. Having taken the streetcar out to the edge of the city at night, he is accosted by a cow who talks to him, maternally scolding him. Marechal reviewed the book, admiringly, in Sur 48 (Sept. 1938). Eliseo Subiela includes a sequence based on this episode in his film El lado oscuro del corazón (1992) [The Dark Side of the Heart].
34 Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz (real-life model for Bernini) denounced Britain’s economic colonialism in Argentina in his book Política británica en el Río de la Plata (1936). He carried on his battle against British interference for most of the rest of his life.
35 Variation on the classical saying Carthago delenda est, “Carthage must be destroyed,” traditionally attributed to Cato the Elder, who would have pronounced this opinion prior to the destruction of Carthage by the Romans in 146 BCE.