36 Britain invaded Buenos Aires twice, in 1806 and 1807. It has been argued that this repulsion of British military might was one factor that inspired enough confidence in the porteños to declare independence from Spain in 1810, making Buenos Aires the first Spanish American colony to do so.
37 Las Islas Malvinas: in English known as the Falkland Islands. A group of islands off the Argentine coast, claimed by Argentina against Britain’s de facto possession. Esteban Gómez, Portuguese navigator in the service of Spain, discovered the islands in 1522. However, in 1690 the British claimed the islands. In 1982, the Argentine military dictatorship went to war against Margaret Thatcher’s Britain in a disastrous attempt to recuperate the Malvinas.
38 Lucio alludes to Jacobo Fijman’s version of his first internment in the Hospicio de las Mercedes, a mental asylum in Buenos Aires, which eventually became the Hospital Nacional José T. Borda — known as el Borda, for short. Fijman recounted his hallucinatory experience in “Dos días” [Two Days], a short text first published in the daily newspaper Crítica on 3 January 1927: “I’m perceiving aromas, incense. My body exudes, pore by pore, diverse and penetrating aromas” (San Julián y otros relatos 28). But in this text he calls himself the Cristo rojo — the Red Christ, not the Black Christ as in Lucio’s version. (The image of a “yellow christ” occurs in “Poema V” of Fijman’s Hecho de estampas [1930]). Fijman surely picked up the phrase “Red Christ” from A. Capdevila’s apocalyptic poem titled “Cristo rojo” (in Melpómene [1912]). In “Dos días” Fijman assumes the identity of the Red Christ while conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony before the multitude, an event he envisioned as heralding “the great work: the Social Revolution” (San Julián 26). This episode later inspired a similar sequence in Eliseo Subiela’s movie Man Facing Southeast (1986), partly filmed on-site at the Borda. Also on-site at the Borda, Gustavo Fontán, with the Frente de Artistas del Borda, filmed a creative evocation of Jacobo Fijman; a voice-over recites Fijman’s poetry.
39 Jean-Martin Charcot, considered the founder of modern neurology, founded in the late nineteenth century the École de la Salpêtrière, where he followed his particular interest in hypnosis and hysteria. Sigmund Freud was one of his students.
40 Founded in 1876, the Buenos Aires Herald began as a single sheet carrying the shipping news and a few advertisements, but it later became the weekly and then daily newpaper serving Argentina’s English-speaking community. It is published to this day both in print and online.
41 Orlando furioso, by Italian author Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533). A novel of chivalry wildly popular in its time, and one of Don Quixote’s favourites. The Immortal Knight imitates Orlando (among other literary models) when he feigns madness in the Sierra Morena over the cruelty of his ladylove (Don Quixote, I, chap. 25).
BOOK THREE, CHAPTER 1
1 Aside from the reference to Ricardo Rojas (see 639n18), Barcia (355n6) detects an allusion to the Argentine poet Manuel de Lavardén (1754–1810) and the well-known opening lines of his “Oda al Paraná” (1801) [Ode to the Paraná]: “Augusto Paraná, sagrado río, / promogénito ilustre del Océano, / que en el carro de nácar refulgente / tirado de caimanes, recamados / de verde y oro, vas de clima en clima, / de región en región, vertiendo franco / suave frescor y pródiga abundancia” [August Paraná, sacred river, / illustrious first-born of the Ocean, / who in the wagon of refulgent mother-of-pearl / drawn by alligators embroidered / in green and gold, you go from climate to climate, / region to region, generously pouring / mild freshness and prodigal abundance].
2 An allusion to Hermann Keyserling’s South American Meditations (see 640n23).
3 An allusion to the misadventures of Don Quixote.
4 As Barcia (360n) observes, Samuel mocks not only Adam’s effusions, but also the opening line of Borges’s famous poem “Fundación mitológica de Buenos Aires” (in Cuaderno San Martín, 1929; later revised as “Fundación mítica de Buenos Aires”) and its evocation of the River Plate: “¿Y fue por este río de sueñera y de barro / que las proas vinieron a fundarme la patria?” (Borges OC I, 81). In Alistair Reid’s translation: “And was it along this torpid muddy river / that the prows came to found my native city?” (Borges, Selected Poems 49).
5 Pereda uses the language of the nineteenth-century frontier in Argentina, where the term cristiano [Christian] is used in opposition to indio [Indian]. In gauchesque literature, cristianos e indios would be roughly the equivalent of Cowboys-and-Indians.
6 “La Chacarita”: lyrics by Iván Diez (1897–1960). The tango is a lugubrious meditation on death written in lunfardo and inspired by the eponymous cemetery (see 628n2).
7 Paternal is a barrio bordering on both Chacarita and Villa Crespo. Villa Soldati is in the south end of the city.
8 lobisome (also, lobisón or lobizón) < Portuguese, lobishome “wolf-man.” The werewolf legend passed from Brazilian to Argentine folklore. In Brazil, the seventh consecutive son of the same father and mother, from the age of thirteen, changes into a lobishome on Fridays during Lent from midnight to two in the morning. In the Argentine version, the seventh of consecutive sons in a family turns into a wolf-like creature that wanders the hills and attacks all humans. This legend was so prevalent in the 1900s that children were being abandoned or killed. To prevent this, a law was passed in the 1920s making the president of Argentina the legal godfather to the seventh son of all families. The state gives the boy a gold medal and a scholarship for his studies until his twenty-first birthday. The tradition continues to this day. On 7 June 2004, Argentine president Néstor Kichner attended the baptism of the seventh boy born to a family in the city of Sunchales, in the northern province of Santa Fe.
9 Perhaps a reference to Marechal’s poem “A un zaino muerto” [To a Dead Chestnut Horse] in Días como flechas: “Sabías deshacer el nudo del horizonte / y masticar el pasto bravío de las leguas” (OC I, 100) [You used to untie the knot of the horizon / and chew up the wild grass of leagues].
10 Rabelaisian allusion. In Gargantua and Pantagruel (Book Two, chapter VII) appears a list of titles supposedly belonging to the Library of St. Victor. One title is Ars honeste fartandi in societate [The Art of Farting Decorously in Society]; another, Tartaretus de modo cacandi [Treatise (or better: Turdise) on How to Shit].
11 Gringo: — refers to any foreigner or immigrant, usually Italians, but others as well. Later, Del Solar calls Schultz “gringo”; his real-life model, Xul Solar, was born of an Italian mother and a German-speaking Latvian father.
12 “Caballito criollo / del galope corto / y el aliento largo.” The first lines of the popular poem “Caballito criollo” by Belisario Roldán (1873–1922), later set to music by Floro Ugarte (1884–1975).
13 In the original, Adam “todo lo veía en imagen.” There may be an allusion to Eduardo González Lanuza’s short story collection Aquelarre (1928), which Lanuza characterized with the somewhat pleonastic subtitle: “cuentos imaginados en imagen” [stories imagined in images].